Sally Field recently spoke candidly about her past relationship with Burt Reynolds, saying that she “disappeared” while dating him.
ET Online reports that Field sat down with ITV’s This Morning and dished on how things were between to two when they were romantically involved in the ’70s.
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“It was instantaneous and intense and I also said we were a perfect match of flaws,” the 71-year-old actress explained. “We went together very well, but not necessarily for the right reasons. It was a pre-formed rut in my road. I say in [my] book [In Pieces] many times, ‘If he had been different, would I have been different?’ “
“He was who he was, a man of his time, and needed the women that he was with to represent him in a certain way,” she went on to say. “I couldn’t be myself, I was absent. I was behaving the way I was taught, that to be loved I had to disappear. So I had to disappear.”
Reynolds passed away in September after suffering a heart attack at the age of 82, but Field said in a previous interview that the two of them had not spoken in about three decades.
“He was a hugely important part of my life, but for a very short period of my life. I really didn’t speak with him for, you know, the last 30 years of his life,” she confessed. “And I would feel him kind of reach out to me via the press.”
“It was something that he would do even when we were dating,” she added. “He would speak to me [through the press] about things that he could, like, call me on the phone about. He would, like, do the Today show and would say, ‘Well, I need to tell Sally [this].’ “
Interestingly, shortly after Reynolds’ passing, Field spoke out about her new memoir — the aforementioned In Pieces — and stated that she was “glad” he was not around for it to be released because she felt he would have been upset by it.
“This would hurt him,” Field said. “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, which he probably would have. I did not want to hurt him any further.”
The iconic actress also shared that while the two had great on-screen chemistry their off-screen romance was “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me.”
In Pieces in available from booksellers now.
