Sissy Spacek has opened up about trading Hollywood for a Virginia horse farm to shield her children from fame’s shadow.
The Oscar winner, 76, has spent the last four decades raising her family on a 210-acre spread outside Charlottesville, a deliberate retreat she mapped out shortly after marrying production designer Jack Fisk in 1974. The couple purchased the property just four years after their wedding, choosing dirt roads over red carpets long before either of their daughters was born.
“We moved there not because we didn’t love LA, but we wanted to raise our children in a more natural environment,” Spacek told Yahoo. The actress, who shot to global recognition as the telekinetic outcast Carrie White in Brian De Palma’s 1976 Stephen King adaptation, had already tasted the extremes of celebrity by then. She and Fisk had met three years earlier on Terrence Malick’s Badlands, where she starred and he handled production design. Spacek later recalled that her future husband was “the cutest one on set.”
The farm became the center of gravity for everything that followed. Schuyler Fisk arrived in 1982, born in California, and Madison Fisk followed in 1988, by which point the family was fully rooted in Virginia soil. Both daughters eventually drifted toward creative work, though along different paths. Schuyler built a career as an actor and singer-songwriter, appearing as Amanda Moore-Hillier in Hallmark’s The Chicken Sisters. Madison pursued visual arts and production design, echoing her father’s craft rather than her mother’s on-camera presence.
Spacek drew a hard line at exposing either child to the machinery of child stardom. She told Yahoo that she didn’t want her children to deal “with that celebrity child thing,” a calculation that shaped where they lived, how they grew up, and what normal looked like in their household.
“For 40 years, I’ve lived on a farm in Virginia and raised my children there,” Spacek told Closer Weekly in 2018. “That’s what I experienced as a child, that’s what gave me stability.”
“I’m able to get away from all the noise and work on my garden in my pajamas,” she added.
That stability has not meant retirement. Spacek continues to take selective roles, and her most recent big-screen appearance came in 2025’s Die, My Love, acting opposite Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as a character named Pam. The film marked another chapter in a career that has stretched across nearly five decades since her breakthrough.
Fisk has remained her constant collaborator in life if not always on set, though their professional paths did cross again on Carrie, where he served as production designer while she endured buckets of fake blood and cemented her place in horror history. The marriage has now lasted more than 50 years, weathering both the industry’s churn and the quieter pressures of maintaining a working farm.
The family still steps out for Hollywood’s biggest nights when the occasion demands. At the 2026 Oscars, Spacek and Fisk appeared alongside Schuyler in coordinated all-black ensembles, supporting Fisk’s nomination for Best Production Design on Marty Supreme, the Timothée Chalamet-led project that kept him in demand even as his primary residence remained rural Virginia.
Spacek’s transformation from the pale, trembling Carrie White to the grounded matriarch of a deliberate country existence represents one of the more radical geographic and psychic relocations in modern Hollywood memory. The role that made her “one of the most recognizable actresses of her generation,” as contemporaneous coverage put it, also helped fund the escape from exactly that kind of recognition.
The actress has not been entirely absent from the cultural conversation. Mike Flanagan’s new eight-episode Carrie series dropped on Prime Video on October 7, introducing Summer H. Howell as the latest interpreter of the King character while inevitably resurfacing questions about the original. Spacek has not publicly commented on the new adaptation, maintaining the same discretion that has characterized her post-Carrie decades.
Her daughter Schuyler’s presence at the recent Oscars suggests the next generation has found its own equilibrium with public life, albeit on different terms than those Spacek deliberately avoided. Whether Madison’s production design work eventually overlaps with her father’s nominated craft remains an open thread in a family whose creative output spans both coasts despite their permanent address.
Spacek’s next confirmed screen appearance has not been announced.