Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon: The Activist Who Kept Getting Cast

Roger Ebert once wrote of Bull Durham that "I doubt if the character would have worked without Sarandon's wonderful performance" — a line that could describe most of her career. Susan Sarandon has spent five decades building a filmography defined by women who refuse to be simple, while building a parallel reputation as one of Hollywood's most consistently outspoken, and occasionally most professionally costly, political voices.

The Eldest of Nine

Susan Abigail Tomalin was born October 4, 1946, in Jackson Heights, Queens, the eldest of nine children of Phillip Leslie Tomalin, an advertising executive and television producer, and Lenora Marie Criscione. The family moved to Edison, New Jersey when she was four, and she attended Catholic schools before graduating from Edison High School in 1964. She earned a drama degree from the Catholic University of America, studying under coach Gilbert V. Hartke and financing her education through hospital work, hairstyling, housecleaning, and switchboard operating — a working-class start with little resemblance to the political and artistic prominence that followed.

From Soap Operas to Cult Classic

Sarandon made her film debut in Joe (1970) and spent the early 1970s in daytime television, appearing in the soap operas A World Apart and Search for Tomorrow. Her breakthrough was an unlikely one: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a film that flopped commercially on release before becoming one of the most durable cult phenomena in cinema history. She then found more serious critical footing through two collaborations with director Louis Malle, Pretty Baby (1978) and Atlantic City (1980), the latter bringing her first Academy Award nomination and establishing her as a director's actress rather than simply a genre performer.

Household Name

It was Bull Durham (1988), opposite Kevin Costner and her future longtime partner Tim Robbins, that made Sarandon a mainstream star in her forties — itself a notable career shape in an industry that typically narrows opportunities for actresses past thirty. Thelma & Louise (1991), in which she played Louise Sawyer opposite Geena Davis in a film that became a cultural touchstone for its portrayal of female rebellion, brought a second Oscar nomination, followed by nominations for Lorenzo's Oil (1992) and The Client (1994) — four nominations across a single decade without a win.

Dead Man Walking

The win finally came with Dead Man Walking (1995), in which Sarandon played Sister Helen Prejean, a nun who counsels a death-row inmate. Critic Janet Maslin praised her for avoiding "the wrong kind of compassion" in a role that could easily have tipped into sentimentality, and the performance earned Sarandon the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her filmography since has ranged widely — The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Little Women (1994), Stepmom (1998), the animated Enchanted (2007), Cloud Atlas (2012) — and extended into television, including a Golden Globe-nominated turn as Bette Davis in FX's Feud (2017), her ninth Golden Globe nomination across a career that has also produced seven Emmy nominations and a British Academy Film Award.

A Public Life of Activism

Sarandon's political engagement has been sustained and, at times, professionally consequential. Appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1999, she has campaigned against hunger, opposed the Iraq War, and moved through a series of left-of-center political endorsements — co-chairing Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign, backing John Edwards in 2008, and supporting Bernie Sanders in 2016 before endorsing Green Party candidate Jill Stein, choices that drew criticism from Democrats who blamed third-party votes for election outcomes. In June 2018 she was arrested during a protest against the Trump administration's family separation policy at the border.

Her advocacy for Palestinian causes has proven the most contentious. She posted in support of Palestinians in 2021, and remarks she made at a pro-Palestinian rally in November 2023 — widely interpreted as suggesting Jewish people had only recently experienced persecution — drew immediate backlash; her talent agency, UTA, dropped her as a client, and she issued a public apology on December 1, 2023, acknowledging the phrasing "implies that until recently Jews have been strangers to persecution, when the opposite is true." In 2025 she joined the steering committee of the Global Sumud Flotilla, an initiative delivering aid to Gaza. A separate controversy arose in October 2011, when comments comparing Pope Benedict XVI to a Nazi drew rebukes from Catholic organizations and the Anti-Defamation League, and again in February 2022 over a shared social media post relating to police criticized as trivializing law enforcement deaths.

Personal Life

Sarandon married actor Chris Sarandon in 1967, divorcing in 1979 but keeping his surname professionally. She had a long relationship with director Louis Malle from 1977 to 1980, a relationship with Italian filmmaker Franco Amurri that produced her daughter Eva Amurri, and a twenty-one-year partnership beginning in 1988 with actor Tim Robbins, her Bull Durham co-star, with whom she has two sons; the couple separated in 2009. In September 2022, appearing on The Tonight Show, she publicly identified as bisexual, saying, "I don't care if it's a man or a woman... I'm open to all age, all color."

Why Susan Is Called a Genius

"Genius" is not a term critics have generally reached for with Sarandon, and the more accurate praise — "considerable versatility and emotional depth," as one standard reference puts it — points to disciplined craft rather than singular brilliance. Her defining skill across five decades has been an unusual willingness to play morally complicated women without softening them for likability: Louise Sawyer's violence in Thelma & Louise, Sister Helen Prejean's discomfort in Dead Man Walking, and roles across dozens of films that resist easy sympathy. That is a specific and hard-won actorly discipline, built through range rather than transformation of the kind sometimes labeled genius.

The more honest frame for Sarandon's public significance may lie outside her filmography altogether — in the persistence and, at times, real professional cost of her political activism, which has ranged from genuinely admired humanitarian work with UNICEF to statements, particularly around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that she herself has had to publicly walk back. That combination — a long, well-reviewed acting career paired with an activist record that is neither uniformly praised nor uniformly condemned — is a more accurate description of her public life than any claim to singular genius would be.

Legacy

Sarandon's career has demonstrated that a serious actress can remain commercially and critically viable well past the age Hollywood traditionally discards its leading women, while her willingness to speak — and sometimes stumble — on contentious political questions has made her one of the industry's more consistently, if unevenly, engaged public figures.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actress — 1996
• New Jersey Hall of Fame — 2010
• Educated at The Catholic University of America
• Worked as film actor, voice actor and film producer