Sally Field Credits Jack Nicholson With Saving Her Career

Sally Field has been refreshingly candid over the years about her complicated feelings toward The Flying Nun — the ABC fantasy sitcom that made her famous and then, by her own account, nearly destroyed her career. But in a new interview with People, the two-time Oscar winner is opening up about the unlikely ally who helped pull her back from the brink: Jack Nicholson.

After the show wrapped in 1970 following three seasons, Field found herself effectively locked out of Hollywood. “I couldn’t get in a room to audition,” she told People. “I couldn’t get on the list. They thought they already knew what I was. ‘No, thanks. We don’t want any of that.’”

The role of Sister Bertrille — a petite nun whose oversized cornette caught the wind and sent her airborne — had been a hit. But it had also put Field in a box that the industry had no interest in opening. She was 23 years old and, for all practical purposes, unemployable in the work she actually wanted to do.

Her Answer: Get Better

Rather than rage against the machine, Field turned inward. She enrolled at the Lee Strasberg-led Actors Studio in Los Angeles and threw herself into training with a quiet ferocity. “I had to say to myself that if I wasn’t where I wanted to be, I had to get better,” she recalled. “Hollywood may be rotten and unfair, but 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.”

Her mantra was simple: “It will change when I’m good enough.”

The Actors Studio in those days was a serious place — serious enough that it drew serious people. “Everybody used to come,” Field said. “It was packed. You couldn’t get in.” Among those regulars: Jack Nicholson, then already building his reputation as one of the most dynamic actors of his generation.

The Moment Nicholson Stepped In

Nicholson watched Field work. And then he did something that would quietly redirect the entire arc of her career. He went to casting director Dianne Crittenden and director Bob Rafelson and told them about her — describing her, Field says, as “an undiscovered talent.”

Crittenden called her in for a meeting. It was Field’s first real industry “interview” since the 1965 sitcom Gidget — a full decade of closed doors, cracked open by one colleague’s word.

The meeting was for Stay Hungry, Rafelson’s 1976 comedy-drama set at a gym, starring Jeff Bridges and a then-unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger. Field got the role.

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

Stay Hungry, she says, “was the beginning of the change.”

What Came Next

What a change it was. The same year the film came out, Field won an Emmy for the miniseries Sybil. From there came Smokey and the Bandit, then Norma Rae — which earned her first Academy Award — then Places in the Heart, which earned her second. The actress who Hollywood once dismissed as the flying nun had become one of the most decorated performers of her era, with two Oscars, two Emmys, and a Tony nomination to her name.

And she’s not finished. Field currently stars in Remarkably Bright Creatures, adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel and now streaming on Netflix. She also has a play in the works. “I’m supposed to go into rehearsals for a play at the end of summer,” she told People. “I still have my head down, and I’m always hoping to get better.”

Fifty years after a phone call from Jack Nicholson changed everything, Sally Field is still chasing the same thing she was at the Actors Studio: better.