In the late 1970s, while Universal was turning her 1976 autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter into a film, Loretta Lynn sat down on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and announced who would play her: Sissy Spacek. It was news to Sissy Spacek. She had not said yes, and she had never met Loretta Lynn.
What happened next turned into one of the longest friendships between a country singer and the actress who played her.
A face in a stack of photos
The studio had sent Loretta a pile of photographs of young actresses and asked whom she would choose. She went for the freckled face. Spacek was about 30 and already an Oscar nominee for Carrie, but Loretta had not seen her work. When Spacek later asked why she had been picked, Loretta told her she just had a feeling.
From then on, Loretta told anyone who would listen. She was a regular guest on Carson and on Merv Griffin, and she kept repeating the same line on the air: Sissy Spacek is going to play me.
Spacek wrote in her 2012 memoir, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life, that she was slightly dumbfounded by it all.
I’d never even met Loretta.
The actress who wanted to say no
Spacek had real reasons to turn the part down. She had committed to a film with director Nicolas Roeg that was due to start at the same time. She was trying to move away from her country-girl image, and she feared a studio would make Loretta’s story clichéd and corny. Playing a living, famous woman frightened her as well.
She even asked to do her own singing, partly in the hope that the studio would decide to look elsewhere. It did not work.
A red dress at the back door
Spacek decided to tell Loretta in person. She went to one of Loretta’s shows in New Orleans, but traffic held her up and she arrived after the concert was over.
Then the back door opened. Loretta came out in a flaming red dress, furious that the drums had been too loud, and let her band hear about it. Spacek was dumbstruck. She had come to say no. She left with a different answer.
I have to play this woman!
In her memoir, Spacek adds one more piece. Torn between the two films, she took her mother-in-law’s advice and prayed for a sign. Soon after, in the car, she heard Loretta singing “Coal Miner’s Daughter” on the radio. Retellings over the years differ a little on the order of these events and on the city of that backstage scene, but Spacek has always described the decision the same way: once she saw the real Loretta, she could not let anyone else play her.
Lampshades in a Nashville hotel
Producers had considered dubbing Loretta’s own voice over Spacek’s performance. Loretta would not hear of it. The actress who played her was going to sing the songs.
So the two women spent about a week together in a Nashville hotel. They pinned sheet music to the lampshades with safety pins and walked from one lamp to the next with their guitars, singing. Loretta taught her the Appalachian accent, the way she phrased a line and the way she played guitar.
Owen Bradley, Loretta’s longtime producer, worked with Spacek in the studio and lowered the key of some songs, since her voice did not reach as high as Loretta’s. When Spacek worried that she had no vibrato, Bradley told her Loretta did not have one either. On long notes, he explained, Loretta simply shook her hand.
Spacek later said the hardest part came after filming, when she had to stop being Loretta.
Opening night and an Oscar
Coal Miner’s Daughter held its gala premiere at the Belle Meade Theatre in Nashville on March 4, 1980, and opened across the country three days later. It opened at number one, earned about $67 million in the United States and Canada, and received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
Spacek won Best Actress. In her acceptance speech she thanked Loretta and said she had started the film with a group of strangers and finished it with a group of friends. The soundtrack, with Spacek singing Loretta’s hits, went gold and became the first soundtrack to win the CMA Award for Album of the Year.
Closer than sisters
Spacek settled in Albemarle County, Virginia, in 1980, and the friendship outlasted the film by decades. On July 30, 2005, Loretta opened the new Charlottesville Pavilion in front of about 3,500 people and coaxed her old friend out of the crowd. Spacek, a little bashful, joined in, and the two traded stories from the making of the movie before singing “Coal Miner’s Daughter” together.
Her and I are closer than sisters.
On October 17, 2018, CMT gave Loretta its Artist of a Lifetime award at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville. Loretta, then 86, was ill and pulled out hours before the live broadcast. Spacek walked up to accept it for her and cried as she spoke. She said there was only one Loretta Lynn, and that from the moment they met, Loretta had been her cheerleader, her sister and her best friend.
Loretta Lynn died at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, on October 4, 2022, at the age of 90. That day Sissy Spacek called her a great artist, a resilient country music pioneer and a precious friend, and said she was heartbroken.