PASSINGS: Margaret Field O’Mahoney

Margaret Field O’Mahoney, 89, an actress who gave up her career in movies and television to raise her children, including daughter Sally Field, died Sunday at her home in Malibu after a six-year struggle with cancer, publicist Heidi Schaeffer said.

Using her professional name, Margaret Field, she had small roles in a string of movies from the late 1940s through the ‘50s, and she starred in the 1941 science fiction thriller “The Man From Planet X.” She appeared in dozens of TV series in the ‘50s and ‘60s, including “The Gene Autry Show,” “Bonanza,” “Perry Mason,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Yancy Derringer,” which starred her then-husband, actor/stuntman Jock Mahoney.

She was born May 10, 1922, in Houston, moved to Pasadena during World War II and signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. She and her first husband, Richard Dryden Field, had two children, Richard and Sally. After their 1950 divorce, she married Mahoney, and they had another daughter, Princess.

Margaret eventually retired from acting to become a full-time mother. In her later years she had lived with her daughter Sally, a two-time Academy Award winner for “Norma Rae” and “Places in the Heart.”

-- Los Angeles Times staff reports

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