Please Rewind Talent Wall

Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon has built a screen career around characters who rarely take the easy or expected route. Born on October 4, 1946, in Jackson Heights, Queens, she studied drama at the Catholic University of America before landing a major role in Joe (1970). Early work in television and films including The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pretty Baby and Atlantic City established her willingness to enter provocative, complicated territory. Atlantic City brought her first Academy Award nomination. The range of Sarandon’s work is especially clear in the movies featured by Please Rewind. She moved from Fame and the modern vampire story The Hunger to the comic fantasy of The Witches of Eastwick. Bull Durham gave her Annie Savoy, a performance central to the film’s mix of baseball, romance and self-aware comedy. Roger Ebert argued that the character might not have worked without her. Then came Louise Sawyer in Thelma & Louise, one of the defining roles of her career and another Academy Award-nominated performance. Sarandon brings Louise a tough, watchful quality, but never reduces her to toughness alone. That ability to hold resolve and vulnerability in the same frame also helps explain why she fits so naturally into an ensemble drama such as Little Women. Her 1990s work brought further Academy Award nominations for Lorenzo’s Oil and The Client, followed by a Best Actress win for Dead Man Walking, in which she played Sister Helen Prejean. The performance was praised by The New York Times for its bluntness and refusal to reach for easy compassion. Sarandon’s career has continued across film, television, voice work, producing and documentary narration. Her appearance in Enchanted shows another side of that durability: she can enter a heightened fairy-tale world without losing the force of her presence. Across drama, comedy, fantasy and genre filmmaking, she remains an actor drawn to strong points of view—and to characters with more going on than the movie first lets us see.