Sally Field shares her favorite memory working with Robin Williams on ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’: Playing ‘Zelda’
Mrs. Doubtfire has been a comedy favorite for Millennials and many other generations since 1993. The movie starred Robin Williams and Sally Field as divorced parents, with Williams dressing in drag as the older Mrs. Doubtfire to work as a nanny and spend time with his children.
Given the wacky hijinks of the film, many fans have wondered what it must have been like for the stars when the cameras were off. It turns out they fired up a Nintendo to play The Legend of Zelda between takes.
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Field was interviewed to promote the film Remarkably Bright Creatures alongside her co-star Lewis Pullman. The interviewer, Jake Hamilton, asked Field about her favorite memory working on the set of Mrs. Doubtfire with Williams. Field answered that one of her favorite memories was Williams coming to her rented apartment to play The Legend of Zelda together.
Playing games, making movie memories
Williams was known to be a Zelda enthusiast. What wasn’t widely known is that Field became just as big a fan. In fact, she currently has a Nintendo Switch 2 to keep playing the games.
“We’d play the early games of Zelda together. Zelda, the computer game, that I still play with my grandsons,” said Field. “Even when my grandsons aren’t there, I pretend they are there. I play them.”
Field then asked her younger co-star Pullman whether he played the games. She playfully chastised him when he admitted he was missing out.
“What the hell is the matter with you?! It’s so fun,” she said with a laugh.
Williams’ connection to The Legend of Zelda
The Legend of Zelda is a Nintendo video game franchise that has released 21 games in the main series. Most of the games focus on the young warrior Link as he battles monsters and solves puzzles to rescue Princess Zelda. The series has continued to produce new entries since its debut in 1986.
Williams became a fan of the original game when it was released in North America in 1987. He enjoyed it so much that he named his daughter after the titular character. When the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time released the game for the Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo had both Robin and Zelda Williams star in heartfelt commercials for the game together.
After his death, fans of the games found a possible reference to Williams in the The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom games. While it hasn’t been confirmed by Nintendo, gaming fans believe that the non-playable character Dayto is a tribute to him because of the facial and vocal resemblance between the two.
Video games are a medium for all ages
Field’s connection to the The Legend of Zelda franchise reinforces how video game fandom is becoming increasingly cross-generational, with many older people picking up a controller to play with their families and on their own. In the end, you can never know what a person is into based on appearances. As many gamers just discovered with Field, you don’t know what you might have in common with someone unless you ask.
A single door can open up a world of endless possibilities. For homeowners, the front door of their house is a gateway to financial stability, job security, and better health. Yet for many, that door remains closed. Due to the rising costs of housing, 1 in 3 people around the world wake up without the security of safe, affordable housing.
Since 1976, Habitat for Humanity has made it their mission to unlock and open the door to opportunity for families everywhere, and their efforts have paid off in a big way. Through their work over the past 50 years, more than 65 million people have gained access to new or improved housing, and the movement continues to gain momentum. Since 2011 alone, Habitat for Humanity has expanded access to affordable housing by a hundredfold.
A world where everyone has access to a decent home is becoming a reality, but there’s still much to do. As they celebrate 50 years of building, Habitat for Humanity is inviting people of all backgrounds and talents to be part of what comes next through Let’s Open the Door, a global campaign that builds on this momentum and encourages people everywhere to help expand access to safe, affordable housing for those who need it most. Here’s how the foundation to a better world starts with housing, and how everyone can pitch in to make it happen.
Globally, almost 3 billion people, including 1 in 6 U.S. families, struggle with high costs and other challenges related to housing. A crisis in itself, this also creates larger problems that affect families and communities in unexpected ways. People who lack affordable, stable housing are also more likely to experience financial hardship in other areas of their lives, since a larger share of their income often goes toward rent, utilities, and frequent moves. They are also more likely to experience health problems due to chronic stress or environmental factors, such as mold. Housing insecurity also goes hand-in-hand with unstable employment, since people may need to move further from their jobs or switch jobs altogether to offset the cost of housing.
Affordable homeownership creates a stable foundation for families to thrive, reducing stress and increasing the likelihood for good health and stable employment. Habitat for Humanity builds and repairs homes with individual families, but it also strengthens entire communities as well. The MicroBuild® Initiative, for example, strengthens communities by increasing access to loans for low-income families seeking to build or repair their homes. Habitat ReStore locations provide affordable appliances and building materials to local communities, in addition to creating job and volunteer opportunities that support neighborhood growth.
Everyone can play a part in the fight for housing equity and the pursuit of a better world. Over the past 50 years, Habitat for Humanity has become a leader in global housing thanks to an engaged network of volunteers—but you don’t need to be skilled with a hammer to make a meaningful impact. Building an equitable future means calling on a wide range of people and talents.Here’s how you can get involved in the global housing movement:
Speaking up on social media about the growing housing crisis
Volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity build in your local community
Travel and build with Habitat in the U.S. or in one of 60 countries where we work around the globe
Join the Let’s Open the Door movement and, when you donate, you can create your own personalized door
Shop or donate at your local Habitat ReStore
Every action, big and small, drives a global movement toward a better future. A safe home unlocks opportunity for families and communities alike, but it’s volunteers and other supporters, working together with a shared vision, who can open the door for everyone.
Visit habitat.org/open-door to learn more and get involved today.
People have been struggling with imposter syndrome, or the deep fear that others will discover you’re a fraud, forever. The fear says that despite all the evidence to the contrary, you are a failure and are faking competence at all times.
Though the term wasn’t coined until the 1970s, even one of the greatest American novelists of all time suffered from severe self-doubt: F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It took Fitzgerald nine years after the release of The Great Gatsby to publish another book, and even still, he wasn’t confident in it. So, he wrote to a friend for advice: None other than Ernest Hemingway.
If you’re looking for advice on how to defeat self-doubt and imposter syndrome, look no further than the words of wisdom written between two of the greatest literary minds of the 20th century.
Hemingway gives Fitzgerald some much-needed tough love
The Great Gatsby, today, is considered one of the great American novels. However, when it was published in 1925, the reception was lukewarm.
“Fitzgerald’s Latest A Dud,” one newspaper headline read.
Partially as a result, he fitzed and fussed over his next novel for years. He also struggled with mental health, his marriage, and alcoholism during that time. Finally, though, he followed up Gatsby with Tender Is the Night in 1934.
By all accounts, Fitzgerald was not happy with the book, even though he had wanted it to become the best American novel of all time—an awful lot of pressure for anyone to put on themselves. He worried he’d never write anything as good as Gatsby again. He asked Hemingway for his opinion, which Hemingway gladly delivered in a way that only he could:
“I liked it and I didn’t,” Hemingway writes, bluntly. He goes on for paragraphs about all the ways the book is lacking before softening. “It’s a lot better than I say. But it’s not as good as you can do.”
Hemingway’s advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald on how to ignore the critics, including himself
Though Hemingway chastised Fitzgerald for taking too many liberties with the story, “cheating,” and stuffing the novel with “good stuff… that it didn’t need,” he ultimately writes to console his friend.
Or, as some would say, his “frenemy.”
“For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live.”
It’s brilliant advice. One way of conquering imposter syndrome is positive thinking and affirmations: “I do belong.”
Another is to realize that everyone else around you is just making it up as they go, too. And that’s the point Hemingway is getting at. Even he, who had written The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms by this point, admits that most of what he writes is trash.
A wonderful, if harsh, pep talk. But Hemingway isn’t finished:
“Scott, good writers always come back. Always. You are twice as good now as you were at the time you think you were so marvellous. You know I never thought so much of Gatsby at the time. You can write twice as well now as you ever could. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is. … Go on and write.”
Modern psychologists’ advice has plenty of overlap with Hemingway
In parts of his letter, Hemingway urged Fitzgerald to stop feeling bad for himself and to channel his pain into his best work.
“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it.”
One evidence-based strategy for overcoming imposter syndrome is coming up with what psychologists call a “post-mistake compassion plan.” It’s a strategy for moving forward with confidence after screwing up. That’s what Hemingway was trying to help Fitzgerald do; recognize that Tender Is the Night was perhaps not his best work, but that he was more than talented enough to get off the mat and come back stronger.
No one is perfect, and falling down doesn’t mean you don’t belong.
In the end, it’s hard to say if things did get better for Fitzgerald. LitHub writes, “he ended his too-short life doing Hollywood hack work to make ends meet before dying, largely forgotten, his final novel left unfinished. His life has long been viewed as a classic tragedy—glamorous rise, brutal fall.”
But the result was not for a lack of his friends, like Hemingway, trying to help.
“[I] was always trying to get him to work and tell the truth at least to himself,” Hemingway wrote. “Well, the hell with all of it.”
We should all be so lucky as to have someone in our lives who will, harshly if need be, insist on reminding us of our own talent and worth.
When Candace Eng and Diana Prince met in college 50........
