by
Paul Fischer
A still ravishing 56, Susan Sarandon
is nibbling on some smoked salmon in a Los 
Angeles
hotel room, almost ready to depart for the annual Teen Choice Awards ["I
made sure that at least the gift bag was good"]. It is hard to imagine
that Susan Sarandon neither set out to be an actress or to this day has
never trained as one, admitting that for years she never even decided
to act. "I went to an audition with my then husband who was trying
to get an agent. He needed someone to do a scene with him, which we did,
and they said 'why don't you act?' So when I came back in September
with him, he went off to do summer stock and I went off with him as the
dutiful little wife. They sent me into this movie that had been trying
to cast for a long time called Joe." That was in 1970. Sarandon
was amused that anyone would want to cast her. "Every part I went up for
I was cast in. It just kept happening," she recalls.
In 1972 she landed a soap opera "and I just started to learn what I was doing a little bit, get some craft down it just kept going like that. I don't know if it was because I really didn't care and I really wasn't particularly desperate, but I just kept getting things. The next thing I knew I had a career." It didn't begin as the strongest career because Sarandon remained very blasé about it all. It was an attitude with its own downside. "I really didn't have anybody working very seriously for me so I wasn't going up for The Godfather and things with really meaty parts with great directors. I was just kind of having time trying to figure out who I was." Concurrently her private life was in disarray, with "disastrous love affairs and marriages that were ending and things that were happening. I thought that was filling my time because I was trying to figure out how to deal with that." By the time her marriage ended in her late 20's, Susan had begun to see mixed success, from The Great Waldo Pepper and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, to the less interesting Other Side of Midnight. Sarandon broke through with1978's Pretty Baby, King of the Gypsies and the acclaimed acclaimed Atlantic City. Susan Sarandon was defining herself as an unafraid actor of tremendous diversity.
The actress learned to love the craft of acting, using all of her wild and varied experiences as part of the process. "That's what's so great about acting. You use everything as opposed to, say, an orthodontist who is stuck with his angst. With acting, the clearer you are about who you are and the more confident you become, the better actor you are. It's hardly a cure for cancer; I mean, acting is something that my kids can do and you can do it without training. Surviving, making right choices, bringing some dignity to your work, having a sense of humor, evolving as a person as you stay in this business [and you can] end up at 70 not bitter and alcoholic. That's the challenge! And there aren't that many people that have done that, having a life and a career."
On screen at present, Sarandon plays three distinctive mothers in three
very different films. There's the independent feature Igby Goes Down,
with Sarandon as a totally unsympathetic mother to Kieran Culkin's
rebellious Igby. The 
Banger
Sisters, a buddy-buddy romp with Goldie Hawn which
revisits the lives of two groupies twenty years on; capped by Moonlight
Mile in which she plays a grieving mother who uses humor to mask
a profound grief opposite Dustin Hoffman. Playing these
women gave Sarandon a unique opportunity to explore different aspects
of her own maternal instincts. "I think that what you find as an actor
is that, at the end of the day, you are capable of things you never thought
yourself capable of given a certain set of circumstances. The gift of
acting is just numerous incarnations. Forget about walking in somebody
else's moccasins. You're in their house. You're in their clothes. You're
in their head. You're in their lives. When you do that it can all be reduced
to what do people need? They want to be loved, they're afraid of dying,
they want to reach out." And of course they remain imperfect, as all three
of these women are. And the imperfections are really where an actor lives.
Not in their accomplishments -- and I think this is where some of the
heroic male movies go wrong, you know, you come in the door already a
hero where do you have to go? Where's the celebration of that? That's
a done deal. -- I'm interested in the imperfections and it gives me an
opportunity to celebrate humanity, to fall in love with these people,
to experience when they're but for the grace of God I would be." It keeps
her on track, she says, and "it makes me appreciate what I have and makes
me understand why I have to get back and makes me so grateful for my family
and for all that they are."
Susan admits that she has crashed and burned a few times in her life.
"The glory of that is when you start to crash again you know that it's
possible to come out the other end. When you've been holding on and holding
on and managing to squeak through and you've never actually crashed, you
can think that the end of the world is imminent. But when you have crashed
and burned a few times, financially, emotionally, spiritually, sanity-wise,
you know that this is just part of the trip. Even though you're desperate
and despondent and, you know, the world is exploding around you, you think:
I can get through this." She has gotten through it with a little
help from her family and Tim Robbins, who has been her
partner since meeting on 1988's Bull Durham. Asked about how
that relationship has survived while so many show business marriages fail,
Sarandon remains unusually reticent. "I'm certainly not going to talk
about that because we fight our way through in cycles constantly and I
don't know if it's a done deal," admits the actress. "But I did ask somebody
who had been in a relationship for 30 some years what the secret was and
they said something that was pretty interesting. That is, at some point
in your life you have to decide if you ever want to be really intimate
with another person, and if you do, it might as well be this person. Basically,
you get to a point that you're bound to get stuck in a relationship and
then you have the choice of battling through and trying to 
find
a way to make it work for both of you or you start all over with another
person and you get stuck again. So, you know, as long as you keep renewing
the interest to fight it through, you'll survive the relationship."
Family remains fundamentally important to the actress, but she is also prepared for a future without them. "Someday my family will be off on their own and then we will have to look at our empty nest and see where we stand with that. You know, they'll continue to be my family but, I know so many people at this stage of their lives that are going through a difficult situation because their priorities have changed. Who they are has not necessarily changed but become clearer and they no longer need a guy to be the one doing this or that, and they no longer need their wives to be this and they have to re-evaluate. I know people that have been together for 20 some years or 30 some years and are struggling right now. They like these people and they love these people, but they have to find some new way for their relationship to work."
For Sarandon, it is also the work that fuels her, and she still clearly gets a kick out of it. "I like acting and I like the collaboration aspect which is really important to me." Acting, she says, has taught her about life and about things she would never have become aware of. "I don't know if I would know about baseball if it hadn't been for Bull Durham, I don't know that I infiltrate this little microcosm and would have had the opportunity to work with Dustin Hoffman. I treasure interaction of this kind and I love taking the time with the director and time to work and I kind of get paralyzed when I have too much choice. I don't know; I go into a large department store and I can't function. I get completely overwhelmed. So, I found something that I know I'm good at that also creates an enormous amount of compassion because I think that's really important to have in life."