The “Steel Magnolias” actress says she learned to do it from her famous acting coach.

Sally Field details first time she channeled rage from her traumatic childhood into a performance: ‘How angry can I be here?’

The "Steel Magnolias" actress says she learned to do it from her famous acting coach.

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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May 8, 2026 3:26 p.m. ET

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Sally Field in 2026. Credit:

Dominik Bindl/Getty

- Sally Field says she learned from acting coach Lee Strasberg to use her inner rage to fuel her performances.

- *Norma Rae*, Field's 1979 film about an activist, is the first on which she remembers using the technique.

- Field has previously said that she had a traumatic childhood, during which she was sexually and mentally abused by her stepfather.

Sally Field remembers her 1979 movie *Norma Rae* as more than the film for which she won her first Oscar.

The inspirational story of a Southern millworker who revolutionizes a small town and, in so doing, finds strength inside herself that she didn't know she had, is also where Field discovered that the strong feelings inside her could be used to her advantage.

"I asked [director] Marty Ritt, 'How angry can I be here?'" while shooting *Norma Rae*, she told PEOPLE in a new interview. "He said, 'How angry are you?' And I said, 'Angry.' And so that was the first time I was ever really able to learn how to tap into my own rage on film."

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Field, known for her emotional scenes in later films such as *Steel Magnolias* (1989) and *Lincoln* (2012), said she was filled with anger because of what she had experienced in her early years.

"Being a little girl raised in the '50s and having a very complicated childhood with my stepfather and even my mother at times, I was filled with rage. Really filled with rage," Field said. "And it was working with [acting coach] Lee Strasberg that allowed me to begin to tap into it, to not let it devour me."

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The former child star, who first rose to fame for her starring role on TV's *Gidget*, wrote in her 2018 memoir, *In Pieces*, that she was abused sexually and emotionally by her stepfather.

The acting institute founded by Strasberg, who died in 1982, has also counted Marilyn Monroe, Angelina Jolie, and Cicely Tyson among its students.

Sally Field in 'Norma Rae'.

20th Century Fox Film Corp/Courtesy Everett

Field later played intense scenes in stories that make audiences feel something, whether portraying the mother in *Forrest Gump* (1994) or a woman struggling to help her family during the Great Depression in *Places in the Heart *(1984).

She told the outlet that she doesn't consider her legacy.

"I can't stand at a distance to see," she said. "[Acting] is what I do. I'm supposed to go into rehearsals for a play at the end of summer. I still have my head down, and I'm always hoping to get better."

Field's new movie, *Remarkably Bright Creatures*, is available on Netflix.

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