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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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."
Her parents were Catholics, her mother of Italian/Sicilian extraction, her father a Celt. "Irish, Welsh and English." So it was a combustible mix. "I think Gena Rowlands has the same mix." Philip Tomalin, her father, known as Tommy, was a big band singer before the war and head of troop entertainment in Italy during the war. "He introduced Burt Lancaster to his wife. And I have photos of him with Marlene Dietrich." An expansive vaudevillian character, he used to sing a lot at home: "I was always told to be quiet because I had a terrible voice. That gave me a phobia right up until The Rocky Horror Show." He later became a vice-president of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. Years after, when she was involved in an actors' strike to do with commercials contracts, she heard someone at Ogilvy & Mather say: "If that Tomalin guy was still here, we wouldn't be in this jam. He'd been an entertainer and an ad man. He knew it from both sides." So that was her father -- a born negotiator.
Her mother Lenora's side of the family was sadder and wilder. At first, Sarandon says she'd prefer not to talk about her, but then she explains why. Her mother was brought up in an institution run by nuns, a charity case, abandoned when she was two. Her mother's mother had her when she was 13. "For years we were told how bad Grandma was, how she deserted her kids. What no one ever mentioned, until much later, was that the father was in his 20s."
Sarandon tried to track down this grandmother, who was called Anita Regali. "She ran a jazz club and was mafia connected. I've seen a picture of her in the newspapers wearing a turban. That's all I know." That, and the fact that when she would try to visit her daughter in the institution, the nuns turned her away. Strange how the past regurgitates. Think of Thelma and Louise and Louise's cold fury that seems to come from nowhere in that rape scene in the parking lot. And of Dead Man Walking, where Sarandon plays a nun -- she threw away every image of every nun she had ever met, or been taught by. "I'd never met one who wasn't a miserable woman. Not one who was life affirmative."
Sarandon's parents separated in 1982, after nearly 40 years of marriage. "Dad retired," she says. "He wanted to go and live in this real cool house I have in Maine. She refused to go and that was it." So that was her mother -- a woman who wouldn't be negotiated into something that didn't suit.
Before I met her, I made a list of some of the attributes that make Sarandon, as an actor, so unusual. In no particular order: she doesn't censor her thoughts and the camera captures the movement of the mind in the movement of her face. So, though she may not be a great beauty, she is genuinely and erotically photogenic. She has made eight really first-rate films: Atlantic City; Bull Durham; White Palace; Thelma and Louise; Lorenzo's Oil; Little Women; Dead Man Walking; Romance and Cigarettes. And the best of her films show life as it is -- her life, and, more or less, everyone's life. "The women I portray and the woman I am are ordinary," she has said. And it is for these characters that she reserves a particular human empathy. She's not a great exponent of what she calls "the black and white." "You know, you listen to a young woman in her 20s, I hear my own daughter, who is 21, and she's very clear about her own standards, about what she'll accept and what not. And that's right at her age. But as you get older you change. You accept human weakness. You start to understand what you'll forgive in yourself, and in others, and what not. And that not every mistake means that you have to burn the house down."
There's nothing aggressively assertive about her either. She can bother you all right, but she bothers you quietly. Viz that scene in Dead Man Walking where she's Sister Helen, paying her first visit to a man on death row. The holier-than-thou priest who greets her mistakes her sincerity for his own brand of sanctimony. He thinks she's a do-gooder. She corrects him matter-of-factly. "He wrote to me and asked me to come." Quiet moral conviction is what you get from Sarandon in this film. And, if Yeats is right, that the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best lack all conviction, then, somewhere between best and worst, is where Sarandon would probably pitch herself.
She is also funny, charming, light on her feet, sharp in attack, has a brilliant sense of timing and a resistance to the herd instinct. What she does best is to play the parts of people who have no part to play -- life's losers. But be careful before you pity them because these losers are armour-plated and way past wanting pity.
Nowhere does she do this better than in White Palace (1990) with the incomparable James Spader, she a hamburger waitress, he wealthy and woebegone, both of them meandering through their respective godforsaken universes -- bits of it are as funny as Godot. And the excruciating pick-up scene, or anti-pick-up scene, in which Sarandon's Nora manages to make Blanche DuBois look subtle, is a gem of noisy desperation. Sarandon loves the film, even though "the music is horrendous and they changed the ending." It has a special place in her heart, she says, "because James Spader is such a wonderful, weird and funny guy".
I ask what she thinks is her enduring appeal. She doesn't have to think for long. "To certain people, there's an attractiveness in a woman who says, `I have a secret and I've figured it out ...' as opposed to a 20-year-old who doesn't have a clue. At least I didn't when I was 20 ... So, I guess, for those people ... someone like me appeals." She was 17, studying at the Catholic University in Washington, when she met her husband, Chris Sarandon, six years older, an actor and a drama graduate student. She married him four years later. "I married Chris, who was the first guy I slept with, because he seemed to know everything, he took me to black-and-white films." But she makes it sound as though she never expected it to last. "We'd renegotiate every year, decide whether we still wanted to be together or not."
It was Sarandon who took her to a film for which he was also auditioning, Joe. She got the part, he didn't. Which can't have helped. It wasn't that, she says. "You need one person at 17, and then you make a transition, and I had never been with anyone else." They were together for seven years before she left him in 1970, incidentally the same year in which she made that first film.
It was seven years later, 1977, that she met Louis Malle in New Orleans, auditioning to play a prostitute in his film Pretty Baby.
She was 32, he was 45, the master director making his US debut, and she was still shy, insecure, convinced when he cast her "he had confused me with someone else." They became lovers on the set and she lived with him for three years, mostly in the south of France, helping to bring up his two young children.
Malle was very smart, very charismatic, very different, she says.
It was now 1980, she wanted to do a play in New York, he wanted her to go to Europe with him to edit Atlantic City. "I stayed to do the play, and that was the end of that. Then he married Candice (Bergen), pretty quickly thereafter, actually." The humor is all in the timing of that carefully poised "actually." Did she suspect they were having an affair? "I never asked. Knowing Louis ... he was French, right. But I'm not that interested in chronology."
There followed, for the next few years, a spell of wandering in the US and in Europe. She was still acting, "but not getting great parts."
And then a "miracle" happened. In Rome, where she was playing Mussolini's daughter, she ran into Franco Amurri. She'd known him as a PA on a previous film. "And I remembered him. He's Italian and quite remarkable looking, beautiful." Tall? "Not that tall. Six foot two [1.88m]. Tim's six foot five [1.95m]. They're the same age, a few months apart." In a matter of weeks she found out she was pregnant. "I didn't know him that well. We hadn't been together long. He hadn't even moved out of his parents' house." She describes it as the answer to all her prayers. "One day, I was feeling overqualified for everything I was doing. And now here was something I couldn't possibly be overqualified for."
She told him she was going to keep the baby. "I said if you want to be part of it, that's fine. If not, that's fine, too." Their daughter Eva was born in 1985. "I'd live some time in Rome. Or he'd come here. He was in our life and not in our life." But it was hard work: "And I felt like I was doing too much work to keep that relationship going."
So when, in 1988, she was sent the script of a baseball film called Bull Durham, with a big part for an Emily Dickinson-reading, proto-feminist, baseball groupie -- "I think it's the best written script I've ever read" -- she decided to go for it. She didn't think she stood a chance. She hadn't been working much and, though there had been The Witches of Eastwick the previous year, with Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer, that was really a Jack Nicholson solo flight. Bull Durham writer/director Ron Shelton didn't even want to see her. "They had an A list, Meryl Streep and whoever, which I wasn't on." But Streep and whoever wouldn't audition. And Kevin Costner, who was the star, was insistent that the sexual chemistry and tension between the three main leads in the film was so important to its success that both the two other parts had to audition. One of the actors put forward for the second male lead was the young, relatively unknown Tim Robbins. "They didn't want Tim either. It was Kevin who fought for both Tim and me. Neither of us would have got it if Kevin had been less secure, less generous." Sarandon paid to fly herself from Rome to Los Angeles. Put aside the humiliation of having to read for the part "with no great difficulty." Costner got his chemistry.
She didn't get together with Robbins on the set -- she had learned that lesson from Malle. Playing the groupie to the new boy on the block was a good part, for a film, but more than this, she says, it was a turning point for her: "Yes, I fell in love with Tim. But I came out of that film no longer wanting to settle for such a compartmentalized life -- guy here, career there." It was just over a year later that her first son with Robbins was born. They have been together 18 years.
Relationships are impossible, she says. "Throw children into the mix and they're really impossible." Add to that the logistics of a life that doesn't unfold regularly, "so you don't know when your vacations are." And the nature of a job that means, "sometimes you're both doing a 14-hour day." Or not working. "And nobody feels completely secure all the time." She thinks of them as "survivors."
Romance and Cigarettes is a story of human frailty -- a marital betrayal where the wife discovers that her husband of many years has been having an affair when she finds a poem that he has written to his young lover. Later, when he is fatally ill with lung cancer, she takes him back home to nurse him. "It's about the grace of forgiveness," Sarandon says. "Forgiveness is the name we give to love."
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