[Advanced] The Staying Power of Susan Sarandon (1)

Starlets and causes come and go, but this actress endures

Susan Sarandon has always made it look so easy.

Generations of actresses launch careers and then flame out. Sarandon, 65, "transitioned" - from ingenue to leading lady to strong female lead to stellar turns as mums. Others come and go, Sarandon reinvents herself and endures.

"It's just managing to get the part you need when you need it," she says. "I just survived. I don't understand how I've stuck around, and I have no idea what to say when people ask me how. I've made plenty of mistakes."

Mistakes or not, this Oscar winner has always cleverly picked, or lucked into, roles that gave her a fresh lease on movie life.

12:18 picking timely rose
"Some of those parts, thanks to the directors of the movies, have managed to become kind of iconic - important parts in the Hollywood history of women," Sarandon says. "But that has as much to do with the zeitgeist of the moment as with me.

Take Arbitrage, her latest. She plays the wife of a Wall Street hedge fund baron (Richard Gere) who has hidden vast financial wrongdoing from her.

Melodramatic touches aside, it's a movie ripped from recent headlines.

"I feel a little bit like Zelig," Sarandon says, referencing Woody Allen's 1980s film about a man with the ability to blend into disparate situations, always on the cutting edge of history. "These films, a number of them, seemed to slip right into the consciousness of that moment in time.

 "When we did Thelma & Louise (1991), we had no idea it was going to be that big of a deal. But it caught a wave."And Arbitrage, she thinks, has wave-catching potential.



Notes and Vocabulary 
stellar adj.
/ˈstɛlɚ/
very good: excellent

reinvent v.
/ˌri:jənˈvɛnt/
to make major changes or improvements to (something);
to present (something) in a different or new way

zeitgeist n.
/ˈzaɪtˌgaɪst/
the general beliefs, ideas, and spirit of a time and place

wrongdoing n.
behavior that is morally or legally wrong


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