Susan Sarandon got her first film role at an audition meant for her husband
In 1969 Susan Sarandon went along with her then-husband Chris to a casting call for the film Joe. He did not get a part; she landed a major one as a runaway teenager. Five Oscar nominations later, she won Best Actress for playing a nun who counsels a man on death row.
Born Susan Tomalin in Jackson Heights, Queens, on October 4, 1946, she was the eldest of nine children; her father worked in advertising and television and had once sung in nightclubs. The family moved to a new suburb in Edison Township, New Jersey, when she was four, and she and her sisters won swimming races at the local club. She played leads in school plays, then studied drama at the Catholic University of America from 1964 to 1968, paying her way by emptying bedpans, cutting hair, cleaning houses and running a switchboard.
After Joe (1970) came two soap operas and a slow build. The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975 became a cult favourite, the same year she starred opposite Robert Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper. Louis Malle directed her twice, and Atlantic City (1980) brought her first Academy Award nomination. Tony Scott's vampire film The Hunger (1983) was her most controversial work, as the first mainstream American movie to show a love scene between two female stars, in her case with Catherine Deneuve.
Fame on a household scale arrived only with Bull Durham (1988), where she played Annie Savoy, a baseball fan who adopts one player each season; Roger Ebert doubted anyone else could have made the part work. The 1990s were her peak: nominations for Thelma & Louise, Lorenzo's Oil and The Client, then the win for Dead Man Walking (1995) as Sister Helen Prejean. Janet Maslin praised how she avoided cheap sympathy, showing a woman repelled by the prisoner yet determined to help him.
Television kept her busy too, from guest spots on Friends to playing Bette Davis in the first season of Feud in 2017, which earned yet another Golden Globe nomination. She has narrated about two dozen documentaries, hosted a lecture series by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, and made her UK stage debut in 2025. She became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1999 and in 2006 helped carry the Olympic flag at the Turin Winter Games.
Source: Susan Sarandon
