Steel Magnolias actress Sally Field, 79, has won two Oscars and three Primetime Emmys. But the legendary actress says that the "three things I am most proud of in my life" are her three sons.
"They are kind and loving, productive human beings, each very different from the other," she said at the 2012 Human Rights Campaign annual national dinner, – Peter, Eli, and Sam. Keep reading to learn all there is to know about Sally's three boys.
© JC OliveraPeter Craig, 56
Sally and her then-husband Steven Craig welcomed their first child, son Peter, on November 10, 1969. The actress fell pregnant at the end of the second season of the 1960s sitcom The Flying Nun, two years after she wed Steven, her high school sweetheart.
However, they split in 1974 and as a young boy Peter grew up between movie sets and the commune where his father lived, living in a "crazy" class dynamic.
"I was a little naked kid running around a commune. We'd be barefoot and covered with mud, and every now and then my mom would send a car over to pick us up, and all the kids would come running over to it and look at it like the apes at the beginning of 2001," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2005.
© Arturo HolmesPeter is an author and a dad-of-three
Peter became an author and used his own childhood as inspiration; he told the Los Angeles Times that his high school experience was the "kind of public school lunacy that goes on," sharing that he was "a geek who got to hang out with the cooler kids, getting into trouble and blowing off school, house parties, not going home for weeks at a time."
He dropped out of school at age 16 and his father forced him to get a job in construction.
Peter ended up attending the acclaimed Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and published his first novel, The Martini Shot, in 1998. He published two further novels, before he moved into screenwriting, penning the script for the 2010 Oscar-nominated film The Town with Ben Affleck.
Peter also worked on the scripts for the third and fourth The Hunger Games films, Bad Boys 4 Life, The Batman, and Top Gun: Maverick, which saw Peter get his first Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
He is dad to two daughters whom he welcomed with first wife Amy Scattergood, and a son with second wife Jennifer DeFrancisco.
"My oldest son is this miraculously loving parent to his two little girls," Sally once said of Peter's own parenting skills. "They won't have any trouble knowing how to love or be loved. To raise children who go on to be great parents is an accomplishment — that's the Oscar moment in life."
Peter is now married to teacher Cristina Esposito.
© Scott GriesEli Craig, 53
Eli was born on May 25, 1972 to Sally and Steven. He has also formed his own career in Hollywood as a producer and director.
His debut was the cult horror comedy movie Tucker & Dale vs Evil, and he previously revealed his mom was the first person he sent his script to for advice.
"She was the first one who said, 'This is really funny,'" he recalled in 2011. "'The encouraging thing was, I don't think she's ever seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
But in 2008 Sally told Oprah Winfrey that she didn't think her son would say she had "done a lot of things well."
"It's true; when he was grown, he told me that I didn't discipline him enough. Can you believe it? I said, 'I'd like you to try to discipline the kind of boy you were. You were absolutely uncontainable!'"
© ROBYN BECKEli's work in Hollywood
His second film was Little Evil, starring Evangeline Lilly and Adam Scott, and it was released on Netflix in 2017, and he has also directed his mom for an episode of her former TV series Brothers & Sisters.
In 2004 Eli married his wife Sasha, a former actress known as the Yellow Ranger on the 2000 series Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue; they are the proud parents of two sons.
© Getty ImagesSam Greisman, 38
Sam is Sally's youngest son and the only child she welcomed with ex-husband Alan Greisman, whom she wed in 1983 and divorced in 1994.
Sam, 37, is a writer and producer, known for Dinner with Jeffrey (2016) and After School (2015), and is an internet personality with over 47,000 Instagram followers.
"I've always been a momma's boy — painfully, occasionally ashamedly so. Perhaps too obsessed with her," Sam wrote in 2023 in an essay for People.
"Maybe it's because I'm the youngest, by sixteen years. Maybe it's because I was a shy little kid and my mom was a safe space; a hip I was attached to. Maybe it's because gay men feel a certain undeniable affection for award-winning actresses. Who knows! Whatever it is, we have always been incredibly close."
Sally "didn't even bat an eye" when Sam came out as gay to her, and the two have come together to publicly support the LGBTQ community, including in 2012, when Sam introduced his mom as she was presented with the Human Rights Campaign's Ally for Equality Award.
