Susan Sarandon Turns 80, and Her Oscar Film Is the Wrong Place to Start
On Sunday, October 4, Susan Sarandon turns 80. Born Susan Abigail Tomalin in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1946, she has spent five decades choosing parts that other actors would have talked themselves out of: a sheltered fiancee in a cult musical, a scientist seduced by a vampire, a baseball groupie with a reading list, an outlaw on a road trip, and a nun sitting across from a killer on death row.
She has one Oscar, for Dead Man Walking, and five nominations in total. That film is where most retrospectives tell you to begin. We think that is the wrong door. Start with the one she once called the most fun.
The door we recommend: Bull Durham
In Bull Durham (1988), Ron Shelton's minor-league comedy, Sarandon plays Annie Savoy, a baseball groupie and spiritual seeker who romances and educates the players. Over one season she is caught between Kevin Costner as the veteran catcher Crash Davis and Tim Robbins as the rookie pitcher Nuke LaLoosh. Sports Illustrated ranked it the greatest sports film of all time, and it earned her a Golden Globe nomination. She met Robbins on the set, and the two lived together from 1988.
It is the best starting point because it shows everything she does in one role: brains, appetite, comic timing, and a warmth that never asks for your approval. Every later performance is some variation of that woman. Asked on Twitter years later, she put it plainly: "Most fun was 'Bull Durham,' but cause I found the book of 'Dead Man Walking' and produced [it], that was dear to my heart."
The run that made her
From there, go to Thelma & Louise (1991). Ridley Scott directed from Callie Khouri's Oscar-winning script, and Sarandon and Geena Davis were both nominated for Best Actress. Roger Ebert wrote that the two found in Khouri's script "the materials for two plausible, convincing, lovable characters." Sarandon's Louise is the tough, protective one, and the ending at the Grand Canyon is still one of the most argued-about in American film. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2016.
That nomination opened a remarkable stretch: Lorenzo's Oil (1992), The Client (1994), and then the win for Dead Man Walking (1995). That is four Best Actress nominations in five years. In the last one, directed by Robbins, she plays Sister Helen Prejean opposite Sean Penn as the death-row inmate Matthew Poncelet, adapted from Prejean's 1993 book. Robbins told The Calgary Sun at the time that her acting was "far too subtle" and the couple "far too political" for her to get her due. He was wrong about the Oscar and right about the subtlety. It is a quiet, listening performance, and it lands harder once you have seen how loud she can be elsewhere.
The strange years before the fame
Her first nomination came earlier, for Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1980), where she plays Sally, a waitress who dreams of dealing blackjack in Monte Carlo, opposite Burt Lancaster as an aging small-time gangster. It won the Golden Lion at Venice. In Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983) she plays a gerontology researcher drawn in by Catherine Deneuve's vampire, with David Bowie as the lover who is ageing fast. In The Witches of Eastwick (1987) she shares the screen with Jack Nicholson, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer.
And then there is the one that never left theaters. The Rocky Horror Picture Show opened in the US on September 26, 1975, with Sarandon as Janet Weiss and Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter in his film debut. Midnight crowds started talking back to the screen at New York's Waverly Theater in 1976, and it is still in limited release, the longest-running theatrical release in film history. October is its season, so see it with a shadow cast and a room that knows the callbacks.
Still working
She never stopped. The list runs through Little Women (1994), Stepmom (1998), Enchanted (2007) and The Meddler, and in Feud (2017) she played Bette Davis for FX and earned her ninth Golden Globe nomination. Last year she turned up alongside Vince Vaughn in Nonnas.
