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Hollywood likes to label Tim Robbins a political animal. But perhaps it's because he doesn't play the game. The actor-turned-director simply believes in saying and doing what he thinks right, and luckily his talent has tended to equal his conviction.

The Man Behind the Moral Mouthpiece.
He's the political conscience of Hollywood, the left-leaning maverick whose outspoken views on everything from the World Bank to Haitian AIDS victims have made him one of the most respected figures in movies. Tim Robbins learned at a very early age to stand up for his opinions, no matter how unpopular they might be. But as he tells Martyn Palmer, the courage of his convictions has also earned him a lot of powerful enemies and marked him as a Tinseltown outsider.

Believe it or not, Tim Robbins, that oh-so-politically correct actor, director and Hollywood voice of conscience on everything from the death penalty to Haitian AIDS victims, is actually a bit of a Peter Pan. Just ask his partner of 13 years, Susan Sarandon. She says he will, for instance, play long into the night with their three children, knocking a baseball about until way past their bedtime, but has a knack of conveniently disregarding the essential domestic chores - little things such as feeding the kids on time or clearing up the mess after a boisterous game of piggy back - while Sarandon finds herself playing a rather different role in the relationship, that of the nag and killjoy who keeps the wheels of everyday life well oiled and on track.

"I'm the one who says, 'It's time to come in now, it's getting late...'" she says. "And he can just play for hours. Sometimes he has to remind me that I should forget about it and join in the game. Someone has to nag them into doing homework and say 'no,' but you can become that kind of negative machine. But maybe it's a good match because of that."

While this paints a certain picture of one of the film world's most successful couples, it is also a revealing glimpse of the man behind such worthy, thought-provoking films as Bob Roberts (a biting send-up of a folk-singing right-wing politician), Dead Man Walking (a grueling true story of a nun who befriends a death-row killer) and his latest, Cradle Will Rock (an epic set in Depression-era New York which deals with the grand theme of personal and artistic freedom and courage). And it's a picture almost completely at odds with the popular public perception of Robbins as a serious left-wing mouthpiece, grinding his own axe through his films.

"I try to have a sense of humor about it," Robbins says. "But it's a little frustrating because I think I'm making movies about humanity, compassion, joy and freedom, and all of those words are about as diametrically opposed to the word 'politics' as you can possibly get. I don't get the label, I really don't."

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he and Sarandon campaign tirelessly on everything from the Clinton administration's treatment of Haitian AIDS victims, to the homeless, the Gulf War and the World Bank and IMF, to mention but a few. And in Hollywood, a town noted for its liberal-minded filmmakers and ultra-conservative studio heads, this sort of talk can ruffle a few feathers.

"It's tough," Robbins agrees. "I don't know what keeps you going. Faith, I suppose. It was like in 1991, when Jacob's Ladder came out and I figured I'd be fine, but then the Gulf War happened and I protested against the war. I didn't have any money and I had a family and that's when (Robert) Altman came through for me. I had a choice between a job I didn't like, this comedy that just wasn't funny, and The Player."

"Then I had about four weeks when the Altman film was a possibility, but not a guarantee. Then Altman was told they wouldn't do the film with me. And Altman said, 'Well, fine. I'm not going to do it either.' He could easily have abandoned me, but he stood by me and really bailed me out."

The film, although never blockbuster fare, was critically acclaimed, and Robbins' portrayal of amoral studio head Griffin Mill gave him the chance to wave two fingers at the suits who had tried to stand in his way.

Almost a decade later, life for Sarandon and Robbins is different. No longer existing on the fringes of Hollywood acceptance - she, after all, is an Oscar winner, he successfully operates his own agenda - they nevertheless refuse to play the Tinseltown game. "It was harder earlier on," says Robbins. "It's difficult when you have to turn down a tremendous amount of money because you don't like what the script is saying and you don't have any money or any prospects of money."

They live in New York with their sons, Jack, 10, seven-year-old Miles, and Sarandon's daughter Eva, 14, from a previous relationship. "New York is more sane than LA," Robbins continues. "I walk everywhere, and if you walk fast enough, you don't really get bothered."

Robbins is a big, rangy man of 193cm with a fondness for sharp suits. That boyish face has few lines to reflect its 41 years, but his muddy brown hair is graying at the sides. In conversation he pauses often, so much so that you think he has finished an answer, then he jumps back in and carries on. He met Sarandon, now 53, in '88 on the set of Bull Durham. At that time she was the more experienced actor. Robbins had made only four films and was largely unknown.

As is often the way, romance blossomed on the set. As is not often the way, it endured long after Bull Durham had hit the box office and did both their careers a lot of good - although, typically, Robbins resisted the way Hollywood immediately tried to typecast him. "After Bull Durham I got all the dumb, charming Big Guy things you could possibly imagine," he says. "I didn't want to be pigeonholed like that, and I'm very happy with the way things turned out."

Robbins' path to the top began with a childhood firmly rooted in showbusiness. He was born in California and moved with his parents and three older siblings to New York's Greenwich Village when he was two. His father, Gil, was an actor and a member of folk-singing group The Highwaymen. He also helped to run the Gaslight Cafe, a bohemian club that promoted singers such as Tom Paxton and Cat Stevens. He was brought up a Catholic and immersed in his parents' liberal values.

"We would discuss who Martin Luther King Jr. was and what he was trying to do," Robbins recalls. "Our parents would say all of this tied in with our Catholicism and our responsibility to other human beings in the world - as it was our job to be as true as we could to our sense of justice and to Jesus Christ's sense of justice."

"Meanwhile, my brother was going to be drafted, although the US pulled out of Vietnam the year he was to go. and my sister was arrested during a protest. The way my mother described that to me was: 'You should be proud of her. She was fighting against this war, which is unjust.' I think there are lessons you take from your parents and one of the strongest ones I took from mine was that a mob isn't right. Just because your opinion is outnumbered doesn't mean you're wrong. Just because someone gets arrested doesn't mean what they are doing is wrong. Some laws are unfair and unjust."

It was a powerfully intoxicating world for the young Tim, who would help out backstage at the Gaslight and watch as dad and his pals went out front to perform. He loved the camaraderie, the excitement, and would spend every moment he could either at the cafe, and later, after his stage debut as a 12-year-old, at the New City Theatre.

By the time he was in high school Robbins was already directing his own school productions, performing with a street theatre group and, after two years at the State University of New York, transferred to UCLA in California to study theatre. "I guess my first exposure to the world of showbusiness was through my father," says Robbins. "I can remember going backstage and discovering that unique, wonderful and strange world full of eccentrics. I can remember the sensory feelings, the smell of make-up and spirit gum and the darkness leading up to a stage that's lit."

In a way, Robbins has been trying to re-create that world ever since. He formed his own theatre troupe, the Actor's Gang, in '81. Even Cradle Will Rock, which centers on a group of actors, directors and writers - including a young Orson Welles - working in federal theatre in New York, celebrates that "magic."

"It is a magical world," says Robbins. "For me, it's like a gypsy existence where you bond with these people very closely and very emotionally for a period of time then you lose them to a different caravan. There's a spirit and there's a lot of banter, obviously, which I love. And yes, I had tried to capture that in Cradle Will Rock."

The Player, which won him the best actor award at Cannes in '92 and a Golden Globe, gave Robbins the clout to get his own movies off the ground. He wrote, directed and starred in Bob Roberts. Sarandon popped up in little more than a cameo in that film, but they were to work together again in Dead Man Walking in '95, a performance which won her the Best Actress Oscar.

Ask Robbins about Sarandon and suddenly the pauses are gone. "We obviously have our love and our trust. So when you work with someone you love and trust it's easier. I've directed Susan three times and each time it gets easier and easier. And you know one of the things I love about her? She really has got balls. She has the guts to do different things. As an actress she has the courage to be unsympathetic, and there are so few people who do that. Even the so-called icons, and you know who I mean here, you can fill in the spaces because I'm not going to mention any names. I mean, there's Glenn Close, she has a similar thing, but Susan is just great. Man, I know I'm biased, but she's a great actress."

Understandably, Sarandon is a huge fan of her partner's work - although, on set for Dead Man Walking, there were times when things got heated. "We might have a disagreement now and then, but who wouldn't?" she says. "You are working long and hard on something you are both passionate about, and it's healthy to air things, get stuff out in the open."

"I love Tim's work. I'm very proud of him. And, you know, the people who go on about his work being 'political,' that's just a way of trying to minimalize his work. You show me a film that isn't political in some way."

We are back to politics again. Robbins will rightly point out that, as an actor, he has made plenty of films which could hardly raise a political eyebrow. There have been prison dramas (the excellent Shawshank Redemption), thrillers (Jacob's Ladder, Arlington Road) and comedies (lots of them, such as Cadillac Man, The Hudsucker Proxy, Nothing to Lose, Bull Durham).

"I don't view myself as a political leftie," says Robbins. "I view myself as a storyteller who is fair to both sides. I have personal beliefs and they are sometimes reflected in the movies I make, but I also reflect other points of view. I think that anyone who challenges the order of things, especially once they become successful, there is an attempt to marginalize them, put them in a corner. You could take any film that's a major success and you could label it political. So I reject labels."

"For example, I don't think Bob Roberts is political. I think it's a movie about politics. But Dead Man Walking is not about politics. It's about human beings and love and the capacity to love and the capacity of the heart to hold hatred and also to hold forgiveness. Cradle Will rock is really about freedom and the celebration of freedom. So I wouldn't define my work as one thing."

"And as an actor I don't think I can be pigeonholed either. Usually actors play one thing and that's it. Extremely successful actors play the same role over and over because they become a bankable box-office commodity, and if you are bankable like that you don't stray too far from what made you bankable in the first place. So you know exactly what you are getting. Whereas with me, I don't think you know what you are getting."

He's right. With Tim Robbins it's hard to predict what he will do next. His latest role, for instance, is playing an astronaut in the big-budget Brian De Palma sci-fi thriller Mission to Mars. Then there's Cradle Will Rock, his most ambitious project yet.

Robbins, who wrote the script, spent years researching the true story of how Welles' theatre company defied censorship to perform their musical, called The Cradle Will Rock, in '30s America. He weaves real characters - Welles, his collaborator and producer John Houseman, Nelson Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst - with fictional ones, and creates a complex, multi-layered story of Depression-era America on the brink of a cultural and social revolution.

"It's all about artistic freedom of expression," he says. "This was a time in which there was no unemployment insurance, no minimum wages, no welfare and a looming threat of turmoil in the US. It was an act of heroism that screamed to be told. The more research I did, the more interesting people from all walks of life presented themselves as characters in the story. What started as a story about a theatre company being censored began to grow into a wild cornucopia of ideas."