Chris Sarandon brought along his wife because he needed a partner to do a scene. The agents asked her to audition for a role in ‘Joe' and she knows the story pat:' They asked me to do an improvisation. I asked them what that was and then did and they gave me the job. I thought:'' Gee, this seems easy, maybe I'll try acting for a while.'' Shelley Winters hates when I tell the story -- she says I'm going to put the Actors' Studio out of business. But you do learn most by working with good people.' She was 20 when she married Chris Sarandon but by the time she played sweet Janet (‘ Touch me/ I wanna be dirty') in ‘The Rocky Horror Show' in 1975 it was over. She kept his name and his friendship. ‘I kind of like the idea of renaming yourself. I liked ther person I had become not because of marriage but at that period and I wanted to keep the name. She lived with Louis Malle, dated Christopher Walken and David Bowie, Richard Gere and Rupert Everett, and others but maintains:' Considering my age and station I haven't been involved with that many men.' Italian writer-director Franco Amurri was an important liaison. At 38, the actress who had been told she could never have children found herself pregnant. When Eva Maria Olivia (‘ I couldn't make up my mind what to call her' ) was born her life changed: ‘Children reinvent your world for you. They're thrown into the works just to make sure you're not getting too stagnant. I highly recommend waiting. It's great when it happens late in life. At least I felt that. I wasn't desperate to get anywhere other than where I was. I had got to the point where I was overqualified for what I was doing and you can't be overqualified for parenting.' By the time she co-starred with Kevin Costner in ‘Bull Durham' she and Amurri had amicably separated. The other star in that film was Tim Robbins as a baseball player Sarandon's sassy literature handcuffs to her bed as she reads to him. ( ‘A guy will listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay'.) It went further than foreplay on and off screen. Their son Jack Henry was born in 1988. She was 42. Tim Robbins was 30. She was 45 when she became pregnant with Miles Guthrie. Her age, she says, was no big deal. She's nonchalant about it -- and also about not marrying Robbins. And their age difference. ‘The age thing is totally insignificant. Living with somebody in any age bracket is never easy. ‘ But younger men have come of age in a time when strong women are not such a strange phenomenon. I mean, a lot of younger men had working mothers. Maybe that makes them different. It has never been a problem for us and there is no reason it should be. ‘Marriage? I've been married. And certainly in terms of family dynamics I couldn't be more old fashioned and secure. ‘But if only you could find a way of doing it where you don't start getting kind of territorial with each other. ‘You want a comrade. You want a partner, not a boss -- a partner who keeps you honest, who tells you when you're full of shit and who also tells you when they're full of shit. And sometimes you just have to accept that he;s not going to put the toilet seat down all the time. ‘The idea that you are going to find somebody who's absolutely perfect or the idea that you find somebody who completes you is a crock of shit. Where that started is really dangerous history.It comes from fairy tales. It comes from the way we were all conditioned. Well, love does not conquer all.
|
|
|