THIS year, for a change, the best actress category will be the most keenly contested when the Oscars are presented in Hollywood next Monday night. Elisabeth Shue and Emma Thompson are the long shots among the five nominees and many voters may feel that Meryl Streep should be satisfied with the two Oscars she has already received, which leaves the category a close race between Sharon Stone and Susan Sarandon. Stone is the favourite, having won the Golden Globe in January for her performance in Casino, but my prediction is that when Tom Hanks opens the envelope to announce the winner of the best actress Oscar, he will read out the name of Susan Sarandon.
Oscar recognition has been a long time coming for Sarandon, who turns 50 in October and started out in movies back in 1970. She received her first nomination in 1981 for Atlantic City, directed by her then lover, Louis Malle; she has been a regular nominee in recent years, for Thelma & Louise (1991), Lorenzo's Oil (1992) and The Client (1994); and her fifth nomination is for Dead Man Walking, directed by her partner for the past nine years, Tim Robbins.
This time Susan Sarandon is raring to win. "Well, it's getting to be a habit, you know, dressing up and going to the ceremony, she said when we met at her London hotel this month. "I don't think I can get any better than I am in Dead Man Walking and I certainly won't get a part like this very often, so I'm kind of retiring if I don't get something this year."
Dead Man Walking has received four Oscar nominations the others going to Tim Robbins for best director, Sean Penn for best actor and Bruce Springsteen for best original film song. A riveting, factually based drama, it features Sean Penn in his most vivid and intense portrayal to date, as Matthew Poncelet, a convicted killer who has been on death row in a Louisiana prison for six years. An aptly understated Susan Sarandon plays Sister Helen Prejean, the humanitarian nun who becomes his penfriend, and then his spiritual adviser in the days leading up to his scheduled execution by lethal injection.
She is faced with a crisis of conscience when confronted with the distraught parents of the killer's teenage victims, and with another when Poncelet reveals himself as a white supremacist. Robbins's beautifully directed film achieves a rare balance as it tackles these moral dilemmas and it builds to an emotional but unsentimental ending. The film is based on a book by Sister Helen Prejean, who served as a consultant on the film.
"What's great about the book is that she makes so many mistakes," says Susan Sarandon. "It's not some righteous nun coming into a situation with everything all figured out. She's a remarkable person who has chosen to define herself within religious parameters." Sarandon herself had a strict Catholic upbringing. The eldest of nine children born to a big band singer who became a television producer and his wife who stayed home to raise the family she was born Susan Abigail Tomaling on October 4th, 1946, in New York City, and she grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey.
Did she draw on her Catholic background to play Sister Helen in Dead Man Walking? "I had to overcome my Catholic upbringing in order to play a nun," she says. "The nuns I grew up with were not like Sister Helen. They were like a third gender to me they had men's names, they had a little bit of a moustache, and you could look under their habits and see that they'd shaved their heads.
"I was in trouble with them from day one. The more I tried to be good, the worse trouble I got. I was always asking questions they couldn't answer, so I was labelled with having an overabundance of original sin. I just couldn't find my place in the Catholic church. Then I went to Catholic University in Washington DC, which finished me with the church. This was in the 1960s when all the really cool priests were running off with all the really cool nuns."
It was a great coming of age place to be at such an eventful time, she says, and she got actively caught up in the student protest movement of the time. She majored in drama and in 1967 she married a classmate, Chris Sarandon - who became best known as an actor for playing the gay lover of the Al Pacino character in the 1975 Dog Day Afternoon. While accompanying her husband to an audition in 1970, Susan landed her first film role, as the hippie daughter of a businessman in John Avilsden's drama, Joe.
In 1975, having appeared in The Front Page and The Great Waldo Pepper, she was signed in the leading role of Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which went on to become one of the biggest cult movies of the century. "When I look at that film now, I think, `God, we had so much fun', and then I realise, `No, we didn't'," she says. "First of all I got pneumonia because I was running around wet or in my underwear most of the time and the studios weren't heated. I didn't have a permanent place to stay and I was moving all the time. And then there was having to sing. I was so self conscious about that. When I look at it now, I love the energy of the film and I love its message - don't dream it, be it - and clearly it speaks to people. I wish I had a piece of its profits!"
TOWARDS the end of her 12 year marriage to Chris Sarandon, Susan became involved with Louis Malle, who directed her in Pretty Baby in 1977 and three years later in Atlantic City, which earned her first Oscar nomination, as a would be croupier who washes with lemons. However, her career only really began to take off in the late 1980s with The Witches of Eastwick, Bill Durham (when she met Tim Robbins) and White Palace.
She was back in contention for an Oscar again in 1991 for Ridley Scott's memorable Thelma & Louise. "I thought we were making a cowboy movie with women and trucks instead of guys and horses," she says. "To give women the option of violence was relatively new. I think Kidley Scott put it all in a heroic context that I don't think necessarily would have happened with somebody interested in the feminist ramifications of what might happen. I don't think he was aware of those. I don't know if he understood us, but he really didn't have to. The ending is pure romantic, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I remember when I grabbed Geena Davis and gave her that kiss. That wasn't in the script and the sun was going down and we had time for just two takes. I thought he was going to kill me, but he didn't mind at all."
Susan Sarandon followed Thelma & Louise with fine performances in Light Sleeper, Lorenzo's Oil, Little Woman and The Client, and it was while shooting The Client on location in New Orleans that she first met Sister Helen Prejean. "I thought she was an incredible woman who was making a difference and still had life in her and was all embracing and wasn't homophobic or racist, and had found a way to distill whatever the essence of Christ is. She was a nun who could still be cheerful and not the least bitter even though nuns are the bottom of the food chain in terms of trickledown anything from the Catholic church in the United States. They don't have a cent - it goes to the parish, it goes to the priests and maybe something gets thrown to the nuns. I just thought she was amazing."
Working so closely with the famously difficult Sean Penn was a revelation to Susan Sarandon. "He's the best," she says. "Intense, yes. Intelligent, yes. The advantage of shooting the film chronologically was that we could pare it down as we went along. A lot of actors would be counting their lines and feeling threatened by that, but not Sean, and he wasn't afraid to be unsympathetic."
"I decided early on to do something I'd never done before, which was to completely empty myself of everything I recognised as me, be it mascara, lipstick of whatever. I don't think I could have been that humble if Sean hadn't been so generous, because he had the flashier part. I always felt he was completely there for me, and the few instances where I had to drive a scene, he gave it to me. And I think I went places I wouldn't have gone to in my performance because I really trusted Tim. And finally the movie's good and that makes a big difference."
Working so closely on the film with two actor directors, Penn and Kobbins, did Sarandon herself feel the temptation to direct? "I've been asked to direct movies and I probably will some day," she says, "but right now I'm very, very caught up in directing my family." She has three children: Eva, her 10 year old daughter with the Italian director, Franco Amurri, and six year old Jack Henry and Miles, who is three, both with Tim Robbins.
"The children are just so much more interesting to me than anything else. I've lived with directors - I lived with Louis Malle - so I'm not naive about directing movies. I know a movie takes a year and a half of your life and the kind of obsessiveness you need to have to direct, I wouldn't have now. I'm just too busy putting toilet paper in the bathroom, food in the refrigerator and making sure everyone has play days, even when I'm working, and that's a tremendous vocation. The kids will be gone soon enough, so I'm very protective of my time with them. I got two more scripts to direct the other day and I'm not even going to read them."
Writing about Susan Sarandon in A Biographical Dictionary of Film, the astute critic, David Thomson, notes: "She has Bette Davis eyes and enough knockout punch to command romantic roles She is one of the few American actresses whose 50s - and more - might hold marvels."