Actress Sally Field

I like her. I really like her. Because even though Sally Field risked being typecast as a goofy yet sweet ingenue as the result of her sixties TV shows "Gidget" and "The Flying Nun" (the latter being notable for being set in Puerto Rico, a rare locale for American sitcoms), she proved herself as a versatile actress in the movies in the seventies and eighties.

Two of her best known roles are title role in 1979's Norma Rae, about a mill worker in the South who fights for the unionization of her factory, and as Emma in the 1985 romantic comedy Murphy's Romance. Both movies were directed by Martin Ritt. Places in the Heart, from 1984, in which she played a Texas widow trying to hold onto her farm and family - and for which she won the Oscar that confirmed how much we like her - was directed by Robert Benton.

And, of course, she was in 1994's Forrest Gump as the title character's mother. These days, Sally Field has come full circle in a return to television, playing Nora Walker (wasn't that the name of the mom in the Who's Tommy?) in the ABC series "Brothers & Sisters." But she hasn't abandoned cinema completely; as of this writing, she is to play Mary Todd Lincoln in a movie version of Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Abraham Lincoln. Maybe what's good gets a little bit better . . .. :-)