Sally Field opens up about her controlling relationship with Burt Reynolds
Sally Field is revealing more about her one-time relationship with the late Burt Reynolds in her new memoir, In Pieces.
Released on Tuesday, the book exposed the pair's tumultuous relationship as Field described the actor – who she dated for several years since the beginning of 1977 – as controlling and distant.
“By the time we met, the weight of his stardom had become a way for Burt to control everyone around him, and from the moment I walked through the door, it was a way to control me. We were a perfect match of flaws,” she wrote. “Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road, a pre-programmed behaviour as if in some past I had pledged a soul binding commitment to this man.”
Reynolds, who first met Field on the set of Smokey and the Bandit, told Vanity Fair in 2015 that Field was the “love of my life".
“I was always flattered when he said that,” Field told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. “But he was a complicated man.”
Field has previously spoken to The New York Times, saying she was “glad” Reynolds wasn’t around to read her book. Reynolds died on September 6 at the age of 82.
“This would hurt him,” she said in the interview last week. “I felt glad that he wasn’t going to read it, he wasn’t going to be asked about it, and he wasn’t going to have to defend himself or lash out, which he probably would have.”
Field opened up about her dark past in her book as she revealed that she had been molested by her stepfather during her childhood, something that later on affected the relationship she shared with Reynolds.
She told The New York Times that her time with Reynolds was “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me.”