Sally Field has admitted that winning her first Best Actress Oscar was “almost too much” to handle, leaving her completely numb during the night.
Reflecting on the 1980 Oscars in a recent interview with Paradethe 79-year-old cinema legend explained that the scale of that year was difficult to calculate.
After a remarkable performance in Norma RaeField had already won numerous trophies, but by the time she reached the Oscars, the gravity of the moment and the shift from TV star to critical darling had left her incapable of feeling anything.
The path to that first golden statuette was notoriously difficult for Field, who fought an uphill battle to be taken seriously as a film actress.
She recalls working incredibly hard to move beyond her television roots, noting that industry figures often refused to let her into a room to audition.
She credited the 1976 miniseries Sybil as the beginning of her transition, but it was her role as a southern textile worker in Norma Rae this really broke the mold.
Despite the success, Field admitted that she was never entirely comfortable with the “glam thing” that came with being a Hollywood star.
The 1980 ceremony itself was a much more low-key affair for Field than modern red carpets might suggest.
She remembers going to get her hair done but doing her own makeup, as was common practice at the time.
Her outfit was designed by the legendary Bob Mackie, who created a white strapless dress paired with a sheer floral cover-up.
Field jokingly recalls asking her if she could have a “princess dress”, only for Mackie to suggest that it wasn’t really chic, leading her to settle for the “little white suit” he had imagined.
While that night in 1980 was a numbing blur, Field won the runner-up Best Actress award for Places in the heart five years later it was a completely different experience.
She used her 1985 acceptance speech to contrast the two moments, telling the audience that she didn’t feel it the first time, but she certainly felt it afterwards.
It was during this second podium appearance that she uttered the iconic phrase: “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!”, finally embracing the professional validation that had seemed so overwhelming to her half a decade earlier.
