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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