Biography

Susan Sarandon

Jump to

Overview

Born
October 4, 1946 · New York City, New York, USA
Birth name
Susan Abigail Tomalin
Nickname
- Sue
Height
5′ 6¼″ (1.68 m)

Biography

It was after the 1968 Democratic convention and there was a casting call for a film with several roles for the kind of young people who had disrupted the convention. Two recent graduates of Catholic University in Washington DC, went to the audition in New York for Joe (1970). Chris Sarandon, who had studied to be an actor, was passed over. His wife Susan got a major role.

That role was as Susan Compton, the daughter of ad executive Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick). In the movie Dad Bill kills Susan's drug dealer boyfriend and next befriends Joe (Peter Boyle)-- a bigot who works on an assembly line and who collects guns.

Five years later, Sarandon made the film where fans of cult classics have come to know her as Janet, who gets entangled with transvestite Dr. Frank n Furter in The The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). More than 15 years after beginning her career Sarandon at last actively campaigned for a great role, Annie in Bull Durham (1988), flying at her own expense from Rome to Los Angeles. "It was such a wonderful script ... and did away with a lot of myths and challenged the American definition of success", she said. "When I got there, I spent some time with Kevin Costner, kissed some ass at the studio and got back on a plane". Her romance with the Bull Durham (1988)) supporting actor, Tim Robbins, had produced two sons by 1992 and put Sarandon in the position of leaving her domestic paradise only to accept roles that really challenged her. The result was four Academy Award nominations in the 1990s and best actress for Dead Man Walking (1995). Her first Academy Award nomination was for Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1980).
- IMDb mini biography by: Dale O'Connor

Family

Spouse
Children
Parents
Relatives

Trademarks

Her early roles were frequently as vulnerable, victimized young women, later roles are often as iron-willed, often sensuous women
Dry-wit humour

Trivia

Her grandmother had her uncle when she was 14 years old, her mom at 16, then disappeared without a trace. Her mother grew up in the care of nuns in an institute, abandoned at two.
She keeps her Academy Award in the bathroom.
Lived with Tim Robbins from 1988 to 2009.
Landed her first Hollywood role when her then-husband, Chris Sarandon, took her along on one of his auditions.
She has twice used Freedom of Information laws to access her FBI file, and claims it reveals her phone conversations are routinely monitored by the US government.

Quotes

I choose projects I can talk about for days because now you do publicity for as long as it took you to shoot the movie.
I feel I've always been on the outside and always on the edge of an abyss. The women I portray, and the woman I am, are ordinary but maybe find themselves in extra-ordinary circumstances, and what they do is at great cost.
Sexuality... is something that develops and becomes stronger and stronger the older you get... If you can continue to say yes to life and to maintain a certain generosity of spirit, you become more and more of who you are.
I think the only reason I remain an actor is that you can never quite get it right. So there is a challenge to it.
If I were 22 and trying to build a career, I don't know who'd be watching the kids as happily as I do. It takes so much to get me to break out of domestic paradise. There's hardly anything that interests me as much as my family.