Who would have thought it? That in US President George W. Bush's America one of the most successful screen actors in Hollywood today would be a woman nearing 60: "I'll be 60 this fall." A woman of outspoken left-wing sympathies -- she used the occasion of presenting the Oscars in 1993 to draw attention to a group of Haitians interned in Cuba, more than a decade before most of the world had heard of a place called Guantanamo Bay.
Who has no problem admitting that she took drugs in her youth: "I came of age at a time that was not just rock'n'roll but when people questioned. And part of that questioning was taking mind-expanding drugs. I took mescaline, sure." Or that she has had an abortion. "I had an abortion in my 20s. My first (and only) marriage was falling apart. I had an affair with an insane guy and I knew having a kid with him wasn't the right thing ... " And who now chooses to live with her -- 12 years younger -- partner, actor/director Tim Robbins, and their two children, John Henry and Miles, rather than marry him: "I think one of the reasons I haven't married Tim is that I hate that couples assumption -- that once you're committed to someone you stop treating each other as individuals. I like getting up knowing I am choosing to be with that person."
Susan Sarandon speaks like this about everything -- candid, open, straight at it -- fixing you with those famous, screen-filling eyes.
She answers direct questions directly -- she even answers indirect questions directly. For years after she appeared bare-breasted for one long brothel scene in Louis Malle's 1978 Pretty Baby, critics would go on about her breasts -- Playboy voted them nipples of the decade or some such. She was always sublimely unfazed. "Actually, I think my breasts have been highly overrated," she told one inquirer.
When she arrives at the restaurant where we are meeting -- black jeans, sneakers, Agnes B leather jacket -- I think she looks grumpy.
But, as it turns out, she is only hungry. "Famished." After downing a cappuccino and a roasted calamari salad in five minutes flat, she is fine. "I've had my pre-sexual lead-up, my foreplay. And now I am ready to go."
One of her strengths as an actor, she says, is that she can look at a page of dialogue and tell in a flash if it's authentic or phoney. Her manner is brisk, saucy even. She doesn't give you showbiz platitudes about her fellow actors. I ask about James Gandolfini, who plays opposite her in her latest film, a madcap musical, Romance and Cigarettes, directed by her friend the actor John Turturro, a loose autobiography based on his matriarchal family. Gandolfini is the errant husband who falls for a much younger woman, the sumptuously vulgar Kate Winslet. James is great, she says. "He can get away with stuff, God knows, he's like an overgrown eight-year-old." Her two boys are 13 and 16. "Yeah ... And I'd like to go on the record here now and say that I hope they don't grow up to be like James. He's a bad boy. But you forgive him because he's so human." Human is a word she uses a lot.
Sarandon comes from a family of nine children; she is the eldest. Home, New Jersey, "where it all started," was a chaotic throng of humanity, all the kids packed into two rooms on bunk beds in one of those little houses on a lot, each of them in a row and all looking the same. "It was fun, it was crazy." It wasn't odd. Every family on the lot had at least seven children, some of them had 20. "My mum would have had more babies, but some of them died, some were miscarriages." Women were trotting kids out, she says, "like one of those Mimeograph machines."
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