Chris Sarandon was alone behind the wheel of a car somewhere in East Africa, sleeping in huts and visiting game reserves, with no crew or companions waiting for him. The Hollywood star was in his 30s, and he was running from the literal horror of working with a director he still describes as malevolent. He was ready to quit the business forever. To understand how he arrived at that lonely safari, you have to go back to a coal town in West Virginia.
Christopher Sarandon Jr. was born in Beckley on July 24, 1942, the son of Greek immigrants who built a life running a restaurant for miners and townspeople. He grew up bilingual, speaking English in the dining room and Greek at home, watching his parents perform daily theater for the public while privately speaking another tongue. Beckley in the 1950s did not usually produce movie stars, but it produced a capable kid.
Sarandon was student council president at Woodrow Wilson High School, graduating in 1960, and he was also a working teenage musician. He played drums and sang backup in a rock and roll band called the Teen Tones, which toured and opened for stars like Bobby Darin, Gene Vincent, and Danny and the Juniors. Before he ever said someone else’s words on a stage, he had learned the discipline of the supporting player, the man whose job it is to make the figure out front sound better. He studied speech and drama at West Virginia University, graduating magna cum laude, then took a master’s degree in theater at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.
C. It was there, during a scene reading, that he met a brilliant young woman named Susan Tomalin. They married on September 16, 1967, while he was still a graduate student, and she took his surname. She still bears it long after the marriage ended, long after she became more famous than him by an order of magnitude neither could have imagined.
The professional climb was slow and unglamorous. He made his stage debut in 1965 in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, joined the Long Wharf Theatre Company, and toured with improvisational companies through the late 1960s. In 1968, he moved to New York and landed a continuing role as Dr. Tom Halverson on the soap opera The Guiding Light.
On Broadway, he appeared in The Rothschilds and played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Susan got her own break, the story goes, by tagging along to one of his auditions. Then came the role that changed everything. In 1975, director Sidney Lumet was making Dog Day Afternoon, the true story of John Wojtowicz, a Vietnam veteran who in August 1972 turned a botched Brooklyn bank robbery into a 14-hour hostage siege.
Wojtowicz was reportedly trying to raise money to pay for his lover’s gender reassignment surgery. Lumet cast Al Pacino as the robber, and for the lover, renamed Leon Shermer, he cast Sarandon, a film unknown in his screen debut. Sarandon prepared for the part in an unusual way. A gay actor friend introduced him to four women, drag performers who lived their lives as women.
Sarandon had them to his apartment, made them spaghetti, and sat with them on the floor and talked. “Essentially, I was interested in their backstories,” he said. He was after interior life, not mannerism. One woman told him she had gone to see King Kong as a child, looked up at Fay Wray on the screen, and thought, “I want to be her.
”
Something else happened across those spaghetti dinners. One of the women he stopped seeing as a man in a dress and started seeing as a woman, full stop. “A very attractive young woman,” he said, “to the point where I was flirting with her. ” He called it a real lesson in the physiological and emotional dimension of what happens to somebody who feels trapped in the wrong body.
The performance is small in screen time but enormous in effect. Pacino and Sarandon famously never share a frame in Dog Day Afternoon. Their great scene is a telephone call, two men’s tender and furious love conducted entirely through a phone line. In Frank Pierson’s screenplay, the scene opened in full melodrama.
Sarandon and Pacino, rehearsing under Lumet’s loose hand, felt the falseness and reached instead for the truth of any long relationship: when two people who have loved each other speak after a long silence, the first thing they want to know is how the other one is. The result earned Sarandon a New York Film Critics Award and, in 1976, an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his first film, alongside a Golden Globe nomination as the year’s most promising newcomer. Half a century later, he acknowledged he would never be cast in that part today. “And rightfully so,” he said.
“It should be somebody who’s more authentically aligned with the character, but I’m very proud of it. ”
There was a strange coda to Dog Day Afternoon. For years afterward, Sarandon found himself aggressively propositioned by men at parties because his performance had been so convincing that he was perceived as “femme. ” It amused and slightly disgusted him.
He had spent weeks learning to see a trans woman as fully human, and his reward was a working education in how badly men behave when they think they have permission. The Oscar nomination should have been a launching pad. In some ways it was, but Sarandon did not want to be a heartthrob. He found romantic leads boring and gravitated toward the dark and the cracked.
“I much prefer the bad guys,” he would say. The first stop down that side street was Lipstick in 1976, a revenge thriller in which he played a soft-spoken music teacher who is, in fact, a rapist, opposite Margo Hemingway. The film drew criticism for being exploitative, the opposite effect of Dog Day Afternoon. Sarandon did not run from the controversy.
The scene, he insisted, was supposed to be unbearable. The next stop nearly ended him. In 1977, he took the lead in The Sentinel, a Catholic supernatural horror picture directed by Michael Winner. He could see the script was nonsense even as he signed.
By his account, what he encountered on that set was the single worst professional experience of his entire life. The villain was the director. Winner, Sarandon said, was caustic and malevolent. The notorious finale required a procession of the damned, and Winner had cast it with people who had real physical disabilities and amputations, then mocked those performers openly on the set.
“He was not an unintelligent man, but he had a malevolent nature,” Sarandon said. The experience broke something in him. He began to see movies not as liberation but exploitation. He almost quit acting.
“I literally almost quit acting,” he said. “I went on a walkabout. I went to Africa for 3 weeks just to get it out of my system. Took a single-man safari.
I drove around for 3 weeks just looking at animals and sleeping in huts and game reserves all over East Africa just to flush it out of my system. Then came back kind of renewed. ”
It would be eight long years before he willingly walked into a horror film again. Years after Winner’s death in 2013, several women accused him of sexual misconduct, including Nana Visitor, Sarandon’s own co-star on The Sentinel.
The actor’s instinct about the man had been accurate. The renewal expressed itself first in television and theater. In 1980, he played the title role in The Day Christ Died and played both Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay in a television adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities. He worked steadily through the early 1980s, including a turn opposite Goldie Hawn in the comedy Protocol in 1984.
It was the back half of the decade that handed him the films that would carry his name into the next century. In 1985, he finally returned to the genre that had nearly destroyed him. In Fright Night, written and directed by Tom Holland, Sarandon played Jerry Dandrige, a vampire who moves in next door to a teenage horror fan. It was a witty, affectionate homage to old Hammer horror, and Sarandon’s Dandrige is its dark engine, a predator with manners.
The film became a hit and then, on home video, a touchstone. Holland brought Sarandon back into horror three years later, casting him as the doomed detective Mike Norris in Child’s Play in 1988, the original outing of the killer doll Chucky, another picture that spawned a defining franchise. Between those two horror pictures came the film that has guaranteed Sarandon a particular kind of immortality. In 1987, Rob Reiner made The Princess Bride, and Sarandon played Prince Humperdinck, the vain, scheming villain who wants to marry the most beautiful girl in the land, mostly so he can have her murdered to start a war.
He remembered the shoot in England as one of the happiest of his life, a kind of working summer camp for grown-up actors. He improvised puns with Christopher Guest, and brought his daughters to meet Andre the Giant. None of them seemed to know they were making a film that would be quoted at weddings and recited by children for the next 40 years. In 1993, Sarandon’s voice found its most unlikely and most enduring home.
Tim Burton’s stop-motion musical The Nightmare Before Christmas needed a speaking voice for Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, and Sarandon supplied it. The film became immortal on home video and in the strange afterlife of merchandise and seasonal ritual. He had now appeared in three films selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry: Dog Day Afternoon, The Princess Bride, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Not many working actors have three.
Sarandon’s personal life had run its own current alongside the films. The marriage to Susan had not survived the 1970s. They separated in 1975, the very year Dog Day Afternoon made his name, and divorced in 1979. There was no scandal in it.
“Her life and my life just diverged,” he said. In 1980, he married fashion model Lisa Ann Cooper, with whom he had two daughters and a son, Stephanie, Alexis, and Michael. That marriage, too, did not last the decade. The thing that nearly destroyed him in those years was a man with a plausible smile and a property scheme.
In the late 1980s, Sarandon invested his savings in Manhattan brownstones alongside a business partner. The partner turned out to be a con man, a fraud who left Sarandon legally liable on the mortgages. “I lost everything,” he said. “I’ve been saving money all through my career for my old age, and I had to liquidate it.
” His marriage to Cooper was disintegrating at the same time. They divorced in 1989. The films he took in this period he later named “mortgage movies. ” He took them because he had to work.
Into this wreckage came the most spectacular professional humiliation of his career, and probably the great love of his life, delivered in the same package. In 1991, he was cast in Nick & Nora, a Broadway musical adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, with a creative team that read like a guarantee. It should have been the hottest ticket of the season. It became instead one of the most legendary disasters in the history of the American theater.
The production previewed for an unheard of 71 performances while director Arthur Laurents kept rewriting it. The opening night was postponed so many times that the theater community joked the show was being murdered nightly. When Nick & Nora finally opened at the Marquis Theater on December 8, 1991, the reviews were brutal, and one week later, after just nine official performances, it closed. Its co-star Joanna Gleason described the experience as a huge mushroom cloud over the theater.
The critics, in Sarandon’s own words, killed it. It was, he said plainly, the worst time of his life. But Gleason was standing next to him in front of that same firing squad, a Tony-winning actress with wit enough to mock the gallows. Two people, both broke, both publicly humiliated, found in each other the thing that catastrophe could not touch.
When the show closed, they left it together. They married in 1994. He has called the moment he met her the beginning of his third life. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Sarandon kept working, but the parts grew smaller.
He moved between guest spots on television and the stage, which had always been his first home. In 2006, he returned to Broadway in The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center, a show that won six Tony Awards. He and Gleason appeared together on stage and screen across the decades, two careers braided into one marriage. For years, Sarandon worked quietly with playwright Susan Rice on Not Someone Like Me, a collection of monologues drawn from the real experiences of women who had been physically and sexually assaulted.
He directed it and toured it, including a return to his old college in West Virginia. “No,” Rice told him when he asked if a woman should direct it, “because the audience for the play should be men. ”
The acting, as he tells it now, has more or less stopped, and he does not pretend to mourn it. “Honestly, I don’t have the fire in my belly anymore,” he said.
“I set out to have a career. I didn’t set out to be famous. ” During the COVID lockdown, he started a podcast called Cooking by Heart, in which he sits with friends and asks them not about their careers but about food and the memories cooked into it. The spaghetti-on-the-floor instinct from Dog Day Afternoon turned into a format.
In his later years, Chris and Susan Sarandon, estranged for decades, reconnected as friends. In 2023, she appeared live on stage with him to talk about the romance of their youth. She said he had taken her to black and white movies and introduced her to literature, and she had believed, correctly, that he knew everything. He had, she said, “basically saved her life with his kindness.
” And then she turned to him and said, “I credit you with my foundation and my survival. ”
The wider world remembers the surfaces: the seductive vampire next door, the bored and scheming prince, the singing skeleton whose face sells merchandise every October. Film historians remember Leon, the tender performance in his first picture that broke open a kind of human representation American cinema had not yet allowed itself. But the truer legacy is the one his first wife named out loud on a stage in 2023.
It is not a role at all. Chris Sarandon set out to have a career, not to be famous. He got both.
And somewhere in between, by the testimony of the people who survived the firing squads and mushroom clouds beside him, he was the kind of man who saved other people’s lives with his kindness, and then drove alone into the African bush to save his own.