Oscar-winning actress Sally Field has opened up about resisting a specific type of role throughout her storied career in Hollywood.

She’s played a flying nun, a revolutionary pro-union textile worker, and a divorcée who discovered that her ex-husband cosplayed as the family’s elderly British nanny, but there’s one type of role the Mrs. Doubtfire and Norma Rae star has claimed she won’t play.

“I never take to stories about women that are trying to find a man,” the 79-year-old two-time Academy Award winner said in a new interview with PEOPLE.

Field told the publication, “I didn’t like it then, and it doesn’t appeal to me now, because I think women are about so much more.”

The star said that “life is so much more complicated than that,” and she’s opted to take alternate parts throughout her later career — including in Netflix’s new Remarkably Bright Creatures, in which she plays an aquarium worker who bonds with a younger employee and an octopus in their care.

While Field maintained that she won’t take roles in which the central woman is “trying to find a man,” she did star in 2015’s Hello, My Name Is Doris, which followed her as the titular office worker who becomes infatuated with her younger coworker and attempts to pursue him.

Earlier in her career, including in the aforementioned 1979 drama Norma Rae, Field said she channeled a specific kind of emotion into roles that she felt were significant not only to popular culture, but to herself as a person.

“Being a little girl raised in the ’50s and having a very complicated childhood with my stepfather and even my mother at times, I was filled with rage. Really filled with rage,” she told PEOPLE. “And it was working with [acting coach] Lee Strasburg that allowed me to begin to tap into it, to not let it devour me.”

While filming Norma Rae, for which she won her first Oscar in 1980, Field added, “I asked [director] Marty Ritt, ‘How angry can I be here?’ He said, ‘How angry are you?’ And I said, ‘Angry.’ And so that was the first time I was ever really able to learn how to tap into my own rage on film.”