Margaret Field, the mother of two-time Oscar-winning actress Sally Field and the star of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Man From Planet X, died Sunday at her home in Malibu after a six-year battle with cancer. She was 89.
The dark-haired beauty worked in Hollywood for almost 30 years, appearing in other such films as John Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948), Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949) and Michael Curtiz’s The Story of Will Rogers (1952). Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, she also appeared in more than 70 television shows, including Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, The Lone Ranger, The F.B.I. and My Three Sons.
In the Edgar G. Ulmer cult classic The Man From Planet X, Field plays Enid Elliot, the daughter of scientist who discovers a new planet fast approaching Earth. An alien visitor arrives at their observatory on the moors of Scotland, supposedly an advance scout leading his civilization from its dying planet.
In 1942, Field married Army officer Richard Dryden Field, and they had two children, Richard Jr. and Sally. Divorced in 1950, she then married noted Hollywood stuntman Jock Mahoney, with whom she had another daughter, actress-director Princess O’Mahoney.
Field gave up acting in her mid-thirties to focus on family and eventually helped raise her seven grandchildren as her kids pursued their passions in acting, film production and, in the case of Richard, quantum chromodynamic physics.
Born in Houston, Field moved to Pasadena during World War II. She was discovered by a talent scout on a street corner and put under contract by Paramount Pictures.
Survivors also include eight great-grandchildren.
