Susan Sarandon, sexy and intelligent, has emerged as one of Hollywood's foremost leading ladies like MERYL STREEP and GLENN CLOSE, contemporaries, she eschews matriarchal roles. One of the more outspoken liberals in Hollywood, she has endured some criticism from conservatives but, like JANE FONDA, has maintained her popularity with film audiences.
Born Susan Tomalin in 1946, she was raised in New Jersey by a strict Catholic family and was educated at Catholic schools. She attended Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in drama. She married Chris Sarandon, another drama student, in 1967, and the couple went to New York City after graduation. She did some modeling and got work in television and on the stage. Her first film role was in the critically acclaimed Joe (1970), but aside from The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the latter now a cult classic, her next few films were not memorable. The Other Side of Midnight (1977) was particularly bad.
Louis Malle gave her career a boost when he cast her as the mother of a young prostitute played by Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby (1978) and later as a clam bar waitress in Atlantic City (1981). In the latter film she washes her breasts with lemons in a memorable scene. Her performance was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Aside from her role in Paul Mazursky's The Tempest (1982), which won her a Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival, her next few films were undistinguished, such as The Hunger (1983), in which she and Catherine Deneuve costarred in a lesbian vampire film.
Appearing with CHER and Michelle Pfeiffer as the witches in The Witches of Eastwick (1986), she more than held her own, despite not getting the part she had been promised - it went to Cher. Her next big role was in Bull Durham (1988) as a sexy baseball fan who specializes in younger players, in this case TIM ROBBINS, with whom she became romantically involved off screen. Although her next three films did not do well at the box office, one of them, White Palace (1990), brought her critical praise. She played a hamburger waitress in love with a wealthy, educated lawyer.
Thelma and Louise (1991) was a critical and financial success, as well as being one of the most controversial American films of its time. In what was probably the first female buddy road film, she and Geena Davis play two women on the lam, defying the patriarchal establishment and attacking those things which men most worship, their sexuality and their vehicles. Tim Robbins featured her in his directorial debut, Bob Roberts (1992), a satire that spoofed a charismatic right-wing politician.
That same year Susan Sarandon made one of her most memorable and significant films, Lorenzo's Oil, playing a mother dedicated to finding a cure for her son's ALD (adrenoleukodystrophy), a film that earned her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress. Another Academy Award nomination was forthcoming for her role in the John Grisham adaptation The Client (1994), playing an attorney protecting an 11-year-old who knows too much about the Mafia. She also appeared that year in Gillian Armstrong's film adaptation of Little Women.
Perhaps Susan Sarandon's crowning achievement of the 1990s, however, was her portrayal of Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking (1995), a film that allowed the actress to work as a powerful advocate for abolishing the death penalty in America. This role resulted in an Academy Award for Susan Sarandon; her costar, SEAN PENN, was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar and her partner Tim Robbins was nominated for Best Director.
In 1998 Susan Sarandon starred with PAUL NEWMAN and GENE HACKMAN in the neo-noir thriller Twilight, directed by Robert Benton, who also wrote the screenplay with Richard Russo, which New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin considered "a class act in a classic genre," adding that "Sarandon doesn't have to fake glamour, she does it here with sinuous allure." The same year she starred in Stepmom and held her own against JULIA ROBERTS in this weepie.
An even greater variety of roles awaited Susan Sarandon. She costarred with Natalie Portman in the Wayne Wang family comedy Anywhere but Here (1999). When Tim Robbins wrote and directed Cradle Will Rock (1999), dramatizing the creation and performance of Marc Blitzstein's left-wing musical during the Great Depression, the all-star cast included Susan Sarandon. She was also featured in another quirky and eccentric film, Stanley Tucci's Joe Gould's Secret (2000), as the artist Alice Neel, who painted Gould, an eccentric denizen of Greenwich Village, with three penises, metaphorically suggesting Gould's creativity.
The film was more a critical success than a commercial one - it grossed less than $1 million - but, at that stage in her career, Susan Sarandon could well afford to take chances on commercially risky projects. Also in 2000 Susan Sarandon provided the voice of Coco La Bouche in the animated movie Rugrats in Paris, which earned more than $71 million at the box office.
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1. Don Ameche was one of the leading men of 20th Century Fox
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