EXCLUSIVE: Sally Field's Darkest Secrets As She Heads For 80 — In Her Own Shocking Words… 'I Slept with Director for a Job While His Wife Slept Upstairs'

Sally Field slept with a film director to land an acting role while his wife slept above them – and that is just one of her most shocking secrets RadarOnline.com can reveal.

The Steel Magnolias actress, set to turn 79 later this year, said she was pressured into having sex with the movie boss at his home.

Field said she had the encounter during a final audition for a role at the director’s home.

He invited her up to his bedroom, where he told her he needed to see her breasts for a nude scene in the film, then said the job was hers.

Field said: "He said, 'But only after I see how you kiss.'"

She submitted to the kiss and later, during filming, he appeared at the door of her hotel room.

Field then allowed him in to have sex with her, even though his wife was staying with him in the hotel suite above.

She said: "I can't unpack it any more than I unpacked it. As far as I was concerned, it was how men behaved, because that's all I ever saw."

The actress opened up about the encounter in a new interview during which she also detailed the stomach-churning abuse she suffered for years at the hands of her stepfather.

Field became a victim of molestation after her mother Margaret divorced her army officer dad Richard in 1950 and married Jock Mahoney, a Hollywood stuntman and actor who played Tarzan in two feature films.

The double Oscar-winner said the abuse began when Mahoney would ask her to walk up and down his body in a flimsy nightgown.

She said: "I walked on his back until he rolled over, commanding me to keep going. One foot in front of the other, up his chest I tiptoed, my nightgown hanging loose as his hands slid over my legs, then moved up.

"I'd turn my feet around, walking toward his stomach to be out of reach, and he'd whisper instructions – 'Lower, lower.'

"My steps got tinier as he muttered, 'Lower.' I walked on this much-loved non-father of mine, carefully trying to avoid where he was aiming my feet, and part of me wasn't in the room any more."

As the intimate walking sessions intensified, Field found it hard to focus at school.

She added: "I understand it is a trait that teachers now look for in children who are having some troubles at home – the inability to concentrate.

"Your mind creates a kind of fog so you don’t have to deal with the things that are coming at you. I lived in a fog and the only time it lifted was when I was on stage or had to memorize a poem in English class.

"I would latch on to it and be alive for a moment."

One day Mahoney enticed her into the bathroom.

Sitting Field on the counter, he tried to make her open her mouth to kiss him.

She said: "I don't. He sets his penis, as muscular as the rest of him, between my legs and pulls my littleness toward him… and it.

"He loved me enough not to invade me. He never invaded me."

Decades later, not long before her mother died, Field finally asked Margaret – by then long divorced from Mahoney – how much she knew about what had happened.

Her mother told her Mahoney had once confessed there had been one incident with Sally, when hed been drunk.

Field said her mum told her: "'He said he'd put his thing between your legs and… came.'"

She added: "Without looking away or hesitating, I flatly told her what needed to be said – 'It was not one moment of drunken indiscretion, mother. It was my childhood. My whole childhood.'"

At first her mother didn't believe her, then asked why Sally never confided in her.

Field said she told her mum: "'I was a child, Mother. I was a child and didn’t know that it was any different than any other child's life. I was afraid."

"'I let you down and I'm so very sorry,'" her mother later said.

They never referred to it again.

Field has said the abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather allowed her to be trodden on by her ex-lover Burt Reynolds, who died this month aged 82 from a heart attack.

She added: "I was so locked in the language of my childhood, I had this very charismatic, very colorful man in my life that in some ways was replicating my childhood – not through any fault of his own, just because it was a pattern I had fallen into.

"To be loved I had to stop being me. Matter of fact, I had to stop being anyone. I was bending myself into a pleasing shape, a soothing, compliant cup of warm elixir that Burt was then lured into drinking over and over, until he became addicted to the seemingly unconditional love I was offering."

But by 1979, when Reynolds tried to dissuade Field from going to the Cannes Film Festival for the film Norma Rae with the words "You don't expect to win anything, do you?" she'd had enough.

She went to Cannes, won best actress for the film – in which she plays the eponymous working-class heroine – and went on to win an Oscar the following year for playing Norma Rae.

By then she had dumped Reynolds – who said letting Field slip through his fingers was the biggest regret of his life.