Susan Sarandon
SWINGING DOLL TURNS NUN!
In the 70s and early 80s Sarandon tended to play pretty dolls who yearned for something better than life was offering them, from a prostitute mother in Pretty Baby to a card dealer in Atlantic City. She also did a quirky role in the cult 70s film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

At the age of 40, when most actresses start scouting around for TV roles, Susan hit the peak of her career with mysticism and baseball in Bull Durham and killed a would-be rapist in the cult film Thelma and Louise (1991). Of late she has proved that motherhood and sex-appeal can and do go together in films like Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) and The Client (1994). The latter, based on the John Grisham best-seller, landed her the British Academy Award for Best Actress — as well as her third Best Actress Oscar nomination in four years, the former two being for Thelma and Louise and Lorenzo’s Oil.

Sister Helen, Sarandon’s real-life model for Dead Man Walking, had never even heard of the actress when Sarandon called her about adapting her life story for the big screen -- she rented Thelma and Louise from the local video library to see what Susan Sarandon looked like! Sarandon eventually convinced Sister Helen to agree to the proposal, and then convinced Tim Robbins, her live-in companion, to write and direct the story. The result was Dead Man Walking, based on Sister Helen’s book which tells the true story of her relationship with two death-row convicts in the final days of their lives.