Actress. Born Susan Abigail Tomaling, on October 4, 1946 in New York City. She grew up in Edison, New Jersey, the oldest of nine children (five girls and four boys) in a family of Welsh-Italian decent. Her father, Philip Tomaling, was a former big band singer turned television and advertising executive, and her mother Lenora Tomaling (nee Criscione) maintained the copious household. Sarandon’s upbringing was Catholic and conservative, and she attended a Roman Catholic elementary school run by nuns. Although introverted and “very spacey,” in her own words, Sarandon often challenged the nuns’ religiously indoctrinated conclusions in the classroom. In high school, her rebellious nature shone through when she was arrested for her involvement in Vietnam and Civil Rights protests. This began a lifelong passion for political causes; she and Tim Robbins brought light to the situation of HIV-positive Haitian refugees at the 1991 Academy awards, and she was again arrested in March 1999 while protesting the New York City police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea. After high school, Sarandon attended Catholic University in Washington, D.C. and lived off-campus with her grandparents. She pursued a varied course of study, including drama, English, philosophy, and military strategy. She paid her tuition by working as a secretary for the drama department, cleaning apartments, and modeling for the brochure of the now infamous Watergate Hotel. Although she had no aspirations to be an actress, she participated in a freshman show and caught the eye of graduate drama student, Chris Sarandon. The two started dating and eventually moved in together. The conservative Catholic University community looked down on their living arrangement, so the two promptly married in September 1967. After graduating in 1968, Sarandon took some modeling jobs while her husband found acting work in regional theatres around Washington D.C. Her life took a dramatic turn when she accompanied him on a reading for an agent in New York City as “a warm body to play against.” The agent, to her surprise, signed them both and told them to come back in the fall. Upon moving to New York, she auditioned for the film Joe and got the leading role of a troubled teenager on the spot. From that moment on, a barrage of bad roles started flowing toward Sarandon and she took many of them, partly out of naivete and partly to continue working on her technique as a character actress.