Sally Field can't deny that people like her as she accepts SAG Life Achievement Award

As Andrew Garfield put it while presenting Sally Field with the SAG Life Achievement Award on at the 2023 SAG Awards on Sunday night, "She's won a lot of s---. She's won so much s---."

Field — who has two Oscars and three Emmys — became the 58th recipient of the honor, joining the likes of Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, and Debbie Reynolds. The award, given annually by the Screen Actors Guild, honors "outstanding achievement in fostering the finest ideals of the acting profession."

Garfield presented Field with the award since the two previously appeared in two Amazing Spider-Man films together, with Garfield playing Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Field appearing as Peter's beloved Aunt May.

"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 as a professional actor," Field recounted, referencing her first acting job as the star of Gidget. "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 the stage when I was 12 years old in the seventh grade and I never left the drama department."

Field is an icon in the acting field. She had starred in three TV shows by the age of 25, including The Flying Nun, and went on to win Emmy Awards for her portrayal of a woman with a personality disorder in the miniseries Sybil and for her guest star work as a bipolar mother on ER.

She has continued to work in television throughout her career, winning an Emmy Award and SAG Award for her portrayal of Nora Walker on ABC's Brothers & Sisters, which she starred on from 2006 to 2011.

"I wasn't looking for the applause or attention, even though that's nice sometimes," Field said in her speech. "It has never been about a need to hide behind myself behind the characters of other people. Acting to me has always been about finding those few precious moments when I feel totally, utterly, sometimes dangerously alive. The task has always been to find a way to get to that, to get to the work, to claw myself to that as necessary."

Field's film career has been no less robust than her television resume, earning two Oscars, one for her portrayal of the titular union organizer in Norma Rae (1979) and another for a widow who must keep her family and Texas farm alive amidst the challenges of the Great Depression in Places in the Heart (1984). Other notable film roles include turns in Forrest Gump, Smokey and the Bandit, Steel Magnolias, Hooper, Absence of Malice, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Lincoln. Most recently, she appeared as a mother losing her son to cancer in Spoiler Alert, and as a Tom Brady superfan in 80 for Brady.

Field spoke to the challenges she faced as an actor, particularly transitioning from television to film. "Struggling to climb my way out of the box of situation comedy took a fierceness I didn't know I had," she said. "I was a little white girl born in Pasadena, Calif. When I look around this room tonight, I know my fight was lightweight compared to some of yours. I know for you, just like for me, it has not been easy, but you know what? Easy is overrated."

She has also worked on the stage, making her Broadway debut in 2002 in Edward Albee's The Goat and twice playing Amanda in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, once at the Kennedy Center and again on Broadway. In 2019, she made her West End debut in Arthur Miller's All My Sons.

Her memoir, In Pieces, was published in 2018. "The questions I was constantly asking are questions that have always been lingering in me, but I never wanted to look at," she told EW at the time. "I've never wanted to know the answers."

Field is also a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honor.

She summed up the extraordinary range of her career, saying, "I've flown on wires and surfed in the ocean. I've had multiple personalities, worked in a textile mill, picked cotton. I've been Mrs. Doubtfire's employer, Forrest Gump's mother, Lincoln's wife, and Spider-Man's aunt."

She continued, "I have been lucky enough to work on projects whose screenplays were so good that my hands shook the first time I read them. The process of owning them, understanding them, changed me. They opened and revealed parts of myself I would not have known otherwise. In all of these almost 60 years, there is not a day that I don't feel quietly thrilled to call myself an actor. Thank you for this award from you, the people I most wanted respect from, actors."

The 2023 SAG Awards took place Sunday night at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. Check out the full list of winners.

Check out more from EW's The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best films.

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