VIV Says: Blog

We can never get enough of the superb Susan Sarandon, so we’re thrilled that there are two opportunities to watch her this weekend. On April 23, she traces her ancestral roots on NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, in an effort to find out what became of her grandmother, and on April 24, she stars opposite Al Pacino in HBO’s You Don’t Know Jack, about assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, M.D.

Sarandon, 63, had traced her paternal Welsh ancestry as part of a U.K. version of NBC’s genealogy program but had unsuccessfully tried for years to track down her maternal grandmother, Anita. “My curiosity outweighed my trepidation and my need for privacy because it was a story we all wanted told and solved,” she says. “It was nice to finally have some sense of closure of what had happened to her.”

Discovering that her grandmother had a very hard life but “managed to stay afloat with dignity, loved a few times and ended up having a sweet little life an hour from New York” was gratifying and illuminating. “Losing her mom and later two children, going through difficult economic times — there are so many things that could have made her a bitter person, but she was just the opposite,” says the Oscar winner, who feels she has inherited some of Anita’s tenacity and curiosity. “I think I probably owe some of my survival instincts to Anita.”

Sarandon, who got a kick out of learning that grandma had met and may have dated Frank Sinatra, encourages everyone to investigate their ancestry. “As you get to a certain age, it becomes more and more important to be able to leave some record behind for your kids to have some sense of their history and their place in the world,” she says.

In You Don’t Know Jack, Sarandon plays Kevorkian’s friend and aide Janet Good, who asked him to euthanize her when she became terminally ill. Though Sarandon is completely de-glammed for the role, she usually looks decades younger than her age, something she credits to the efforts of her hair and makeup team, not smoking, and taking care of herself.

“I’m certainly not in the shape I was and my face certainly isn’t the way it was, but it helps to have good skin, and if you smoke or eat badly, it’s going to catch up with you eventually. I think it’s important to be around people that frame life in a way that’s joyful and curious and compassionate,” she adds. “You get a lot back from being around those kinds of people, and I think it shows.”

Nevertheless, the upbeat and in-demand Sarandon, who’ll play Michael Douglas’ ex-wife in Solitary Man, opening May 21, and re-team with him in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in September, admits to less-than-sunny moments. “I have my bad days, when I don’t feel confident,” she confesses. “But I think my curiosity outweighs my ego most of the time and so I keep moving forward.”

Have you traced your ancestry? What’s the most surprising thing you discovered about your family?

Photo credit: Michael Caulfield/Getty

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