I know that that was a very unpopular phase and I have

I know that that was a very unpopular phase, and I have to admit that, looking around, there were not the people I expected to be there.”If anything keeps Sarandon’s value-system intact, it’s her family. She and Robbins live in New York with their two sons, Jack, 16, and Miles, 13, as well as Sarandon’s 20-year-old daughter, Eva, from her time with the Italian director Franco Amurri. “It is definitely clear that people were afraid to question that war, or even to ask why we were in it No one was talking to anybody. It was not the first time she and Robbins had felt isolated in Hollywood. “During the Gulf war, we asked questions when a lot of people weren’t, and that was a very scary, lonely time,” she recalls, her eyes widening like an owl’s. You just know that if you go home and you haven’t said anything when you had an opportunity, it’s much worse.

On your deathbed, those are the moments you regret.”While the Haitian prisoners were released the next day, a massive backlash followed, from sack-loads of “homophobic and racist” hate-mail to a ludicrous two-year ban from the Oscars (which was lifted when she was nominated for her role in The Client). I guess that’s the most concrete example of being inappropriate and getting something accomplished. You just never have any idea how your words affect people – for better or for worse. “I was raised as a dutiful little Catholic girl – people were screaming at us from the wings. Just thinking about it now traumatises me! There was nothing to read, and we fought over what we were going to say and the words to use to try to do it as quickly as possible. It’s no coincidence that she met Robbins on Bull Durham at an age when most actresses would have been heading for early retirement in Hollywood “I don’t know how I’ve survived,” she says.

“I’ve done everything wrong.”You could be forgiven for thinking she’s referring to the 1993 Academy Awards ceremony, when she and Robbins hijacked the show to speak out on behalf of HIV-positive Haitian refugees interned at Guantanamo Bay who were on hunger strike “I wasn’t raised to stop the conversation,” she says. While she tells me her children have been downloading tracks by Keane and The Killers on to her iPod, I suspect that it’s being with a man 12 years her junior that has invigorated her. “So pretty early on, you learn to live with rejection.” Yet it’s more than that. There is a youthful zest to Sarandon that makes her a sensual being. “In the early part of my career, I lost a job because my teeth were too small,” she says.

While Sarandon is entirely at ease with her sexual allure, she claims never to have focused on her looks. Then there was the vampire movie The Hunger, which featured Sarandon in an infamous love scene with Catherine Deneuve. After she reignited her career at 42 by playing a sizzling baseball groupie in 1988’s Bull Durham, she got to play a leggy coke-fiend (Light Sleeper), a femme fatale (Twilight) and, most famously, her Oscar-nominated feminist icon Louise (Thelma and Louise).
A former model, Sarandon appears at least a decade younger than she is – aided by skin that is remarkably free of wrinkles and that sassy crop of red hair. In Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, she played a New Orleans prostitute who abandons her child.