Sally Field knew her book would "hurt" Burt Reynolds.
Sally Field
The 71-year-old star found it "horrifying" that her memoir, 'In Pieces', was released just four days before her former partner died last month aged 82, and while she didn't want to cause him any pain with the content of her tome, she knew the book would have done.
She said: "I think it was [released] four days before [he died]. It was very, very close. It was kind of horrifying that it was so close, and I certainly never wanted to hurt him anymore than I already had.
"I knew this book would hurt him, even though I tried to paint him as the colourful human being that he was, so I don't know. He will always be in my heart and my history so he will always be there."
The former couple dated for five years after meeting on the set of 1977 movie 'Smokey and the Bandit', but the 'Gidget' star has admitted she couldn't be herself when she was with him.
Speaking on 'This Morning', she added: "We were a perfect match of flaws. We went together very well, not necessarily for the right reasons. It was a pre-formed rut in my road. I say in the book many times, if I could have been different, would he have been different?
"He was who he was, a man of his time and needed the women that he was with to represent him in a certain way. But would he have been different if I could say, 'Don't do that. I don't like it?' But I couldn't. I couldn't be myself. I was absent. I was behaving the way I was taught and that is to be loved I had to disappear. So I disappeared."
Sally recently claimed the late movie legend - who referred to the 'Mrs. Doubtfire' star as the love of his life - was a "complicated" man, and admitted their connection was "instantaneous".
She said: "He was a complicated man.
"We'd known each other about three days, four days. It was instantaneous and four days felt like four years. You can see it in our faces. We were sort of, you know, deeply entangled. The nature of it wasn't just, 'Oh this is a love affair.' There was some ingredient between us having to do with my care-taking and him needing to be taken care of."
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