Dr. Nielsen had better be careful, Sarandon's lover boy, Tim Robbins, doesn't take kindly to criticism of his little Susan.
Posted on 04/22/2003 3:58:04 AM PDT by Zacs Mom
EDMONTON - It's hard to imagine feeling let down when Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon is playing your character in a movie. But that's how Ice Bound reacts to her portrayal in the new tele movie, Ice Bound.
"I'm disappointed," says the 51-year-old doctor famous for the diagnosis and treatment of her own breast cancer while at the South Pole in 1999. "I wish they would have met me. I think it would have been nice to have had a chance to have them know me before they wrote about me or tried to play me."
Based on the book Nielsen wrote about her experience, Ice Bound starts as Nielsen (Sarandon) arrives at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on Antarctica, one of the coldest and most remote places on Earth. Nielsen had agreed to spend a year taking care of the health of staff at the research centre, which is cut off from the rest of the world in the winter when it's too cold for planes to operate.
But when she discovered a fast-growing lump in her breast, roles at the Pole were reversed. The doctor had to rely on fellow "Polies" to keep her healthy. With no medical background, co-workers learned how to administer Nielsen's chemotherapy until a rescue flight could safely carry her back to the United States.
Nielsen lost a breast to cancer, but gained a circle of friends who remain close more than three years later. Nielsen says that's what makes it hard to accept the movie, which portrays her as a distant and dour character who doesn't much like the Pole once she gets there. Nothing could be further from her actual experience, she says.
"I knew I had finally found a society that I fit in and I was totally at home and I made the greatest friends of my life," recalls Nielsen, who shared her story with Edmontonians last year during her Unique Lives lecture at the Winspear Centre.
Nielsen went from feeling like an outsider most of her life to knowing she belonged. She's not exactly sure why she felt so comfortable in a place most would find a challenge to sheer survival.
"Maybe it was the morals of the group, the concept of duty and responsibility, our ideas of honour and friendship," she says. "Women were allowed to grow there and be whole people. We weren't judged by our appearance or by external weird stuff that's meaningless."
In the movie, Sarandon is seen as a woman who had fled problems all her life. Nielsen insists she wasn't running from anything when she decided to tackle the South Pole, unless boredom counts.
"We're all trying to change our lives in some way. I was leaving a flat line, a grey life that had developed because I was middle-aged."
At the top of her profession, she knew her choices were to sit around doing the same thing until she retired, or try something new. Though she refuses to talk about her family situation -- a nasty and very public lawsuit between her and her ex-husband erupted after her book came out in 2001 -- she insists the South Pole was adventure, not therapy.
"I'd had disappointments in my life, but my attitude is not that you run, but that you go towards something positive and you go after your dreams."
The doctor understands why the film's creators needed to make her character initially unpleasant. They needed a story arc, a place for the character to go.
"They wanted me to change," she says. "I did change spiritually, but you can't see that on the outside and it's hard to show that in a quick movie."
Nielsen thinks there's another reason why moviemakers had to give her a different motivation than the one that truly took her to the Pole.
"They can't imagine that a middle-aged, dumpy, professional woman from the hinterlands would suddenly decide to have an extreme adventure. They think something has to be behind it. What's behind it is a little girl with a goal who has always had dreams and there's lots of us out there."
lfaulder@thejournal.canwest.com
I like yours though.
Dr. Nielsen had better be careful, Sarandon's lover boy, Tim Robbins, doesn't take kindly to criticism of his little Susan.
Well, sweetie, you should've known better than to expect Hollywood to give a damn about trivial things like "facts" or "reality".
I actually met Robbins and Sarandon at a Museum once. I complimented Robbins on his performance in Jacob's Ladder. Robbins is very tall, goofy, and psychologically enslaved/dependent on the short, ugly, domineering Sarandon, who looks hideous without make-up.
That phrase is almost never used anymore. It has been replaced by the phrase, "inspired by actual events."
This allows the writers to take creative liberties and also frees Hollywood from having to pay and obtain permission from the person whose story is being told.
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