She wore dark glasses, gripped the steering wheel and drove toward a cliff.

For most actresses, such a scene would have marked the end of a character. For the woman behind the wheel, it created an immortal image of freedom, rebellion and female friendship—and transformed her into one of Hollywood’s most fearless stars.

Yet the road that brought her there was filled with unexpected lovers, provocative roles, political battles and decisions that repeatedly placed her career in danger.

She was born in New York City as the eldest of nine children in a deeply Catholic household. Her father worked in advertising and television production, while her mother raised the enormous family. The future star attended Catholic schools and later studied drama at the Catholic University of America.

Oddly enough, her first major opportunity arrived at an audition she had attended mainly to support her husband.

He did not receive a role.

She did.

The film was Joe, a dark 1970 drama about generational conflict, drugs and violence. Her portrayal of a troubled young woman opened Hollywood’s doors, but stardom did not arrive overnight. She worked in soap operas and accepted supporting parts while gradually developing a reputation for intelligence, sensuality and a willingness to explore uncomfortable material.

Then, in 1975, she stepped into a strange castle wearing only a slip.

As the innocent Janet Weiss in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she became part of a film initially dismissed by many critics. Midnight audiences transformed it into a cult phenomenon, shouting lines at the screen and returning in costume year after year.

The seemingly conventional young woman from a Catholic family had become an icon of cinematic rebellion.

Her private life was changing just as dramatically.

She married actor Chris Sarandon while still in college. Although the marriage ended in divorce, she kept his surname—the name under which the world would eventually know her. She later became romantically involved with French director Louis Malle, who directed her in the controversial Pretty Baby and the acclaimed Atlantic City.

The latter brought her first Academy Award nomination.

Other famous men entered her story. She acknowledged a brief romantic involvement with David Bowie and later had a daughter, actress Eva Amurri, with Italian filmmaker Franco Amurri.

But the relationship that fascinated Hollywood began on a baseball field.

While filming Bull Durham, she met a younger actor playing an unpredictable rookie pitcher. She portrayed Annie Savoy, a confident baseball devotee who selected one player each season as her lover and student. The chemistry between the two actors escaped the screen.

They became partners and had two sons, but never married.

For more than two decades, they appeared to be one of Hollywood’s most stable unconventional couples. They raised their family, acted together and marched side by side for progressive political causes. Their refusal to marry became part of their mystique.

When they separated in 2009, fans were stunned.

She later entered a relationship with Jonathan Bricklin, a businessman more than 30 years her junior. Together they became involved with SPiN, a chain of fashionable table-tennis clubs. The age difference generated headlines, but she refused to allow conventional expectations to define her romantic life.

Her screen choices were equally daring.

In The Hunger, she shared a famously sensual scene with Catherine Deneuve. In The Witches of Eastwick, she joined Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer in confronting Jack Nicholson’s devilish seducer. In The Client, she played a determined lawyer protecting a frightened boy.

Then came the outlaw road movie.

Alongside Geena Davis, she portrayed a waitress whose weekend escape became a desperate flight from the law. The final image of the two women choosing the unknown over surrender became one of cinema’s most debated endings.

Four years later, she delivered the performance that finally won her an Oscar.

In Dead Man Walking, she played Sister Helen Prejean, a nun serving as spiritual adviser to a condemned murderer. The role demanded compassion without sentimentality and moral courage without easy answers. After four previous nominations, Hollywood could no longer deny her.

But awards never made her cautious.

She opposed the Iraq War, supported Occupy Wall Street and protested the Trump administration’s family-separation policy—an action that led to her arrest in 2018. She also angered many Democrats by supporting third-party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 and Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Her activism sometimes carried a professional price.

In 2023, comments she made at a pro-Palestinian rally sparked intense criticism and led United Talent Agency to drop her. She later apologized, describing her phrasing as a terrible mistake and acknowledging that it had diminished the long history of antisemitic persecution.

The controversy might have silenced a more cautious celebrity.

She continued speaking.

That stubbornness has defined her career from the beginning. She has never seemed interested in being universally adored. She played sexual women without shame, became a mother outside marriage, loved younger men, challenged presidents and accepted roles that exposed the contradictions of morality, desire and justice.

Even as she entered her late seventies, she continued acting rather than retreating into nostalgia. Her face carried the history of a woman who had survived more than five decades in an industry that often abandons actresses as they age.

Perhaps that is why the final scene of that famous road movie still feels so powerful.

The woman behind the wheel was never simply escaping the police. She represented something Hollywood could neither control nor comfortably explain—a woman determined to choose her own ending.

The Catholic schoolgirl who became a midnight-movie heroine, an outlaw feminist icon, an Oscar-winning nun and one of Hollywood’s most unapologetically political stars is Susan Sarandon.