Sheer Sarandon
She’s in her early sixties, looks 20 years younger, and is playing a grandmother for the first time in her new film. Strong, sexy, outspoken – and a ping pong devotee – is there a less conventional Oscar-winning actress in Hollywood? Gabrielle Donnelly doubts it
She strides into the Beverly Hills hotel room on a dreary winter afternoon, surprisingly small in frame, but radiating vitality in black jeans and a black leather biker jacket, her hair a luxuriant mess of unruly copper curls, her huge brown eyes alive with intelligence. She drops into a chair, shrugs off the jacket to reveal a simple grey top over a toned body, and gratefully accepts a cup of coffee.
“I’m losing my voice,” she murmurs when we meet to talk about her new film, The Lovely Bones. “And my mind, too,” she adds wryly. It quickly becomes apparent that Susan Sarandon is losing neither.
At 63, Sarandon (pronounced to rhyme with “abandon”) is the sort of woman who makes you feel rather proud to be older. She has been doing what we do best – breaking the rules – for around 50 years now, and is still going strong. A middle-class Catholic girl from suburban New Jersey, she started out in films playing a teenaged junkie in the 1970 family drama Joe, quickly became famous in The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975, pioneered, along with Geena Davis, the female buddy movie in Thelma and Louise in 1991 and became only the second actress ever to win an Oscar for playing a nun, in Dead Man Walking in 1995.
She has been married, divorced, and led a riotously colourful romantic life, including affairs with Louis Malle, Franco Amurri and Sean Penn. Until their recent separation she enjoyed a 22-year relationship with the actor/director Tim Robbins.
She is now politically and socially active, including being an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq and a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Her activism is a large part of the strong woman she so clearly is. “I come from a generation where, growing up, if you had half a brain and half a heart, you were automatically active. I see how my life and the lives of my kids are connected to the outside world. How can you not participate in the world you live in?” she has said.
Somehow she has found time to have three children (the first at 39) and has recently become just a little obsessed with ping pong – of which more later.
Meanwhile, there is The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of the novel by Alice Sebold about a family torn apart by the horrific murder of a child, in which she plays Grandma Lynn, a whisky-swilling, chain-smoking grandmother. The first time, surely, that Susan has portrayed a grandmother?
“It seems so,” she agrees. “I wasn’t aware of it myself, but so many people have told me so that I suppose it must be true. It seems to be much more disturbing to other people than it is to me that I’m playing a grandmother. To me, she was just a fun character to play. She was a sort of comic relief to the plot, and she had a lot of props, which are always great fun. Obviously it wasn’t real liquor, but it was fun to pretend!”
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