Even a pair of Oscars won’t guarantee good roles – at least not forever. Sally Field could have stayed busy playing supportive wives and concerned mothers for the rest of her career. But beyond that?
“It’s perhaps a problem that I’ve just been doing this so long,” the 69-year-old said over the phone recently, taking part of the blame as you might expect the famously humble actress to do. “But it’s also the fact, quite obviously, that I’m older, that I’m female and, to find something that’s interesting on such a deep level as this is really hard to do.”
Field is referring to “Hello, My Name Is Doris,” her first starring role in far too long. So why aren’t there more movies about older women again?
That’s a mystery - and an epidemic. In USC’s recent Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment, researchers found that nearly 80 percent of film characters over 40 are men. But such projects as “Hello, My Name Is Doris,” “Eye in the Sky,” “Grandma” (starring Lily Tomlin) and the Netflix series “Grace and Frankie” (with Tomlin and Jane Fonda) are tiny glimmers of hope for actresses who want to keep working into their golden years.
Unsurprisingly, “Doris” almost didn’t get made. No one wanted to finance a quirky comedy about a 60-something wallflower. Director Michael Showalter sent a script he co-wrote with Laura Terruso to every production company he could think of, only to get a pile of rejections in return.
“The response was pretty much, ‘This is a good movie. but we’re not going to make it,’ “ he recalled. “Like, ‘Nice script, but unless you want to put Cameron Diaz in the part, we can’t do it.’ “
Showalter later landed Field, who most recently reprised her part as Aunt May in 2014’s “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” - a role, she admitted to Howard Stern, that wasn’t exactly a career high. Even as the first lady in “Lincoln,” she was relegated to the periphery. In an industry where a 37-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal was deemed too old, the actress says, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man, what kind of parts does an older woman get? As Meryl Streep recently commented at the Berlin Film Festival, after 40, women are generally asked to play “hags and witches.”
Doris Miller is neither. As the movie begins, her mother (who is also her roommate) has just died, leaving Doris alone with her cat in a Staten Island house full of junk. This puts the shy, eccentrically dressed accountant at a crossroads: She can either shut herself in and become her mother or break out of her shell.
This is hardly a Cinderella story, however. At no point does Doris remove her glasses (she often wears two pairs at once) to reveal a more beautiful version of herself. In fact, she can be awkward, and she will no doubt make the audience squirm when, for example, she tails John and his new girlfriend around the city like the most conspicuous gumshoe imaginable.
Regardless, Field loved the character, whom she found to be hopeful and joyous despite her faults. More important, the actress didn’t see the movie as a story about baby-boomer life; the themes are universal.
“It is in some ways about age, but really it isn’t,” she said. “It’s about this human part of us that, in every stage in our life, we’re brand-new again. And the choice that human beings have is whether to move into that territory, into the next stage of our lives, or to hang on to what we were and stay kind of jumping up and down in one place.”
On the verge of 70, Field is embracing newness. Doing press for “Doris” has been unlike publicizing any movie she’s done before. It’s all about social media these days, which explains her interviews with Stern, various podcasts, Huffington Post and “AOL something-or-other,” as she put it, plus talk shows galore.
So far, the actress appears to be a natural at going viral. When she visited the “Late Show,” she laid a big kiss on Stephen Colbert, leaving the host a little flustered before he turned to the audience to say, “This job just keeps getting better and better.” By the next morning, the clip was trending on Facebook and Twitter.
“I had heard that Helen Mirren had done exactly that the night before, so that’s kind of why I did it,” Field said the next morning, sounding a little sheepish.
Doris, however, would no doubt be proud. The character, who was once so easily overlooked, makes a conscious decision to be seen.
“She’s just invisible, and that’s what older women feel,” Field said. “But I think all people feel that way sometimes. And some of them are all dressed up and all painted up and all prettied up and they’re loud or vulgar or showy or whatever they need to be. And it’s all an attempt to say: ‘Please see me. Please someone look my way.’”
