Sally Field: Emmy Speech Bleep 'Surreal'

An Emmy in hand, Sally Field gears up for Season 2 of "Brothers and Sisters."

ByABC News via logo
February 12, 2009, 10:27 AM

Sept. 28, 2007 — -- She's considered one of the great actors in any medium, be it movies, television or the stage. She has two Oscars and three Emmys she won her third Emmy Sunday night for her role in the ABC show "Brothers & Sisters."

An actress as lauded by critics as she is loved by fans, Sally Field, one critic said, "has specialized in playing women whose demure exteriors have a way of cracking open to unleash torrents of outsized emotion at times of crisis."

And her "torrents of emotion" aren't limited to the small screen.

As she accepted the Emmy for best actress for her role as Nora Walker in ABC's "Brothers & Sisters," Field's speech was cut short after she started to speak, heatedly, about the war in Iraq.

"And especially the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait," Fields said. "Wait for their children to come home. From danger. From harm's way. And from war I am proud to be one of those women. And let's face it, if mothers ruled the world, there would be no " at which point her speech was cut short, unseen or heard by American television audiences.

Immediately after the speech, the censoring was a surprise to Field. "No, I didn't know I had been bleeped. You know, the whole thing was sort of a surreal experience," she told ABC's Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America."

It was just as she began to say "godd--ed" that her speech was cut off by Fox executives.

"I made the mistake of putting a God in front of the damned," Field told Sawyer. "But basically, I feel if anything on Earth God would damn, it would be war. But I guess for whatever reason, they decided that God and damned together was not acceptable," she said.

Fox later released a statement about the incident. "Some language during the live broadcast may have been considered inappropriate by some viewers. As a result, Fox's broadcast standards executives determined it appropriate to drop sound during those portions of the show."

Fox also bleeped the word "screwing" uttered by Ray Romano and cut an expletive blurted out by ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" star Katherine Heigl, when she heard her name called.