Sally Field

Field attended Portola Middle School, followed by Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, where she was a cheerleader. Her classmates included infamous financier Michael Milken, actress Cindy Williams (of Laverne & Shirley fame) and Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and Walt Disney Studios fame.

Field got her start on television as the boy-crazy, surfer girl in the mid-1960s surf culture sitcom series, Gidget. She went on to star as Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun. In an interview included on the DVD release of The Flying Nun, she said that she would have preferred to continue playing Gidget. Field said she hated being on The Flying Nun because she wasn't treated with respect by various directors. After her iconic role on The Flying Nun, she had become typecast. Later, she starred opposite John Davidson in a short-lived series called The Girl with Something Extra (1973–74). Read Less

She did not appear as a pictorial subject inside the magazine, although she did wear the classic leotard and bunny-ears outfit on the cover. That same year she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award.

For her role as the matriarch, M'Lynn, in the film version of Steel Magnolias (1989), she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. She had supporting roles in a number of other movies, including Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) in which she played Miranda Hillard, the wife of Robin Williams's character and the love interest of Pierce Brosnan's character Stuart 'Stu' Dunmyer. She followed this with the role of Forrest Gump's mother in Forrest Gump (1994), even though she is only 10 years older than Tom Hanks, with whom she had co-starred six years earlier in Punchline.

Her other films in the 1990s included Not Without My Daughter, a controversial suspense film based on the real-life experience of Betty Mahmoody's escape from Iran with her daughter Mahtob, and Soapdish, a comedy in which Field, playing Celeste Talbert, the pampered star of a television soap opera, heads an all-star cast including Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Shue and Robert Downey, Jr. Read Less