Sally Field didn’t feel supported by Burt Reynolds when she won her first Academy Award in 1980. In Dave Karger’s new book 50 Oscar Nights, the 77-year-old actress looked back on her relationship with her late partner and how he was “was not happy” when Sally was being celebrated for her performance in the 1979 drama film Norma Rae.
“He did not want me to go to Cannes [Film Festival] at all,” she said in the book which comes out January 23, according to PEOPLE. “He said, ‘You don’t think you’re going to win anything, do you?’ ” she recalled.
Sally claimed that Burt – who died in 2018 — refused to be her date to the 1980 Academy Awards, where she won the Oscar for Best Actress for the first time. “When the Oscars came around, he really was not a nice guy around me then and was not going to go with me,” she said.
Sally said she “didn’t know what to do” about not having a date to the Oscars, but luckily, actor and comedian David Steinberg and his then-wife, Judy, went with her and “made it a big celebration.” Sally revealed that the pair “picked me up in a limousine and had champagne in the car. They made it just wonderful fun.”
The Brothers & Sisters star dated Burt for five years after they met on the set of the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit. In recent years, Sally has opened up about the difficult relationship she had with Burt, including in a March 2022 interview with Variety.
“He was not someone I could be around,” Sally told the outlet. “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. He just wanted to have the thing he didn’t have. I just didn’t want to deal with that,” she added.
More recently, Sally said that Burt was her “worst” on-screen kiss on Watch What Happens Live. “I tried to look the other way, and say, ‘Well that was just then.’ It was just not something he did very well,” she said during her appearance on Andy Cohen‘s show in December 2022.
When Burt died at the age of 82 after suffering a heart attack in September 2018, Sally released a brief statement honoring her late partner. “There are times in your life that are so indelible, they never fade away. They stay alive, even 40 years later. My years with Burt never leave my mind. He will be in my history and my heart, for as long as I live. Rest, Buddy,” Sally said.