When you look at the Oscar nominations for Best Actress this year, it’s obvious that this has been a terrible year for leading women. Precious aside, there are none of the meaty roles you associate with Oscar-worthiness, and she won’t win. You know you’ve enjoyed a good year if Susan Sarandon is in there, she’s never been bad in anything, from romcom to drama, the woman can do anything. Recently she’s been busy dragging bad writing up into come classy roles. She’s at that stage in her life where Hollywood has no idea what to do with her; she a much-loved actress but isn’t willing to do willowy love-interest parts, she in her 60s but isn’t old and people find her sexy. For Hollywood this does not compute. That’s why she’s been quiet recently, concentrating instead on theatre in her hometown of New York.

Born Susan Tomalin back in 1946 and graduated from The Catholic University of America in 1968, earning a BA in drama. While at The Catholic University, she worked with legendary drama coach Father Gilbert Hartke, the man who pretty much singlehandedly brought drama to Catholic schools and colleges. She also met and married fellow actor Chris Sarandon.

The year after she graduated, Susan accompanied Chris to an audition for a part in Joe, he didn’t get it but Susan was picked out to play the role of a teenager who gets caught up petty crime. She kept working through the early 70s in soaps and bit parts of films, until she got the part no one wanted as Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was a huge cult hit abut not for another few years and Susan worked constantly, if unremarkably, throughout the 70 and early 80s. She and Chris divorced, amicably, in 1978.

It was in 1983 that she made the film most lesbians will remember with a fluttering heart, The Hunger, seemed like your run-of-the-mill lesbian vampire film, but with Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in it how could it be ordinary? Susan famously asked them to change the love scene so that her character stays sober:

You wouldn’t have to get drunk to bed Catherine Deneuve, I don’t care what your sexual history to that point had been.

The film was a flop at the box office but, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, made a mint in the video market. Why? Well….

She started creating some Hollywood heat over the next couple of years, garnering an Oscar nomination for 1981′s Atlantic City, but it was in 1988 starring opposite Kevin Costner in Bill Durham, that she hit the big-time. It was also where she met Tim Robbins, the man with whom she would spend the next 21 years of her life. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for the role. Even though she doesn’t see herself as a great actress:

I think the only reason I remain an actor is that you can never quite get it right. So there is a challenge to it.

Sarandon has a total of five best actress Oscar nominations: Atlantic City (1981), Thelma & Louise (1991), Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), and The Client (1994), winning in 1995 for Dead Man Walking. Apparently she keeps the Oscar in the loo.

She told About.com what if felt like to win:

I felt like it was for my body of work and when I saw everybody leap to their feet that way I felt, in a way, like I’d come home somehow. Like all of these nominations over a period of time were just leading me to that moment. Really, it felt like the class trophy because it was really for Sean [Penn], it was really for Tim, it was really for everybody. Sister Helen [who she played in the film] was there. So of all the films that I could have gotten it on, this was by far the best one to do it on. It just meant so much so that when it happened then I really didn’t know if it would happen.

Along with Dead Man Walking, the film that is Susan Sarandon for a lot of people is Thelma & Louise. In it she plays Thelma, street-wise waitress with a shady past who just wants a weekend away with her BFF, Louise played by Geena Davis. It was a huge hit, so much so that they thought about making a sequel. Spoiler! How could they, when they die at the end:

They actually had an idea that we did die and came back as ghosts. For a sequel. We’d go around helping women leave their husbands.

Thankfully that never happened.

I was surprised that the film struck such a primal nerve. I knew when we were filming that it would be different, unusual and hopefully entertaining. But shocking? I guess giving women the option of violence was hard for a lot of people to accept.

Not content with entertaining us over the past 20 years, Susan always strives to educate us on social issue:

People probably think of me as Debbie Downer. I have become kind of a joke in terms of activism for some people. But it is like worrying if your slip is showing when you’re fleeing a burning building. You have to prioritize.

She is an very active supporter of progressive and liberal political causes, but refuses to define herself as a feminist:

I thought the whole point of feminism is that you’re not supposed to be defined by gender. I don’t understand the reasoning behind that, because I wouldn’t vote for Condoleezza Rice, and I hated Margaret Thatcher.

Even though she says things like:

The thing that’s bad about breasts is that you have to choose between having a mind and having breasts. It’d be nice if you could have both. Anyway, I think my breasts have been highly overrated.

You have to be careful not to be upstaged by your breasts. I’ve gotten curvier as I’ve gotten older. Directors cast the men they want to be and the women they want to have.

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