The actress looks back on her first Academy Award win in a new book.
Sally Field is revealing a bittersweet Oscar memory. The 77-year-old actress recalls the night she won her first Academy Award in 1980 and how her then-boyfriend, Burt Reynolds, refused to attend the prestigious awards ceremony with her.
In Dave Karger's new book, 50 Oscar Nights -- out Jan. 23, Field recalls a lack of support from her famous ex as she began receiving accolades for her role in Norma Rae. The star earned her first Oscar nomination and win in 1980 for the project.
"When the Oscars came around, he really was not a nice guy around me then and was not going to go with me," she says in the book, according to People.
This apparently wasn't the first time Reynolds revealed that he "was not happy" with the career success Field was enjoying.
"He did not want me to go to Cannes [Film Festival] at all," Field shares. "He said, 'You don't think you're going to win anything, do you?'"
In the end, Field enjoyed the company of friends -- comic David Steinberg and his then-wife, Judy -- at the 52nd Academy Awards after revealing she "didn't know what to do" about not having a date for her big night.
"Then David said, 'Well, for God's sakes, we'll take you,'" Field remembers. "He and Judy made it a big celebration. They picked me up in a limousine and had champagne in the car. They made it just wonderful fun."
The actors shared a rocky relationship for five years in the 1970s and 1980s after meeting on the set of the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit.
Field has been candid about her tumultuous relationship with Reynolds in recent years, naming him as her worst on-screen kiss during a 2022 interview on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.
"I tried to look the other way and say, 'Well, that was just then.' But it was just not something he did very well. I could go into detail, but you don't want to hear it," Field said, which prompted host Andy Cohen to disagree, asking, "I kinda do. The tongue? The tongue was not?"
"Not totally involved, just a lot of drooling was involved," Field elaborated to Cohen's delight.
She also opened up about Reynolds in her 2018 memoir, In Pieces, and spoke about him in a subsequent Variety interview.
"He was not someone I could be around. He was just not good for me in any way," Field shared of Reynolds. "And he had somehow invented in his rethinking of everything that I was more important to him than he had thought, but I wasn’t. He just wanted to have the thing he didn’t have. I just didn’t want to deal with that."
Reynolds died in 2018 at age 82. He had previously said -- while promoting his 2015 memoir, But Enough About Me -- that Field was the "love of his life."
"I miss her terribly," Reynolds told Vanity Fair, at the time. "Even now, it’s hard on me. I don’t know why I was so stupid. Men are like that, you know. You find the perfect person, and then you do everything you can to screw it up."
He doubled down on his praise for Field, with whom he co-starred in four movies, in an interview with ET the same year.
"I do miss her. I think she was one of the most underrated actresses, you know?" he said. "She was the best actress I ever worked with."
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