Hollywood's Top Mom

(CBS)  (This program originally aired May 14, 2006)

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It's a Wednesday afternoon and Susan Sarandon is doing what she does a lot: she's come to see her son Miles play baseball.

The other team hears she's a movie star, but she's here to be Miles' mom.

This is a woman who doesn't shade what she thinks or feels, even at a game for kids in junior high, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl finds.

Asked if she ever embarrasses her son, Sarandon says, "I tell him it's my job to embarrass him. He's always embarrassed. I guess you know, your kids just want you to be like everybody else, don't they?"

But she is like everybody else, when it comes to being a mother.

When it was Miles' turn at bat, he hit a double.

Susan Sarandon is passionately involved and uncompromising in all her roles: as mother, movie star and political protester. She's even been arrested. But her reputation probably comes more from the provocative roles she has chosen in her 58 films: from a prostitute in "Pretty Baby" to a nun in "Dead Man Walking."

Sarandon explains the controversy that seemingly swirls around her, saying, "I think I have a bit of Forrest Gump in my stars. You know, it just seems like I'm in the right place with the right movie at the right time."

You could certainly say that about her role as an outlaw in "Thelma and Louise."

"I'm not quite sure how it ended up being so threatening and such a big deal. We thought we were doing a cowboy movie with trucks and women instead of horses and guys," she says. Sarandon adds that she never viewed the film as being an overt threat to men.

"Maybe men that wear too much gold jewelry or something. They were the only ones we seemed to pick on," Sarandon says. "A lot of men aren't threatened by that movie. It's not true that you know it's just a woman's movie.

"It's about not settling," she adds.

A lot of Sarandon's parts are about "not settling."

Of her role in 1988 as Annie Savoy in "Bull Durham," Sarandon says "that really was a stereotype buster."

"She had a lot to say; she had to be funny, she had to be smart, she had to be sexy and all those things that normally aren't put together in one person in a film for a woman. And she didn't die at the end so it was a great part," Sarandon quips.

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