Susan Sarandon: sexy, single and 63

Playing a glamorous granny may not top the wish-list of every leading lady. But Susan Sarandon, newly single at 63, is unfazed by getting older. On the eve of her new film, The Lovely Bones, she tells Chrissy Iley why marriage was not for her, why she's getting into tattoos and how laughter keeps her skin perfect

The first thing you notice about Susan Sarandon is how comfortable she feels in her own body. She often talks about how proud she is of her breasts, but it's more than that. There is something about how connected she is to herself that makes her charismatic. She is instantly accessible, perching on a little sofa in Claridge's hotel, wondering why the green tea is brown. She is wearing black jeggings, New Balance trainers, an oversized sweater with a cream lace shirt underneath. A curious outfit, yet somehow you notice her – not its oddness.

Her skin is flawless, her eyes huge and all-consuming. She is not afraid to look at you and she's not afraid to let you look right in at her. It's an open face. No slyness, no manipulation. She is renowned for being a woman who doesn't fear most things and certainly doesn't fear speaking her mind.

It is that truth-telling that later on in the interview makes us come a little undone. But more of that later.

To start off we are embracing the fearlessness that makes her sexy at any age, whether she is doing a lesbian love scene with Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger, driving off a cliff in Thelma and Louise or reinventing the screen granny as she does in her latest film, The Lovely Bones. Leopard-skin accessories, Jackie O hair and racoon eyes – she's the sexiest thing in the movie, a meditation on death.

We've met before. The last time, she turned up feeling sick, had to go and vomit halfway through the interview, but she didn't want to cancel because it might have inconvenienced me. The show must go on.

Today she is feeling healthy. She talks about her new regime of dehydrated fruits and vegetables, and her ping-pong club in New York. Then she'll catalogue what drugs she's done and what exactly they do. There is no self- conscious talking about the movie, even though there's an awards buzz already for her.

She won an Oscar for playing the nun in Dead Man Walking. Her career started off in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Following that, she was Brooke Shields's hooker mother in Pretty Baby and went on to have a long and tortured affair with its director, Louis Malle. She specialises in every nuance of the mother role, making it in turns forceful, sexy and unsentimental, and was the most unvictimy cancer victim in Stepmom.

She's just come from Sweden, where she received a lifetime achievement award, but is more excited that she met a table tennis gold medallist "because I have opened a ping-pong bar in Manhattan and I want him to come". Her sons Jack Henry, 20, and Miles, 17, have both DJ-ed there, and it was one of the coolest places in Manhattan before it had even had a liquor licence.

"Girls can beat boys, old ladies can beat young guys and little girls can beat older guys. It's about strategy, and you can't get hurt…" she says, her eyes spinning with excitement. Her ping-pong fever started when she was working with an editor who was also making a documentary about table tennis. "I wouldn't say that I play very well, but I make it possible for other people to play well."

Facilitating, nurturing, making things happen, organising are all at the core of her. The oldest child of seven, she's had a lifetime of doing things for other people. But who facilitates her?

"Not enough people," she says with a dryness that comes right from the back of her throat. "That's the curse of the confident woman. Most people know that if you take care of yourself and open your own doors, they stop opening them for you. It's harder to ask for help because you get in the habit of taking care of yourself, and I think you forget how to ask." Her eyes look searching now. "I am trying to change all of that. I am trying to repattern myself now that my youngest is out of the house." The change seems to scare her and excite her in equal parts. The change is something she refers back to many times. It's a big deal, a new her.

She peers into her cup of brown green tea. "I celebrated my 63rd birthday and got blood tests and saw a nutritionist. I want to do a pre-emptive strike on whatever is building up in me, so I'm travelling with this dehydrated green stuff and red stuff and cutting out all sugar and all liquor. I rarely drink, so that wasn't hard. The bad one was bread. I love bread. I cheat sometimes. When I did the play [Exit the King on Broadway] I got run down and was drinking serious caffeine, so I needed to clean up my act. I'm very susceptible to drugs of every kind. Coffee, it's great because it gets me very up, but then I crash."

I tell her I find coffee comforting. She surmises authoritatively: "You are probably someone who takes Ritalin to calm them."

When she says drugs have such an effect on her, what kind of drugs does she mean? "I mean anything! I'm not really interested in drinking. Tequila maybe, but champagne makes me fall asleep. It doesn't take much. I love mushrooms and I've done those successfully, but I don't like anything chemical. I didn't like LSD, and ecstasy wouldn't agree with me. I like stuff you can smoke."

I tell her that the stuff you smoke makes me paranoid and depressed. "Oh, that's sad," she says in a heartfelt way, as if she's running through all the good times that I'll never have. "Everyone is wired differently. Some people can do stuff that others can't. That's what I told my kids. Some drugs can kill you. Some are not even worth trying. Some are a lot of fun, so talk to me first."

It doesn't surprise me that seven minutes into our interview we are discussing chemical versus herbal drugs in detail. Sarandon is curious and open. Some things she just can't be bothered to hide or be polite about. She once said it was her ambition to be the longest working actor. She works a lot but doesn't need a star role, just one with meat on it. She loved working with Peter Jackson on The Lovely Bones because "he knew what he wanted. It was a very pleasant experience. I've been on films where I didn't particularly like the director, which wasn't the case here. You don't have to be best friends with someone, but if they are passionate you respect them. I've also worked with directors who are just trying to get to dinner. They want their martini and to get out of there. And that's a terrible thing. I've done a number of low-budget indie films lately where the director has also been the writer and they have cut at the behest of the powers-that-be the very things that made their movies special, because they think homogenising it will make it appeal to the most amount of people and it will make the most money."

Did she suffer by working on things that were quirky and got homogenised? "Yeah. They're still waiting to come out," she deadpans. She doesn't want to say which ones they are but Solitary Man, Leaves of Grass and The Greatest are all indie films with writer-directors.

She's not bitter, just bemused. "I wouldn't have done them if [certain] scenes had been cut. Imagine in that movie with Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller [There's Something About Mary] if the hair scene had been cut out. Imagine people saying: 'Oh, that goes too far…'

"When I did Dead Man Walking people were trying to get me to have an affair or the guy not to die. The whole movie would have been completely different." In it she stays a nun and Sean Penn, the man on death row, does die and it is, of course, brilliant. Did The Lovely Bones make her think about mortality? "Well, I'm always thinking about it… I think it was interesting to think about how grief is processed. I remember talking to some firefighters' wives months after 9/11 and them saying: 'I'm still angry. People don't understand.'"

We talk briefly about how grief, just like drugs, affects people differently. We agree that the coping mechanism is to disconnect from the pain until something in a movie you are watching or something in a song suddenly reconnects you to it in an unexpected moment. "I am just like that," she says. "I am so busy getting everyone else through it that I don't luxuriate in whatever it is you have to go through."

The Lovely Bones is the Alice Sebold book that became a bestseller in 2002. For a lot of people, reading it was the way they processed 9/11.

"The reason so many people gravitated towards the book after 9/11 was that it somehow helped if you believed your father had passed on and you might be having a baby and somehow that he was somewhere appreciating that. That there is some kind of continuum."

In the book, the parents of the raped and murdered teenager, Susie, implode in different ways. The mother goes off to have an affair and the father becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer. The affair is cut from the movie. Sarandon gives a half smile. Another scene cut from the movie was one of Sarandon's pivotal ones, in which she goes into the bedroom where everything has been preserved just as she left it and rips the sheets off.

"There's always the balance of what the director thinks is more important, and he was focused on more than the family dynamic. Some people get really pissed off with bereavement. Others can't get out of bed. I know when my dad passed away I was much more objective. There were things to be done and I felt I needed to do them."

As the eldest of seven she was used to taking charge. "They all needed me and they all needed to get up and speak at the memorial, and I really didn't want to because I didn't want it to be about me, so I didn't speak. I was seeing my dad every weekend, but he wasn't living in my house. I think unless you are living with someone you can delude yourself."

Her agent of 25 years, Sam Cohen, recently died, too. "I did speak at the memorial. I was flattered that they asked me – it was very difficult. You try not to just wail and at the same time you are incredibly disconnected."

She is so disconnected she hasn't crossed out dead people's names from her phone book. She uses an old-fashioned phone book. It's somehow more vicious to cross them than to delete them from a mobile phone. "I'm always telling my kids they should have a back-up, because if you lose your phone everything gets stolen. I look at my phone book and there is a whole history there. I don't cross out the dead people. I hold on to T-shirts and gifts that people who have passed away have given me."

A few months ago, when she performed Ionesco's Exit the King on Broadway, which is all about confronting death, she turned her dressing room into a little shrine for people who had died. "I would talk to them before I went on, for perspective," she remembers. "They were people I thought would like the play, like Bob Altman and Paul Newman. I would say: 'Help me remember this is just a play and not to take myself so seriously.'"

Did she feel they talked backed? "No, but I did feel good having them there. I also had new little souls – babies and pictures of my kids when they were little and new babies that had just been born."

Does she believe that souls get passed on? "Maybe. I'm not so sure, but the one thing that makes me believe that something goes on is that I felt that I had already known my children in some way, before they were born. When my daughter Eva was about three she asked me when we'd first met, and I started to tell her the story of her birth. She said: 'No, I remember when I wanted to pick you as my mother.'

"Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote the book about the five stages of dying and she wanted me to do a movie about her life," Sarandon adds. "She said that kids have the easiest time passing on because they didn't have so many attachments."

The first time Sarandon played a mother she was 32, and that didn't represent the milestone that it could have been. Even pain she seems to cherish as a poetic experience. Her relationship with Louis Malle sounds epically tortured. He was the director, she the actress. "I learned a lot from him because he was from France and older. I don't regret any of the relationships I've had, even the ones that practically killed me."

She talks about sobbing for days and being humiliated, but never for long. "I always believe that lovers and certain people come into your life, as well as certain jobs. It may not be clear at the time, but they come for a reason. Exit the King – 120 nights meditating on death. That definitely changes you."

Sarandon tells me she is going to change everything and that she is looking forward to "repatterning" herself. "I have been living a wonderful life, but I have to rediscover my voice. I have been a function of my family's needs for such a long time. I have defined myself as a mother first, always checking the schedules. I did it with my siblings. My son said: 'You are the glue that keeps the family together.' And I'm sure an element of that will remain."

It's like her whole life she's been trying to escape being the caretaker, the responsible one. She's escaped into rebellious parts. On films she can push boundaries, be daring.

She left home to go to Catholic University in Washington DC. "I couldn't wait to leave home. I was always shy, but I knew there was something outside. That was the main reason I went to college." Yet she hadn't been in college long before she got married. Why did she get married so young? "At that time you couldn't live together if you weren't married. He was a grad student. I was 17 when I met him and slept with him when I was 19 and got married when I was 20. How backwards is that? I was a Catholic and I was living with my grandparents to save money." Did she love him? "Oh yes, he was a dear man, and very instrumental. I felt safe with him. He introduced me to black and white movies and poetry. There's a huge difference between a graduate student and a freshman."

There's an almost romantic yearning when she talks about this first love, Chris Sarandon, whose name she kept. "It's a very good name." The marriage didn't last because perhaps she wanted more than safety. They both ended up having children and her son Jack is the same age as his son Max. She describes it as if it's a life that could have been hers.

After the marriage broke down she had a kind of meltdown. It's hard to explain exactly what triggered it; it seems to have been many things. Perhaps believing that life was going to be certain and safe and discovering it was not. At the time she decided she would get through it without any pharmaceutical help.

"It worries me that people see pain as an alien thing," she says. "There won't be any poetry if everyone is on such an even keel."

She only got married once, and not to Eva's father, director Franco Amurri. She became pregnant in a miraculous accident: she had been told her endometriosis would mean she could never have children and she stopped taking the pill. She had not known Amurri long before they became parents. Their relationship was never meant to last.

Sarandon then met Tim Robbins on the set of Bull Durham in 1988. She never planned to marry him either. "I don't get the marriage thing. When people ask me to support gay marriage they are asking the wrong person." She seems to rail against being part of a couple. Playing safe doesn't exist for her.

"My daughter talks about getting married. She thinks it will be great, and a great party… My friend had a daughter who got married pretty young. She was about 23 and it was a huge wedding and she is a celebrity and her daughter is a celebrity and she said: 'It's a good first marriage.' I thought: 'Fair enough.' A few years and one child later she's not married any more." I think we can figure out that that's Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson, but Sarandon does one of those cartoon smiles.

Does she think she'll be with Tim for ever? "I have no idea." Cartoon smile disappears. Does she want to be? "I'm not going to talk about it." Cosy Sarandon disappears. The air is thick with something I can't quite make out. Anger, it seems like. Everybody knows she and Robbins have had one of the loveliest relationships. Or so I thought… I wondered why a wall came down. She had been almost forensic in her intimacy, and here she was, closed down completely. I couldn't understand the sudden change of pace. She saw that I looked shocked and offered: "I think I'm just very superstitious." There was a silence during which neither of us knew what to say. Avoiding questions doesn't come easily to her.

A couple of weeks later her US publicist announced that Sarandon and Robbins had separated. For years people had marvelled at their like-mindedness and revelled in the fact that she was 12 years older than him and unfazed by that. "Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have split up. Has the world come to an end?" one blog read.

And what of Sarandon? Is that why she wants to reinvent herself? Unleash her old patterns? Radically detox physically and emotionally?

I wonder if the tattoo round her wrist, which looks like a ring of barbed wire, is a symbol for relationship torture. "No. It only looks like barbed wire. It actually says: 'A new dawn, a new day' to remind me that every day you come into the world you are born again a new person. I have a large one on my back which I got during the filming of Lovely Bones. It's my kids' initials."

Typical Sarandon. Never does things in the right age or order. She discovered tattoos in her 60s and has made tattooing a family event.

"My son Jack has one and my daughter just got one too when I had this one on my wrist. She has the Latin words for being present and being conscious written in typewriter script, and my son got a Ganesh."

So you all went together as a family?

"No. Just me and my daughter, and my son was very angry that I got mine before his, but he couldn't think what he wanted. I left after the matinée of Exit the King and met him at the tattoo place and went back for the evening show, so I was there for most of his tattoo.

"I had given him a little Ganesh when he graduated high school and he was going to travel around Europe. He was afraid he'd lose it. So he had a duplicate of it as a tattoo. Miles doesn't have

one yet, but he will."

Sarandon has never been able to be stereotyped. Playing a grandmother in The Lovely Bones has not made her feel old or unsexy. "I think we have to revamp the idea of what it means to be a grandmother. This one is the anti-granny."

She is the only sexy, funny thing in the movie, and that is her purpose: to lift it, to stop it from being tragic. "I loved the hair, and the outfits were fabulous. The arc of my character is seen through her hair. In the end it's limp and discombobulated. It was my own hair by then. She didn't have time, and with grief your maintenance just goes."

Sarandon looks good because she looks after herself. "Everything used to be over by the time you were 40," she says. "When I did Bull Durham I had just turned 40, and that was a great part."

She played a baseball groupie and felt very sexy in that role, and it's special to her because it's when she first met Robbins. Does she still feel sexy? "Yes, I am sexy. Someone said to me recently: 'Do you think about ageing?' and I think: what's the choice? A lot of what we don't like aesthetically about women who are fighting ageing is fear manifesting. I don't think you should try to look 22 when you are in your 60s. There is something odd about a woman who looks younger than she did 20 years ago. I'm not against anybody doing anything to themselves that makes them feel good, but aesthetically some fillers and stuff make people unrecognisable. It's difficult to watch somebody's face, to see someone who has lips that are unrecognisable. I've never had fillers, and how can you get Botox when you're an actor?"

Has she ever had anything done? "Yes, I had under my chin sucked out once. I think we have to be supportive of each other, and if someone wants to get implants or tucks you hope that that will be fine and they will keep the essence of who they are and not go over the top."

Does she have a regime to stay in shape?

"I have a trainer for strength because I don't want osteoporosis to come, and I do gyrotonic when I can. Young actors ask me: 'Why is your skin so great; what is your product?' and all I say is: 'Stop smoking, that's the big one.' And just not overindulging, and being happy. Laughing does a lot for the face. Do the things you enjoy. Surround yourself with good people. Denying yourself is not good for the face. You can't be a bitter, angry person. Hatred is unsexy and not great for your skin."

There has been talk of an Oscar nomination for The Lovely Bones. "I'd love that," she says instantly, without any false modesty. "Acting is really not that complicated. It's surviving as a human being that's difficult."★

The Lovely Bones is out on 19 February

• This article was amended on 18 January 2010 because we incorrectly referred to "Bill Durham" as the name of the film on which Susan Sarandon met Tim Robbins; it should have been Bull Durham.

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