Sally Field receives Life Achievement Award at SAGs

Effusive, brilliant actor Sally Field yesterday received the Life Achievement Award at the Screen Actors Guild Awards to a standing ovation from her peers.

Field, 76, scored her very first acting role in first acting role in the ’60s series Gidget.

“In the fall of 1964, I was standing in front of a camera on a freezing cold beach in Malibu and I said my first lines of dialogue as a professional actor: You see before you me, Gidget,” she said. “I was 17, fresh out of high school. I didn’t have an agent, and I was working under what’s called the Taft Hartley Law. A few months later, this show was picked up and all of a sudden I was the star of a television series, and I became a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I remember so clearly, putting that little paper card in my wallet, quietly thrilled to call myself an actor. I first found this stage when I was 12 years old in the seventh grade. And after that, I never left the drama department.”

She continued, “I’ve flown on wires and surfed in the ocean, rode on horses, in wagons, trains and fast cars. I had multiple personalities. I worked in a textile mill, picked cotton. I’ve been Mrs. Doubtfire’s employer, Forrest Gump’s mother, Lincoln’s wife, and Spiderman’s aunt,” continuing: “Sometimes I have been lucky enough to be a part of projects whose screenplays were so good that my hands shook the first time I read them… They opened and revealed parts of myself I would not have known otherwise. I’ve worked my whole life. In all of these almost 60 years, there is not a day that I don’t feel quietly thrilled to call myself an actor.”

She added, “Acting, to me, has always been about finding those few precious moments when I feel totally, utterly, sometimes dangerously alive. So the task has always been to find a way to get to that — to get to the work, to claw my way to it if necessary. Struggling to climb my way out of the box of situation comedy in the ’60s and ’70s took a fierceness I didn’t know I had. But honestly, I was a little white girl with a pug nose born in Pasadena, California. And when I look around this room tonight, I know my fight, as hard as it was, was lightweight compared to some of yours.”