Redefining Susan
Sexy, single and 64, Susan Sarandon still remains among the most sought-after stars. She talks Frankly about love, loss, politics and ping-pong
WORDS | ELAINELI PWORTH
PORTRAIT | FABRIZIO FERRI
AS FAMOUS FOR HER POLITICAL ACTIVISM as for her dazzling performances, Susan Sarandon is always outspoken, but today she’s at a loss for words. She is frustrated at her recovery time from a foot operation. “I didn’t realise it would be this incapacitating,” she sighs when we meet for coffee near her Manhattan home. ”I’ve been off the crutches for five days but I’ve had to turn down work to get this sorted.”
Leaning across the table on a swelteringly hot day, Sarandon, 64, is dressed simply in brick-red Indian trousers and a loose, low-necked top. “It’s impossible to look glamorous in 110 degrees,” she jokes on her arrival. But, of course, she does. Voluminous auburn pre-Raphaelite curls frame those luminous amber eyes. She attributes her healthy glow to not smoking and steering clear of the stresses of life in LA.
“When I’m in LA, I feel like if I go to the supermarket in my sweats and without make-up, which is usually the way I look, I’ll be losing work. In New York, you don’t have that expectation. I realise I’m not young, but nor do I feel old. It helps to live in a city that’s about more than just the film industry. I think looking good and being sexy is a state of mind.”
Over the years, I have met Sarandon a dozen times to discuss various films: her Oscar-nominated roles in Thelma & Louise and true-life drama Lorenzo’s Oil, her powerful performance as Sister Helen Prejean in the riveting Dead Man Walking, which won her an Oscar, fantasy fairytale Enchanted, and the chilling drama The Lovely Bones. She has invariably been an inspiration; a natural optimist, intelligent and perceptive.
The past 12 months, however, would have tested even the sunniest nature. She recently split from fellow actor/filmmaker Tim Robbins, 12 years her junior, and with whom she has two grown-up sons, Jack, 21, and Miles, 18. (She also has a daughter, actress Eva Amurri, from a previous relationship). The end of the 23-year relationship has left Sarandon facing her sixties alone, yet she is undaunted.
“There hasn’t been room to even think about dating,” she says. “I’m open to anything, but I think a lot of it has to do with timing. What I’ve learned is that it’s important to live in the present. There’s a tendency as you get older to just put on the brakes and preserve what you have – whether it’s your face or your income. You have find a way to be in the moment: not held back by the hurts and mistakes of the past, nor living for the future. You have to be willing to take chances and embrace the fact that all your relationships – whether with a partner, your children, yourself or your business – are living, breathing organisms. You have to nurture them and remember that they are constantly changing and evolving.
“My boys have been home and we’ve been talking about this a lot over the summer. How to unclutch from both the past and the future. It’s scary and at the same time it’s fabulous.” Are you good at taking risks and being fearless? “No, but maybe I’m better at feeling uncomfortable than some people.”
Sarandon’s new business venture – a trendy New York ping-pong club – appears to be a manifestation of this new joie de vivre. “It began last year when I was making a documentary and the film editor used to organise ping-pong parties. During that time, I became a ping-pong propagandist. I grew to love the sport, so we opened Spin.”
Alongside plotting global domination for ping-pong, Sarandon is also busy promoting the movie sequel Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. Michael Douglas reprises his role as the now-infamous trader Gordon Gekko, fresh from a prison stretch. He and Sarandon are joined by Shia LaBeouf (who plays Gekko’s protégé and Sarandon’s son), Carey Mulligan (Gekko’s estranged daughter), and Josh Brolin. The original film’s mantra of ‘greed is good’ hasn’t just survived. It has thrived.
“My character is the American dream, trying to spin straw into gold as quickly as she can. She’s a thrill-seeker, like her son and all those guys on the stock market. She leaves her job as a nurse and gets fascinated by ‘flipping’ houses (doing up and selling houses for a quick profit) and then is ruined by the crash.”
Making the film was great fun, says Sarandon. She and Douglas had coincidentally just filmed a small art house movie, A Solitary Man, together, due out later this year. “I really like Michael. You get to a certain point in this business when you’ve been in it fortysome years that you bond with anyone who’s still standing. Michael is ironic, charming and a good actor, and that’s becoming more evident the older he gets. Anyone who can survive in this industry and not be a raving alcoholic or twisted and bitter – they’re amazing!”
The moral message of the film chimed loudly with Sarandon’s own political views. (She’s a die-hard liberal and a supporter of President Obama). “It’s so frustrating. We’ve reached the point in government and business where there’s no transparency, no long-term vision and no-one ever seems to be held accountable. Take the example of BP and the Gulf oil spill. We’ll be living with this colossal mistake for our entire lives. It’s the same in business. People are just ploughing forward with no sense of responsibility towards other people.
“God, I wish I could change the world,” she says in a heartfelt way. “It’s a question of not being able to live with yourself if you don’t try to make this world a better place.” That’s a philosophy the actress has pursued with a vengeance – whether campaigning against the war in Iraq (which led to death threats against her family last year), protesting against the death penalty, or speaking out against social injustice.
“I use my celebrity, I don’t feel it uses me,” she says, recalling the 1993 Oscars ceremony, when she got up on stage to protest against the internment of a group of Haitians by the US government. There couldn’t have been many in the TV audience who’d even heard of Guantanamo Bay before her impassioned outburst. The refugees were released the next day. “Doing that was terrifying,” she confesses. “But I had to and the next day the matter was settled, though you can’t imagine the abusive letters I received.”
She pauses for a heartbeat, reflecting on the current injustices of the world. “At the rate we’re going I think some massive changes are going to happen. But maybe that’s part of what will lead to a change of consciousness. When people don’t have money to spend or oil for their cars, maybe we’ll invent something else and our value system will change. People are beginning to search for more spiritual things. I’m hoping my children take responsibility for themselves, the earth and the future.”
The kind of greed featured in Wall Street 2 – based on research into real-life investment bankers who think nothing of spending £100,000 on the latest watch – is an anathema to Sarandon. “I really don’t have a relationship with money. I didn’t have money for a long time. I remember it was a big deal to save for an album, to eat avocados and asparagus. I was always taking the train instead of cabs. I found clothes in second-hand shops. I lived on unemployment occasionally and did commercials when I wasn’t working to pay my rent. But I never felt poor or longed for anything because I didn’t have that connection to money. Then when I started having money, it didn’t seem any more real to me than not having it, so I’ve never had a flashy lifestyle of owning expensive cars.”
So what does she spend her money on? “Having children, putting them in private schools, travelling. Paying for privacy is expensive. Our lifestyle is such that you can’t plan well ahead for a vacation. The luxury of leading a haphazard life takes money. My daughter is good with figuring out how to save money and do what she needs without spending a fortune. I’m happy that I have money. It’s a cushion in case I don’t want to work. If I felt I was incredibly wealthy, I’d definitely have a cook and a driver, that would be my indulgence,” she laughs.
In the meantime, Sarandon gives a lot of her money away. “I have a charitable foundation. But it is most gratifying to give money to those charities who need it. If you can give 15 or 20 thousand dollars to small worthwhile charities, it can literally keep an organisation afloat. For instance, I know someone at Hope North, [which helps Ugandan children who have been abducted and forced to serve as soldiers in the country’s civil war]. They’ll send me a note saying we need $5,000 in two weeks. I can help. Another group I like is the Somaly Mam Foundation [dedicated to fighting the sex-trafficking industry]. They are a group I became involved with very early on.”
Raised in New Jersey, the oldest of seven children, she’s had a lifetime of looking after others. “From the age of six, I had a baby on my hip. When that happens to you early in life, it can be difficult later to handle romantic relationships. I mothered men for a long time. My daughter doesn’t do that. It took me until my thirties to learn what she already knew in her teens.”
Her father Philip Tomalin was an advertising executive who had been a big-band singer before the war and performed with the likes of Marlene Dietrich. Her mother Lenora is Italian-American and Sarandon says her grandmother, whom she recently traced for the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, once dated Frank Sinatra. Family life was “fun and chaotic”. Everything centred around Catholicism, but the doctrine never made sense to her. “I think being a girl at that time in the Catholic Church was mainly about ‘don’t make trouble and don’t ask questions’. There seemed to be so many loopholes.”
There were no dreams of stardom as a child. “I was pretty introverted, but when we acted out the mass, I always played the priest. Then at high school I tried out for plays, but I never thought of myself as an actor.”
In high school, she also became involved in radical politics and was arrested while participating in anti-Vietnam protests. At 17, she left home to study English and drama. Interestingly, given her growing radicalism, she chose the Catholic University in Washington, a decision she now regards as a mistake. “I had to live with my grandparents because I couldn’t afford to live on campus.”
On the positive side, she fell for a graduate drama student, Chris Sarandon, whose name she kept. “He was five years older and introduced me to black-and-white films and poetry, and it was huge for me. He was a dear man and I felt safe with him. He was the first person I slept with and I thought he knew everything. We got married when I was only 20, isn’t that crazy?” She throws her head back with a throaty laugh. “But I got out of my grandparents’ house that way. You weren’t allowed to live together on campus in the late 1960s.”
“He was acting and I was the wifey, but I also did some modelling,” she says, describing married life. She landed her first film job through sheer luck, when her husband’s agent sent her on an audition for a low-budget film called Joe. “They asked me to do improvisation and I didn’t even know what that was, but I got the part. I thought, ‘that was easy,’ and it ended up being a breakthrough movie.” A part in a soap opera followed and more film roles. “It was a riot, a lark.”
Ultimately the Sarandons divorced. “We split after seven years. It was amicable but still painful. The end of your first real love is a huge loss.” Around the same time, her career started taking off with The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Following that, she landed a role in French filmmaker Louis Malle’s 1978 movie, Pretty Baby, as Brooke Shield’s prostitute mother, started a torturous affair with the director and went to live in France. “I learnt a lot from him because he was older. I don’t regret any of the relationships I’ve had, even the ones that practically killed me.” Looking back, she says she never considered herself wild. “I guess I’ve broken a lot of rules but not consciously. I’ve just followed my heart.”
She discusses her lifestyle during the 60s and 70s and freely admits it involved drugs. “I did things that people did at the time – sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. But it was done more from a spirit of exploration than rebellion. We were interested in Eastern philosophy, and music like Bob Dylan. We were all vegetarian. Everyone lived together because nobody had a place to live. It was the attitude of ‘if it’s mine, it’s yours’.
“Then as Vietnam progressed, the movement started to get more violent. At that time it made sense as a young person to be idealistic. When the war stopped, we thought, ‘Well, that worked!’ My kids are jealous that they weren’t around in the 70s, even though that makes me very old.”
Not so much old as iconic, I suggest. She laughs that deep, throaty laugh. “I’m flattered and happy to know that I’m leading a band of women with healthy appetites who are still sensual and interested in life. But from the inside, I don’t feel it. Career-wise, I’ve had great women ahead of me who have been my role models.
I think what women do on a day-to-day basis is remarkable. I’m not leading, I’m just following the crowd – and saying ‘yes’ to life.”
