Sally Field didn’t just portray Julia Roberts’ mother in “Steel Magnolias,” she exercised her maternal side off camera, too.In a new interview with Vulture published Monday, the 77-year-old actress discussed the “dazzling cast who were so loving and so supportive” amid difficult moments. Field, Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah and the late Olympia Dukakis particularly rallied around Roberts, who was allegedly being “picked on” by the film’s late director Herb Ross.
“Herb was very, very, very hard on Julia. If you ever talk to Julia, she’ll tell you,” Field said. “She was the baby. She was sort of the newcomer. And she was wonderful, and he just picked on her. It was awful.”
Clockwise from upper left, Dolly Parton, Sally Field, Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts, Olympia Dukakis and Shirley MacLaine starred in “Steel Magnolias” in 1989.
She added that there wasn’t a particular reason that Roberts was on the brunt of Ross’ intense criticism. “Some people just need to have somebody they pick on. But we all came to her aid, and I remember Dolly once just turned on him — always with humor, but usually the most vulgar humor you ever heard so that it was like, you just literally don’t have a leg to stand on,” she recalled.
USA TODAY reached out to reps for Roberts.
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Field said the director “dared not” to mess with her because she would give it right back.
“I don’t mind notes, but I will argue if it doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “But if you’re gonna be mean to me, then you’re gonna find a warrior. I may be small, but you don’t want to do that.”
Sally Field and Julia Roberts were nominated for Golden Globes for their performances in “Steel Magnolias.”
The 1989 movie was an adaptation of Robert Harling’s play of the same name. The comedy-drama centers on a group of women in a small town in Louisiana as they rally around M’Lynn Eatenton (Field) following the death of her daughter Shelby Eatenton-Latcherie (Roberts) due to complications of type-1 diabetes.
The film earned Roberts an Oscar nomination and Golden Globes win for best supporting actress in a motion picture. Field was also nominated for best actress at the 1989 Globes ceremony.
Sally Field’s Five Stages of Grief in One Steel Magnolias Scene
The cemetery scene in the 1989 film Steel Magnolias is an all-time, hall-of-fame, best-in-show cry scene, the kind of weighty, deeply emotional piece every actor dreams of playing. The key reason can be summarized in two words: Sally Field. As M’Lynn, a mother who has just lost her daughter Shelby (Julia Roberts) to complications from diabetes, Field careens through peaks and valleys of grief so raw that you can’t watch it with dry eyes. While pacing through a graveyard, she skates back and forth through the five stages of grief in roughly five minutes, and not one millisecond of it feels false.
Surrounded by her closest friends — Clairee (Olympia Dukakis), Truvy (Dolly Parton), Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine), and Annelle (Daryl Hannah) — M’Lynn starts her extended monologue from a place that sounds at first like stage five: acceptance. “Shelby, as you know, wouldn’t want us to get mired down and wallow in this,” she says. “We should handle it the best way we know how and get on with it. That’s what my mind says. I wish somebody would explain it to my heart.” From there, she recounts the final moments of her daughter’s life, when the machines in the hospital were turned off. “I was there when that wonderful creature drifted into my life, and I was there when she drifted out,” she says, her voice catching. This is when, as a viewer, you know you’re a goner yet still don’t fully understand how devastated you’re about to become.
Field then snaps abruptly from sadness to denial, saying she needs to get back to the rest of her family and checking her face in a compact mirror. Then she instantly dissolves again into grief spiked with extreme rage. “I want to know whyyyy!” she cries out, in a scream so primal it seems to come from the deepest cells in her bone marrow. Then she reverts to bargaining — “No, it’s not supposed to happen this way. I’m supposed to go first” — and immediately U-turns and drives right back into anger. “I just want to hit something, hit it hard!” she shouts.
