Susan Sarandon has redefined what it means to be an older woman, asking, “Do you really have to be the ice queen intellectual or the slut whore? Isn’t there some way to be both?”
Years before it was socially acceptable, Sarandon became the first cougar, hooking up with twelve-years-younger Tim Robbins, her co-star in Bull Durham. With her daughter, Eva Amurri (whose father is director Franco Amurri), she moved in with Robbins and had two children: Jack Henry and Miles Guthrie. “Living with somebody of any age isn’t easy,” Sarandon says. “But younger men have come of age in a time when strong women are not such a strange phenomenon. I’ve been married and I’ve been single, and it doesn’t make much different. We’re a family.”
And long before it was the norm, Susan Sarandon was outspoken on political issues, asserting, “Everyone has a responsibility towards this larger family of man, but especially if you’re privileged, that increases your responsibility…How can you not participate in the world you live in?”
Noted for her active support of progressive and liberal causes, she took an early stance against the US 2003 invasion, questioning: “What did Iraq do to us?”
Born on October 4, 1946, in New York City, Susan Abigail Tomalin been a rebel since childhood, explaining, “I was told I had an overabundance of original sin.”
While in college, she married fellow student Chris Sarandon. After their divorce, she retained her married name as her stage name. In 1981, Playboy’s readers voted hers the Best Celebrity Breasts, causing her to remark, “It’s very hard not to be in a scene and not be upstaged by your nipples.”
Insofar as being a role model, Sarandon muses, “I didn’t realize that everything was supposed to fall apart at forty, so I just slid past forty and fifty and sixty. When you’re an outsider and not paying attention to the rules, the hurdles are a little lower.”