Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon's film debut was Joe in 1970, an angry low-budget drama about a murderous bigot, and for most of that decade she worked without any obvious plan. The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975 flopped on release and then became a midnight institution, which is a peculiar sort of credit to carry. Her first Academy Award nomination came for Atlantic City, a Louis Malle film that premiered in 1980 and reached American cinemas the following year. She was thirty-five, which by the arithmetic of the period was late.

The run that matters starts in 1988 with Bull Durham, where she plays Annie Savoy, a woman who selects a minor-league baseball player each season and takes his education in hand. It is the first part that let her be funny and in charge at the same time. Then Thelma & Louise in 1991, which put her and Geena Davis in the same Best Actress category the following spring. Two nominees from one film is a reliable way to lose, and Jodie Foster took the award for The Silence of the Lambs.

The nominations then came almost annually: Lorenzo's Oil in 1992, then The Client in 1994, which won her the BAFTA for Best Actress in April 1995. The resolution arrived at the end of that year with Dead Man Walking, directed by Tim Robbins, in which she plays Sister Helen Prejean advising a condemned man in Louisiana. It won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in March 1996 and the Screen Actors Guild award for the same performance. Four nominations, then the fifth.

Sarandon is one of the few on this list whose public profile has been shaped more by what she says than by how she looks. She became a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 1999 and has been arrested at protests; in November 2023 her talent agency dropped her over remarks made at a rally. The then-and-now comparison therefore measures something other than a face. What the later photographs record is a woman who has never kept her career and her politics in separate rooms.