Out of all the actors who have made news in 2012 for either gaining weight, losing weight, packing on muscle or a combination of some or all of the three, Sally Field may be the most unexpected. Field’s diminutive frame has managed to seem larger than life in movies like “Norma Rae” and appropriately fragile as a nun capable of flight. Who would have thought that Ms. Field would finally join the ranks of those actors who reinvented their physical appearance to a significant effect only upon reaching her mid-60s?
In order to play the far more horizontally broad wife of the Great Emancipator in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” Sally Field had to pack an additional 25 pounds onto her slight frame. One of the advantages of age is the advantage of being able to express a blunter form of honesty without recriminations and Field has been far blunter and, probably, honest in her assessment of this particular aspect of modern day acting.
“It was disgusting…I never had a fun meal” is how Field describes her six month ordeal of transforming her body from its natural state to one more recognizably similar to the plump figure seen in some of the very first photographs ever taken of America’s political royalty.
If Sally Field’s honesty about the unpleasantness associated with landing what may wind up being the most important role of the twilight of her career is unambiguously evident, exhibitions of the wisdom one associated with the aged is certainly murkier. At the other end of the spectrums associated with the overwhelming number of stories of actors who have physically transformed for roles in 2012 is Anne Hathaway’s sudden and drastic weight loss to play the part of sickly Fantine in “Les Miserables.
That crash diet took Hathaway from the svelte figure who burnt up the screen in black leather in “The Dark Knight Rises” to a seriously thin tubercular victim of the French Revolution in about a third of the time it took Sally Field to expand into the figure of Mary Todd Lincoln. But then again Anne Hathaway is half the age of Sally Field and weight loss generally tends to be less hazardous than weight gain. (Obviously, in specific cases, the opposite will be true.)
Even taking in account the severity of Hathaway’s weight loss and the means by which it was accomplished, one senses that the greater danger here is most definitely on the part of Sally Field. If his 66 year old female patient showed up 25 pounds heavier, one at least hopes that a doctor would be aghast at the potential health problems.
Things are different in Hollywood, however. Or are they? The lesson to be gained from the latest story of actor reinvention is that even in Hollywood a price must be for daring to spit in the face of advancements in prosthetic technology and computerized manipulation of the film image. What took Sally Field six months to enslave upon her body took twice as long to emancipate.
And, in the process, the inability of Field’s knee to support the additional weight ultimately required surgery.
