The two-time Oscar-winning actress Sally Field and the late great Hollywood star Burt Reynolds, who famously starred together in the classic 1977 movie Smokey and the Bandit, dated from 1976 until 1980. In a new interview, Field is revealing what finally made her leave Reynolds, who died in 2018 at the age of 82.
Field Discusses Reynolds Relationship
Field, 79, and Reynolds made four movies together back in the day. However, that’s not exactly how she remembers it looking back now.
“I really only did one movie with Burt, which was Smokey and the Bandit,” Field told People Magazine. She and Reynolds met while making that beloved film. They went on to star together in its 1980 sequel. Field and Reynolds also starred in the 1978 movies Hooper and The End.
“The others that I was in, I was just a girl,” Field explained. “I just was stuck there because I was sort of stuck altogether. And it was a very complicated relationship.”
Field met Reynolds, who was ten years her senior, when he called her out of the blue to see if she’d want to star with him in Smokey and the Bandit.
“He said, ‘It’s really awful. The script is awful, but we’re going to fix all of that because we’ll just make it up as we go along,'” Field recalled. She added that when they got to set, “It was completely improvised. We’d drive off in the car with the cameras mounted, and I would go, ‘Okay, roll!’ And then of course, he and I met and began whatever it was that we began.”
Their tumultuous relationship was on-again-off-again for five years. Field remembers that “there were parts of Burt that were so wonderful and lovable, and then there were parts that were really frightening.” She claimed that Reynolds was “very much like” her stepfather, who had abused her as a child. In fact, according to Field, being with Reynolds “was me exorcising my stepfather out of my brain.”
Field Reveals What Made Her Leave Reynolds
It was actually Field’s 1979 movie Norma Rae, which won her the Oscar for Best Actress, that led to her finally leaving Reynolds for good. Indeed, Field alleges that when she received the script for Norma Rae, Reynolds lost it.
“It was the beginning of me pulling away when he didn’t want me to do Norma Rae, called her a [expletive], and it was because she had some sexual past. He threw the script at me,” Field claimed.
“He wanted to control me, and because I was standing up, he said, ‘Boy, you’re letting this get the better of you.’ And I said, ‘This is the better of me.'” And I went and I met with [director] Marty Ritt. I did the film. But it was the beginning of me finding my legs,” Field stated.
Reynolds Refuses To Attend Oscars With Field
Once the film was made, Reynolds was still so angry that Field had starred in it that he refused to attend the Cannes Film Festival with her. This ended up being one of the best moments of Field’s career.
“It was a standing ovation for like 10 minutes, and I started to cry,” Field recounted. “I just was like, ‘What?’ After I had worked so hard to get out of television, to even be considered for anything, and here I was.”
Reynolds then refused to attend the Oscars with Field on the night she took home her first Best Actress Academy Award. Soon after that, the two stars parted ways for good.
“Being Norma at that time was exactly what I needed, because to learn how to stand in her shoes, I think I said this [in her 2018 memoir In Pieces], I could feel my own legs,” Field remembered.
“I could feel my body getting stronger,” she concluded. “Because I was having to portray how she grew up, I started to grow up, and I eventually just wouldn’t be manipulated and humiliated like that. And ultimately I left.”
Reynolds’ Regrets About Field
Reynolds would come to regret the way he treated Field. In 2015, three years before his death, Reynolds even described Field as being “the love of my 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.”
Field, however, shut the notion of her being the love of Reynolds’ life four years after his death.
“He was not someone I could be around,” Field told Variety in 2022. “He was just not good for me in any way.”
“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,” she continued. “He just wanted to have the thing he didn’t have. I just didn’t want to deal with that.”
Field Slams Reynolds As A Bad Kisser
Later that year, Field further condemned Reynolds as being the worst kisser of all the leading men she’s locked lips with onscreen. Field said this during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live! in December of 2022.
“Oh boy, shall I really name names here?” Field wondered when a viewer asked her to identify her worst onscreen kisser. “Okay, this is gonna be a shocker, hold on folks,” she said, before she quickly added, “Burt Reynolds.”
“It was just not something he really did very well,” she added with a laugh. “I could go into detail, but you don’t want to hear it.”
When host Andy Cohen asked if she was talking about “tongue,” Field replied, “No … just a lot of drooling was involved.”
Check out Field’s full comments on that in the video below.
Field and Reynolds did not speak for the last thirty years of his life. Given the comments that Field has made about him since his death, it’s easy to see why.
While their relationship in real life may not have gone well, the chemistry that Field and Reynolds once shared will always live on in Smokey and the Bandit.
There’s an old phrase that goes: “some people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” In the end, it’s clear that Field and Reynolds were only meant to be in one another’s lives for a season. Sometimes, that’s just how life goes!