“At 70, Sally Field Navigates Aging In The Spotlight” (NPR Weekend Edition Saturday, March 5, 2016) Interview with Lourdes Garcia-Navarro.

Sally Field has become a genuine wise woman. In this interview she says three great things: (1) life is process and we’re always passing from phase to phase; (2) you earn your years by living them; and (3) we carry a whole chorus of influential people with us along our way through life.

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro: What attracted you to playing this character Doris?      SF: It’s such a unique story and it looks at so many things. It looks at age, I mean, what is age? It looks at transitioning, you know, human beings; our task in life is to constantly transition from one stage into another whether it’s toddlerhood into childhood into adolescence and then young adulthood and then middle age. It’s just constant movement. . . .   I’m an old woman, 70 is old, and that’s OK. … I’ve gathered strength behind my years, I owned them, I’ve earned them, I’ve deserved them, I have a right to have them.

LGN: Are the characters you’ve played over the years like people that you take along with you?     SF: You know, they are. I’ll be walking down the street or cleaning the house or in the market and a vision, a memory will just flash through your head the way they do. You know, you’ll see the oranges or something and something will flash through your head of an experience that you had or something, and sometimes I stop myself and say, “Wait a minute, that wasn’t my experience, that was a character’s experience. It was Norma’s experience or Edna’s experience or Celeste’s experience,” and it wasn’t mine. But I portrayed it so it registered in my head as an experience that I had, so it’s an odd thing that actors do when you have the opportunity to really work on a character that you somehow have to plant inside of yourself. They stay in me and they have always changed me in some way.