Best Actress 1980: Sally Field - From Flying Nun to Oscar Winner

I'm not gonna tell you and the winner is Sally Field the 52nd Academy Awards took place in April 1980 and honor the best movies made in 1979 it was the year Sally Field took home her first Best Actress Oscar for her role in Norma Rae before Sally Field was an Oscar winner she was a bonafide TV star today it might seem natural for an actor to transition from one medium to the other but for many years a stigma against television prevented this exchange but by harnessing the daring plot an invigorating spirit of Norma Rae she broke through that barrier and launched herself into the upper echelon of movie stardom the other nominees in 1980 were in a unique situation three of the four had passed on the role of Norma Rae Marsha Mason Jill Clayburgh and Jane Fonda in Chapter two Marsha Mason plays a recently divorced actress who enters in a relationship with a recently widowed writer based on Mason's real-life relationship with playwright Neil Simon the film was considered overwritten and quote weighed down by the philosophy that more is more in starting over Jill Clayburgh plays a nursery school teacher who gets set up on a blind date with a recently divorced man primarily a stage actor she had recently gone on a street of great film performances this was her second consecutive Best Actress nomination after an unmarried woman in 1979 Jane Fonda stars in the China Syndrome as a reporter who discovers the management of a nuclear power plant covered up faulty safety precautions though originally dismisses far-fetched the movie's message took new meaning when just two weeks after its release an accident occurred at the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island Jade's performance was lauded but having just won her second Best Actress Oscar the year before for coming home her win was unlikely the only nominee who was not offered Norma Rae was Bette Midler although this Oscar nomination for the Rose was her first she was no stranger to the American public by this time she'd already won an Emmy a Grammy and a Tony and she wasn't even 30 she knew that an Oscar win probably wasn't in the cards for her in 1980 but that hasn't stopped her from joking for the past three decades that she should have won but it was Sally Fields who took home the Best Actress Award that year for playing Norma Rae Webster a textile worker who rallies her co-workers to join a union both her journey and this film were highly non-traditional at the time and said build oncoming shifts in the movie industry by the time Sally Field was 19 she'd already been cast as a lead of two TV shows in Gidget she played a boy-crazy surfer girl and in The Flying Nun she played sister Bertrille who due to her weight of only 90 pounds her stiff habit and some particularly strong puerto rican winds but literally catch the wind and fly around solving local problems I could probably do an entire video trying to dissect how and why this show was greenlit to be fair Sally wasn't a huge fan of the premise either sure it made her famous but not in a fun way she was a newness Sally Field actor slash complicated ambitious woman with human desire she was known as Sally Field nun slash happy-go-lucky abstinent girl next door it shows innocence and whimsy clash with a society undergoing a sexual revolution and social upheaval and it became an easy punchline for comedians eventually she began to feel like she was the object of the joke it was very successful it was a joke and people did make fun of you yeah yeah it wasn't it was the thing that was hard for me at the time is that I couldn't tell the difference between them making fun of Sally Field or making fun of Flying Nun she felt that in order to progress in her career she had to rebel against this typecasting even though it's a comedy series that image of you is so indelibly his mind says and done at the idea of you're having a baby is very very odd not to you maybe this but you'd like to play the stage or ot you know what I'd really like to do right about now I'd like to do really fantastic nude scene or when if you want to direct something again hoping to sharpen her acting skills in to some degree game legitimacy she enrolled in an actor studio with Lee Strasberg where actors like Marlon Brando James Dean and Jane Fonda have learned their craft things began to change in 1976 when she appeared in the film stay hungry in what she's called her first real role shortly thereafter she won the lead role in the TV mini-series Sybil in which she plays a woman with dissociative personality disorder her performance earned her an Emmy and with roles in films like Smokey and the Bandit on the table she had hope that more challenging and serious roles would present themselves yet with each new film she felt her roles grow smaller less interesting and less vital to the picture once again she was pigeon-holed into the role of girl next door her salvation was Martin Ritt who called with the offer for Norma Rae the studio didn't want her but having seen Sybil he believed that Sally could pull it off Norma Rae performed really well critically and financially ultimately resulting in an Oscar nomination for Best Picture the success was somewhat unexpected because it didn't entirely match the criteria we usually find in a successful film first it took a liberal stance on labor Hollywood has not traditionally per trade unions in a positive light with the exception of some free code films released during the most turbulent years of the Great Depression Hollywood has at best circumspectly acknowledged the existence of unions and at worst portrayed its leaders as corrupt agitators who threaten the success business and of course as we all know Hollywood has been notoriously apprehensive of anything anyone could conceivably label as communist second it's not like Hollywood was alone in this there wasn't a thriving pro-union zeitgeist to appeal to according to a Gallup poll in 1979 only about half of Americans approved of unions at all remember Norma Rae was released on the eve of the election of Ronald Reagan and the effective eradication of organized labor as a political force third Norma Rae actually gives representation to working-class females and people of color outrageously underrepresented groups in film as film historian Doyle green points out the initial support of the Union primarily arises from the women and african-americans working in the mill the white male workers and the mill management represent the reactionary anti-union component of the town all of these points would suggest a lukewarm or or optimistically Anish interest response to the film but the public and the critics loved it and we've seen many films since that echo its brand of social consciousness such as Silkwood and Erin Brockovich normal race success is of course undoubtedly linked with Sally's performance which is gritty and spirited she turns it or miss flaws around and uses them to empower her smack dab in the middle of what film critic Molly Haskell calls the age of ambivalence toward women in film when the story of women was largely one of absence Norma stands on the table and dares you to ignore her that's not a bad analogy for the turning point this performance became in Sally's career it's odd to think about now when movie stars are practically flocking to TV but from its inception until very recently acting on TV was understood to be inferior to acting in films movie stars rarely appeared on TV during the degradation of their reputation it was seen as a fall from grace where you went renewals had dried up along with your relevance the stigma helps explain why some of the most beloved faces of early television never made a significant impact in film unless they started there plus the industry had an economic incentive to keep these worlds separate TV actors appear directly in the viewers living rooms and therefore they were accessible TV derived its value from this connection while film derived its value from its inaccessibility it's superficial glamour as the perfect means of escapism by reducing the availability of stars to an in theater experience they stoked the viewers curiosity making it more likely that they'd go to the theater and pay for the content they couldn't get elsewhere it wasn't that Sally was the first Best Actress Oscar in our tough in on TV plenty of winners and nominees had started out in bit roles or guest spots early in their careers rather it was that Sally was the first who had been at the helm of her own show and was specifically identified with a role that gave audiences preconceived notions of her acting capabilities and personal demeanor she was the first to break through that and reach an elite group of actors who regularly starred in critically acclaimed and award-winning films at a time with her Best Actress winning predecessors were primarily recruited for films from the stage is how he found her achievement difficult to believe she didn't absorb the community's acceptance of her until her second Best Actress Oscar win four places in the heart in 1985 while her acceptance speech for this award is often parodied in contexts it's a quite touching outpouring of gratitude for the validation she received on this journey by the way 80s some of the most popular stars had just like Sally once led their own TV shows Robin Williams Tom Hanks cher and Bruce Willis to name a few perhaps Sally Field will never shape the label of being a former TV star the curse off with The Flying Nun but she also belongs to an exclusive club of women who have won the Best Actress Oscar twice and if that doesn't make her a huge movie star I don't know what would channeling the defiant and progressive spirit of Norma Rae she forged her own path to stardom and opened doors for other actors to follow if you liked this video be sure to LIKE and subscribe thanks for watching bye

Channel: Be Kind Rewind

Views: 166,687

Rating: 4.9324036 out of 5

Keywords: best actress, oscars, academy awards, sally field, norma rae, 1980, best actress 1980, movies, hollywood, jill clayburgh, starting over, jane fonda, the china syndrome, marsha mason, chapter two, bette midler, the rose, the flying nun, gidget, tv

Id: YoFwDiLwtQk

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2018