Now here’s something that doesn’t happen very often. Hollywood is renowned for liking pretty young actresses, and casting female leads that are massively younger than their male counterparts (Ewan McGregor has recently said it’s why he’s gone off nude scenes, as it feels exploitative that he gets older but the women playing opposite him stay the same age).
However Steven Spielberg has now confirmed Sally Field for the role of Mary Todd Lincoln in his Abe Lincoln biopic, even though Field is actually older in real life than Mary was when she died, and several years older than Daniel Day Lewis, who’s playing honest Abe.
There’s no reason she shouldn’t have the role of the stalwart wife in Lincoln, as she is an incredible actress, but it’s not how Hollywood usually works. Normally we’d have got Scarlet Johansson or someone like that in the role, just to keep the studio bean counters happy. However with Spielberg running his own studio, he’s actually allowed to cast the best actress, the crazy guy.
Spielberg says, “I’m excited to be working with Sally for the first time. I’ve admired her films and she has always been my first choice to portray all the fragility and complexity that was Mary Todd Lincoln.”
“To have the opportunity to work with Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis and to play one of the most complicated and colorful women in American history is simply as good as it gets,” said Sally Field.
While she’s mainly been on TV in recent years, Field is a double Oscar winner who largely went to the small screen (admittedly where she started off) when she hit middle-age and Hollywood automatically stopped offering her decent roles. However with Aunt May in The Amazing Spider-man and now Lincoln, she’s finally getting some decent big screen parts again.
The other news to come off the press release about Field’s casting is that after years in development (and losing Liam Neeson in the lead role because he felt it had taken so long he’d got too old), it’s now scheduled to shoot this autumn, for release at the end of 2012.