Hollywood's Top Mom

(This program originally aired May 14, 2006)

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.

It was a great part. And the movie was a home run for Sarandon personally because that's when she met actor Tim Robbins.

"I don't think it was love at first sight," Sarandon says. "When we started working together, he was really good and he was really funny and he was really smart. And you give me smart and funny and I immediately, you know, my ears perk up."

She was 12 years older than Robbins, but they clicked, and they've been together ever since. Though they never got married, they're raising their two sons: Jack, who turns 17 tomorrow, and the baseball player Miles, who is 14, as well as Sarandon's daughter from a previous relationship, Eva Amurri, who's 21.

Sarandon is hard pressed to pinpoint a term of endearment for Robbins and jokes of her relationship, "I don't know. It seems to be working. I mean, if you count real estate and children, we're definitely committed."

But when it comes to marriage and a wedding, Sarandon remains ambivalent. "Maybe we would if we decided you know by the time I'm 80-something I might want a big party. That would be a good excuse," she says.

They're together in their home life and together in their liberal politics. Most famously, they disrupted the Academy Awards ceremony in 1993 to make a statement about Haitians detained in Guantanamo Bay only because they had HIV.

"My agent didn't know. My publicist didn't know, but somehow people got worried something was going happen so they started to scream from the side at us.

The very next day, the Haitians were released. But Robbins and Sarandon were banned from ever attending the Oscar ceremony again.

But that didn't last.

Just two years later the couple returned with "Dead Man Walking," nominated for four Academy Awards including best director for Robbins and best actress for Sarandon, which she won.

"But I'm the only one who won," Sarandon says. "Well, I had all those nuns praying for me."

She was raised a Catholic in Edison, N.J., the oldest of nine children.

"In the Catholic grammar school that I was in, you had a minimum of seven. I think there were maybe 30 families that populated the entire school. So it didn't seem like anything unusual to have nine kids. It was pretty normal," Sarandon says.

In the late 60s, she went to college in Washington, D.C. and majored in drama with a minor in military strategy. There, she met and married actor Chris Sarandon. The marriage ended after 12 years, by which time her career was off and running. She had landed one great part after the next, like Hattie in "Pretty Baby" directed by Louis Malle, with whom she had a three-year relationship.

Years later she met Italian director Franco Amurri.

"We had a fabulous affair and low and behold I became, against all odds, pregnant," Sarandon remarks.

Against all odds because she'd been told she could never have children.

Sarandon was elated and regardless of how Amurri felt, she was going to have the baby. "I said, this is a miracle and I'm gonna do this. If you want to be part of it, you can. If you don't, that's cool, too," she recalls, adding that Amurri is "very much" in their daughter's life.

When Sarandon had Eva at age 39, her career was already well established. She had her third child, Miles, at 45. "I was ready for another one after that but I got voted down," Sarandon says laughing.

But she keeps playing mothers on screen: in "Little Women," "Igby Goes Down," "Step Mom" and in "The Banger Sisters" she played mom opposite her own actress-daughter, Eva.

Stahl asks Sarandon if she would have made a movie like her 1983 "The Hunger," in which she played a lesbian vampire, if she'd had kids then.

"Sure," Sarandon says. "I don't think my sexual preference would be compromising for them or being a vampire would be compromising for them. I just think they just don't want to see my nipples on screen, you know. And I can understand that."