Sally Field worked with Dolly Parton on one movie in 1989. She spent the next thirty-seven years loving her anyway.
Field introduced the Dolly Parton tribute at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards on Monday, September 14, at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles. She opened with a line that quieted the room.
“If there are truly angels on Earth, then we just lost one, Dolly Parton.”
Field starred alongside Parton in Steel Magnolias, the 1989 film based on Robert Harling’s play about a group of Southern women holding each other together through a death in their circle. Parton played Truvy, the beauty shop owner. Field played M’Lynn, the mother.
“It was my great good fortune to have worked with Dolly in a film called Steel Magnolias,” Field said. “And over the years, I never stopped loving her, though we lived very far apart.”
Then she asked the room a question that answered itself.
“I adored her from day one. How could you not?”
She Remembered the Humor Before She Remembered the Legacy
Field could have led with the records or the Hall of Fame inductions. She led with the jokes.
“She was genuine and humble, supportive and blisteringly funny, with a bawdy sense of humor that would send any rude guy looking for a place to hide,” Field said.
Anyone who watched a Dolly Parton interview understands exactly what she meant. Parton spent sixty years disarming people with a punchline before they ever got close enough to underestimate her.
Only then did Field talk about the size of what her friend had built.
“I couldn’t see then what a real giant Dolly was. Not just as an artist, but as a human,” she said. “She was a humanitarian whose contributions have made a profound difference in the lives of so many in her home state of Tennessee and across our country.”
Field closed the speech with a promise rather than a goodbye, and the theater responded with sustained applause.
“God bless you, Dolly Parton, my friend. I am not the only one on earth that will love you forever and ever.”
They Used to Go to Walmart Together
The detail Field shared elsewhere at the ceremony says more about that film set than any premiere photo.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, she described how the cast spent their downtime during filming.
“We would go shopping together, all of us, to Walmart,” Field said. “Can you imagine all of us coming into Walmart?”
Picture that. Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Daryl Hannah, and a very young Julia Roberts walking through a Louisiana Walmart on a weeknight. Whoever was working that shift got a story for life.
Field and Parton had done this once before. When Olympia Dukakis died in May 2021, both women posted tributes to their castmate. Parton called her one of her favorite people she had ever known. Field wrote, “What can I say but I loved her. Everyone loved her. She was a gift. Rest in peace my friend Olympia.”
Five years later, Field was writing the same kind of words about Dolly.
She Is About to Turn the Same Age Dolly Reached
There was a layer to Monday night that nobody in the audience could see.
Field turns 80 on November 6. Parton turned 80 in January and died in August. In her conversation with The Hollywood Reporter at the same ceremony, Field spoke plainly about what that number feels like from the inside.
“What’s left for me? I don’t know,” she said. “What’s around the corner? It’s very hard to find projects for old women. I’ll be 80, so I’m not young in any way, shape or form. It’s about finding that next thing.”
She said that on the same night, she stood up and eulogized a woman exactly her age.
Field was at the Emmys for her own work as well, nominated for lead actress in a limited or anthology series or movie for Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures.
Parton was laid to rest on August 30 in Nashville, sixteen days before the ceremony.
Sally Field met her on a film set in Louisiana in 1988 and shopped for towels with her at Walmart. Thirty-seven years later, she stood in a theater in Los Angeles and told several million people that she would love Dolly Parton forever and ever, and there was no reason on earth to doubt her.
