Sally Field has insisted one of the most quoted speeches in Oscar history has been misunderstood for decades.

The two-time Oscar winner, 79, made the statement as she revisited the moment when she declared during her Academy Awards acceptance speech "You like me, you really like me".

Sally revisited the moment during an interview with People while promoting her new Netflix drama Remarkably Bright Creatures.

The actress won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1985 for her role as widowed Texas farmer Edna Spalding in Places in the Heart, five years after first taking home the prize for Norma Rae.

Her acceptance speech at that year's Oscars quickly entered Hollywood folklore and has since been parodied across television, film and pop culture, becoming one of the most enduring moments in the event's history.

But Sally, whose career has also included starring roles in Steel Magnolias, Mrs. Doubtfire, Forrest Gump and television classics including Gidget and Brothers and Sisters, has now said the line has repeatedly been quoted incorrectly ever since.

Reflecting on her first Academy Award win for Norma Rae, Sally told People: "The first time I won for Norma, it was so unexpected. I had come out of nowhere."

She added: "So I was so numb when I won. I don't remember walking up on the stage. I didn't feel any of it."

Sally explained by the time she returned to the Oscars stage in 1985, she wanted to fully absorb the experience after years of struggling for artistic recognition within Hollywood.

She said: "I had to have a moment of allowing myself to feel that I had done something, that I had conquered something that was so hard for me to do."

Sally added: "It doesn't mean that it wouldn't continue to need to be conquered on a daily basis for the work to keep on getting better, to keep understanding it on a different level."

During the original speech, Sally told the audience: "This means so much more to me this time. I don't know why. I think the first time I hardly felt it because it was all so new."

After thanking her family and colleagues, she delivered the line that would later become immortalised in entertainment culture.

Sally said at the ceremony: "But I want to say thank you to you. I haven't had an orthodox career, and I've wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can't deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!"

Clarifying the speech decades later, Sally told People: "I wanted to take this moment and see it and own it for myself, that for this one minute in time - maybe never again - you like me, you really like me. And that's what I said."

She added: "It became this whole (thing), but the reality is that I was talking to myself."

Sally also revealed she had avoided preparing remarks beforehand because she considered it "bad luck".

The actress is currently starring in Remarkably Bright Creatures, a Netflix adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt's bestselling novel.

In the film, Sally plays Tova, a widow who develops an unlikely connection with an octopus named Marcellus while working at an aquarium and helping a troubled young man played by Lewis Pullman.

Speaking about the novel, Sally said: "It's a lovely, lovely little book about healing, about family, and an homage to sea creatures."

She added: "I read about three chapters and said yes."