These make a rare combination of talent that has made her a top line name in many recent movies.
Eldest of nine children (5 girls and 4 boys), Susan Abigail Tomalin, was born October 4, 1946, in Jackson Heights, NY. Her father was a former big band singer, Philip Leslie Tomalin, who later became an advertising executive for television.
Acting was something that happened for Susan, though she worked her way through college (Catholic University in Washington, DC ) as a secretary for the drama department and cleaned apartments – it was not her objective.
While attending college she fell in love and married Chris Sarandon, a drama student who later appeared in several local play theaters in the DC area. On one occasion Susan accompanied her husband, Chris, to an audition reading opposite lines to his character audition. She portrayed the character so well that she landed a role in the movie Joe (1970).
From movie to soap opera, like most stars, Sarandon took minor parts in daily dramas, like As the World Turns, Search for Tomorrow and then A World Apart.
Sarandon has stared in numerous films that some say did not make her career, but they were the leads that developed her to her present ability. Persuaded by Tim Curry, actor, to play in the leather and ambiguous sex musical, Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which was a box office flop.
This sleeper cult film of midnight showings and has grossed $134,198,000, and grossed more than any film she has been in to date. It still has a momentum of its own, so not all decisions are bad decisions in Hollywood.
Although some choices are not so good, like, Satan’s Murders (1974, TV) but by 1975 she was staring with major stars like Robert Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper. Shelley Winters and Eric Roberts in the King of the Gypsies. Sarandon stared with Henry Fonda in The Great Smokey Roadblock (1976).
Susan’s life changed in 1979 as she divorced her only husband Chris Sarandon. Later she had a standing relationship with director, Franco Amurri, with whom she had a daughter Eva Maria Livia Amurri (1985).
She met and fell in love with actor Tim Robbins whom she co-stared with in the movie Bull Durham. Tim (who is 15 years younger) is a common-law husband and they have two children (Miles, 1992, and John Henry, 1989).
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