Susan Sarandon picks the two best movies of her career: “The role of a lifetime”
She may be just as well-known today for her work as an activist as she is as a movie star, but Susan Sarandon has spent so many years in the industry that it has become easy to take her efforts for granted.
While she hasn’t exactly been doing obscure work within the last few decades, it was at the end of the 20th century when she was considered to be one of the best actresses of her era, and one responsible for inspiring others to take up the craft.
The actor’s career is so vast that it’s difficult to narrow down what her best work is. Although she had a memorable debut in Joe, one of the most disturbing anti-establishment films of the ‘70s, it took another decade for Sarandon to prove herself capable of being a star when she shared the screen with Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City, for which they both received Academy Award nominations.
She may have turned up at subsequent Oscar ceremonies after she was nominated for Thelma & Louise, Lorenzo’s Oil, and The Client, but she walked home empty-handed each time, until finally winning the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for Dead Man Walking, which she named as one of the two best films of her career. In addition to co-starring Sean Penn, the film was directed by Sarandon’s partner at the time, Tim Robbins.
“I found the book, and I nurtured it, and as difficult as it was to do, I really loved working with Sean,” Sarandon said, “Tim did an amazing job directing. It was just very rewarding to have it even get made and then see it affect so many people.”
The film was loosely inspired by a 1993 non-fiction book of the same name, and although the film’s depiction of state executions was deemed controversial, it was the intention of both Sarandon and Robbins to tell the story in a way that would cause politicians on both sides of the aisle to think critically about the nuanced issue.
Dead Man Walking is a very heavy film that is just as powerful today, but Sarandon’s other favourite role of her career was in the much lighter Bull Durham, a sports comedy that she starred in alongside Kevin Costner, and called “the role of a lifetime”.
“That was the first part I had that I was not overqualified for,” she said in regards to her character, Annie Savoy, the “baseball groupie” for the Durham Bulls, adding, “She didn’t have to die at the end”.
Bull Durham was popular during its initial release in 1988, but its reputation has only grown in the years since because of its popularity among baseball fans. Although Costner did several other baseball-related films, including Field of Dreams and For the Love of the Game, Bull Durham had something special because of the excellent chemistry he shared with both Sarandon and Robbins. It’s certainly an important film, albeit not in quite the same way as Dead Man Walking is.
