Sally Field Credits Jack Nicholson With Career Revival Post Flying Nun

Throughout the years, two-time Oscar-winning actress Sally Field has made her distaste for her breakout, titular role in The Flying Nun known, but while opening up to People, she revealed it was fellow Actors Studio alum Jack Nicholson who helped get her career going again afterward.

After starring in ABC’s hit fantasy sitcom from 1967 to 1970, Field said she “couldn’t get in a room to audition. I couldn’t get on the list. They thought they already knew what I was. ‘No, thanks. We don’t want any of that.’”

She recalled thinking at the time that “I had to say to myself that if I wasn’t where I wanted to be, I had to get better.” Though the entertainment industry can often be “rotten” and “unfair … it had to be that it was on me to make it different. I felt if I wasn’t doing that, then I was just handing them all the power.”

The Forrest Gump star began studying at the famed Actors Studio under founder and coach Lee Strasberg, alongside such performers like Nicholson. At the time, she believed her situation would change only “when I’m good enough.”

Enter: The Shining actor, who saw her work with Strasberg and put in a good word with late casting director Dianne Crittenden and director Bob Rafelson, calling Field an “undiscovered talent.” The pair granted her an “interview,” her first since her 1965 TV debut Gidget, for Stay Hungry, a dramedy starring Jeff Bridges and an early-career Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“So in some weird way, my theory was right,” Field noted. “I worked at the Actors Studio for so long — and it was so hard — that Jack had seen it and the word spread.” 

The 1976 film marked “the beginning of the change” in her Hollywood career, cementing her as a movie star and catapulting her to eventually iconic roles in Smokey and the Bandit, Norma Rae, Places in the Heart and more.