Following a successful screen test, she was offered an 18-month contract.
She showed great emotional range as a woman with multiple-personality disorder, winning her first Emmy Award for her performance.
In 1979, she starred as a gutsy, determined mill worker who tries to unionize her workplace in Norma Rae.
The textile mill where single mom Norma Rae Webster Field toils away every day is a brutal place of drudgery, bad pay and terrible working conditions.