In his last years, Burt Reynolds kept saying it to anyone who would listen: Sally Field was the love of his life. Field, meanwhile, had not spoken to him in three decades. That gap — between what he called it and what she lived — is the real story of their relationship.
They met in 1977 on the set of Smokey and the Bandit, the car-chase comedy that became one of the decade’s biggest box-office hits. Reynolds was already one of America’s biggest movie stars. Field was 30 and still known mainly for TV roles in The Flying Nun and Sybil. The director reportedly didn’t think she was sexy enough for the part, but Reynolds fought to cast her — and eventually got his way.
What happened next, Reynolds later said, was visible to anyone who watched the movie. ‘Audiences were right,’ he told interviewers. ‘They were watching two people fall in love.’
They dated for roughly five years, co-starring in Hooper and The End before going their separate ways in the early 1980s. By then, Field was becoming one of Hollywood’s most respected actresses, winning Academy Awards for Norma Rae and Places in the Heart. Reynolds’s career, meanwhile, would eventually move in the opposite direction.
He never quite let go of her. In a 2015 interview, he called her the love of his life and blamed himself for the breakup. Two years before he died, he told People that the feeling of loss had never left him — and that he had heard, through her son, that she still talked about him. He seemed to take comfort in that.
Field’s version is more complicated, and she waited until after his death to tell it fully.
When Reynolds died of a heart attack at Jupiter Medical Center in Florida on September 6, 2018, at 82, Field released a statement saying he would always be part of her history and her heart. But in her 2018 memoir, In Pieces, she wrote about their relationship with a candor she had clearly been holding back for years. She described Reynolds as ‘confusing, complicated and hurtful’ — while also acknowledging that he was not without love or care. She wrote that when she met him, the weight of his fame had already changed him, and that his need for control extended to her. ‘Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road,’ she wrote, ‘a pre-programmed behavior as if in some past I had pledged a soul-binding commitment to this man.’
She also wrote that she had stopped existing during her years with him.
Field said she was relieved Reynolds would not read the book. ‘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,’ she said, ‘which he probably would have.’
The silence between them — thirty years of it — was not entirely a mystery to her. She described feeling humiliated when reports of his infidelity surfaced while they were together, fielding calls from relatives as the stories spread. She felt like a fool. After that, she did not call. He kept reaching out through the press, she said — the same way he had tried to communicate with her even when they were dating.
Field was 79 when she discussed the memoir publicly and her view had not softened into nostalgia. She remembered him as someone real and flawed, not as a romantic legend. Reynolds, in the years before he died, had mostly chosen the legend. He called her the love of his life so often it became its own kind of message — one she received but never answered.
Neither of them ever resolved it. That may be the most honest thing that can be said about them.
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