Tim Robbins - Biography

Name: Tim Robbins

Born: 16 October 1958 (Age: 51)

Where: West Covina, California USA

Height: 6' 5"

Awards: Won 1 Oscar and 3 Golden Globes, 2 BAFTA Nominations

Whether it be due to fear, indifference or disaffection, it's notable how few of today's popular entertainers ever make a political stand. Award wins are taken as an opportunity to thank their manager and the studio/record company, those who've made them rich and will hopefully continue to do so. It seems the spirit of the Sixties, where art went hand-in-hand with revolution and artists believed they could use their talent and status to change the world for the better, is dying.

Yet in some quarters it's dying hard. Some artists still believe, still mouth off, still endanger their careers in the name of human decency. And surely close to the top of this hallowed league is Tim Robbins. Along with his partner, Susan Sarandon, he has purposefully made himself a thorn in the side of the right-wing Establishment, fighting for the liberal cause, both with unions and on his own. Beyond this, throughout his career he has cleverly worked the system, making big bucks from the studios and ploughing it back into his own worthy projects - mostly theatre projects, but also outstanding movies like Bob Roberts, Dead Man Walking and The Cradle Will Rock. These are award-winning films with something to say, that challenge popular opinions and make audiences think. And they reveal Robbins to be not just a fine actor and director but also one of the most important figures in (and out of) Hollywood today.

Unsurprisingly, Robbins sprang from an artistic and wholly bohemian milieu. He was born Timothy Francis Robbins on the 16th of October, 1958, in West Covina, California, a town on the eastern edge of the Los Angeles/Pasadena conurbation. His parents, Gil (a musician and part-time actor) and Mary (a musician and later a publishing editor in the magazine industry) had met while both were studying music majors at UCLA and had married in 1952. Tim arrived as the youngest of four children, after Adele, David and Gabrielle.

At this point, Gil was enjoying some success in his musical career. Having played with the Robert de Cormier Singers and backed the hugely popular Harry Belafonte, he'd gone on to join The Cumberland Three, a group also featuring John Stewart, who'd later write Daydream Believer for The Monkees and, in the late Seventies, score a major hit of his own with Gold. At the time, a folk revival was underway, and most record labels were seeking their own version of prime movers The Kingston Trio. The Cumberland Three fitted the bill, in 1960 releasing two albums, The Civil War Almanacs, to some acclaim.

The momentum wouldn't last, though, with Stewart soon joining the aforementioned Kingston Trio. Noting that much of the new folk scene's action was taking place in New York, Gil upped sticks and took his young family across the States to the Big Apple, where he joined another renowned folk band, The Highwaymen. These guys were softcore traditionalists, far removed from the fiery politics of folk peers like Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and Phil Ochs, and thus doomed, but they had hit Number One with a version of Michael, Row The Boat Ashore and were still going strong. With Gil onboard they toughened their stance a little, covering the likes of Buffy St Marie's Universal Soldier.

For the Robbins kids, the move to New York brought exposure to a whole new world. The family lived in Greenwich Village, at 21 ' King Street, just a few blocks from Washington Square, a hot-bed of political protest and performance art. Gil and Mary being Catholics, the kids all attended parochial school and were taught by nuns. It's been said that young Tim's first stage performance was as an altar boy (Gil directed the congregational choir), but he was an unconventional altar boy. When it came to choosing a confirmation name, he picked Illya, after David McCallum's Illya Kuyakin in The Man From UNCLE. Sadly, the Vatican had yet to canonise the fictional Russian super-agent, and Tim's request was turned down.

Outside of school, life was far more bohemian. The King Street apartment was a 5th floor walk-up with one bedroom, Tim sleeping in a walk-in closet with his brother David. Gil and Mary would teach the kids music, guitar in particular, and there'd be the added bonus of famed folkies like Tom Paxton popping over for dinner. When Gil became manager of the Gaslight, one of New York's legendary folk clubs, the kids would hang out down there, mixing with the luminaries.

There was the occasional outside jaunt, too. In 1965, the Robbins's were hired by Eveready to play the Cordless family, a kind of living advert for their lead-free electric devices. Thus they spent two months on the road, renting a station wagon to drive to St Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, all over the country, doing TV and radio interviews and demonstrating appliances for all and sundry. Tim's job was to operate a battery-operated piggy-bank with a moving arm. It was his first real taste of performing for the public.

Yet constant contact with such liberated and creative individuals did not turn young Tim into some boho wild child. Rather his father would describe him as "sober and pontifical", referring to his son as "Cardinal Robbins". Gil's former manager would call Tim "the oldest person in the world". This was surely partly due to Tim's active interior life. Learning to speak late, he had nevertheless developed his own language, his siblings translating for him. His fantasy world was very highly developed.

This would come in handy when, at age 10, he joined his sisters in the avant garde theatre troupe, the Theatre for the New City, in an off-Broadway production of How To Steal An Election (that George W. Bush was in the audience remains unconfirmed). He loved it, and from now on would immerse himself in stage work wherever possible, in school and out. By 14 he would be directing his own shows.

Meanwhile, the boy was also receiving a political and social education. Now answering the phones down at the Gaslight, Tim would watch such spiritually - and politically-minded performers as Eric Andersen, Seals & Croft and Cat Stevens (though Richard Pryor was deemed too outre for his young ears). On the street, in Washington Square, he heard the social activists railing for change. It was the Sixties and revolution was in the air, unignorable even at home. Tim would duet with his father on the protest song The Ink Is Black But the Page Is White, and once he was woken up by his mother to be told he should be proud of his sister Adele, who'd just been arrested at Ohio's Antioch University for protesting against US involvement in Vietnam. Living in Greenwich Village, the seamier side of life was also unavoidable. For a while, when Tim was 11, there was a house of detention for women near King Street. Walking home, he'd hear them calling out the likes of "Help me, I need to get laid so baaad! I need somebody to f*** me!" Naturally, the centre's neighbours would soon have it moved elsewhere.

Living at the hub of such mind-expanding times, it was no shock that, at the science-orientated Stuyvesant High School, Tim should prove to be an excellent student. He was a big kid (he'd eventually grow to 6' 5") and athletic with it. Ice hockey was his preferred sport - he was a huge New York Rangers fan - and on the rink he'd work off his adolescent aggression, once being kicked off the team for fighting. Basketball was a favourite, too. Not only was his height an advantage, but he'd spent years playing with the local kids on the Village's public street courts. Yet theatre remained his greatest obsession and, at 15, funded to the tune of $20 a week by the State Endowment programme, he took to the streets to perform vaudeville sketches, often politically themed, one being based on the current Watergate scandal. Years later, his political skits would reach their apotheosis with Bob Roberts. For now, he was learning to hold people's attention while trucks roared by and mothers called out for their kids.

Academically, he was something of a brain, in 1976 winning a Regents Scholarship to the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, situated by Lake Champlain some 20 miles from Canada. Here he took up with a small theatre group, but this was not the challenging work he was used to. What did inspire him were the more bacchanalian aspects of college life. The Sex Pistols and The Clash, with their sneering anti-authoritarianism and street-smart glamour, gripped the boy's imagination and he spent the next two years in slam-dancing heaven. For money, he'd find work back in New York City as a spooler in a thread shop - not a career that really appealed.

His two years up, Tim took his first serious step towards a life in theatre. Moving to Los Angeles to stay with his brother David (David would be a musical composer, providing scores for many of Tim's theatre productions, and all the films he directed, dad Gil working on orchestral arrangements), Tim spent a year delivering pizzas and working as a waiter at the Hillcrest Country Club before enrolling at UCLA in the autumn of 1979, majoring in theatre.

At college, at last, he found some like minds. He joined a drama student softball team called the Male Death Cult and, working and playing together, they discovered shared ideas of what theatre could and should be. Fuelled by a punk sensibility, they demanded more energy and imagination from writers and performers and took as influences the white-faced weirdness of the commedia dell'arte and the turbulent works of Alfred Jarrey and Berthold Brecht. With Tim graduating in 1981, they became the Actors' Gang and Robbins, having survived some torrid power struggles in the early period, remains the group's Founding Artistic Director to this day.

The Gang's first production in Los Angeles brought them immediate attention. Directed by Robbins, this was an adaptation of Jarrey's Ubu Roi, a farce of murder, betrayal and revenge attacking middle-class mediocrity and stupidity that had provoked riots when first performed in Paris in 1896 (very punky, as was the fact that Pere Ubu, one of America's finest avant garde bands, had taken their name from the play). With Jarrey being known as the father of the Theatre of the Absurd, the Gang had plenty of scope to test their audience with haphazard scenery painting, confusing accents, puppet-like movements, masks, placards and assorted strangeness (after all, their motto was "Dare to be stupid"). Beyond this, they staged the play at midnight.

The Actors' Gang would go on to present many challenging productions, including Freaks and Mein Kampf (Robbins would win a Best Director award from the LA Critics' Circle for Brecht's The Good Woman Of Setzuan). Tim had at last found a perfect working environment - politically charged, anarchically creative and sometimes painfully physical. But the one thing he didn't have was money, financial backing that would allow the Gang to bring their ideas to onstage fruition.

So Tim decided, as many actors before and since, to take monied screenwork to finance his personal artistic endeavours. At the start, and indeed throughout his film career, this reasoning would see this highly talented actor appear in some absolute stinkers.

. From 1982 to 1985, he mixed TV work with minor screen appearances. On the tube he found work in such favourites as St Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues and Moonlighting, usually playing some tortured, deranged or rebellious kid. There was also the TV movie Quarterback Princess where a very young Helen Hunt played a girl in Oregon who battles to play on the football team, Daphne Zuniga playing her sister and Tim one of her team-mates. On the Silver Screen there was a brief part in No Small Affair, where a 16-year-old photographer fell for 22-year-old wannabe rock star Demi Moore (both Tim and Jennifer Tilly making their debuts), and then Toy Soldiers, where Robbins was one of a group of US college kids who get kidnapped in Central America by a drug lord's mercenaries, then escape, form a vigilante gang and kick their enemies' mercenary arses.

The next year, 1985, brought his first decent movie in Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing. Here John Cusack played an East Coast college kid who needs to get to California where he's been promised a date (and a lot more) with hot babe Nicolette Sheridan. Accepting a lift from Tim, a geeky singer of show-tunes, he's annoyed to find himself sharing the ride with an uptight classmate (Daphne Zuniga again) and the pair bicker across-country until Robbins dumps them. The rest you can guess.

The movie was a big hit for Reiner and a good move for Robbins. Not only did it bring him to studio attention but also allowed him to shore up the Actors' Gang - at this stage he figured that a reasonably sized role in a well-funded picture could finance one theatre production and keep him alive for six months. The film also introduced him to John Cusack with whom he became big drinking buddies. Cusack later visited Robbins and his Gang and was so impressed he took their ideas back to Chicago for use in his own New Crime Theatre.

1985 would also bring a couple of other money-makers for Tim, though artistically they were not from the top drawer. First came Fraternity Vacation where he played one of two college rascals offered a free Palm Springs holiday if they show a nerdy classmate how to have a good time. Naturally there's lots of beer, silly shenanigans and young ladies in swimsuits - standard mid-Eighties fare, really. Robbins was philosophical about it all, accepting the switch of name from Wendell to Fraternity Vacation, and recognising the cash he received for six weeks work would allow him to run his theatre workshops for months.

His next effort was a real oddity, a TV movie called Malice In Wonderland, concerning the vicious war of words between legendary Hollywood gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.

Elizabeth Taylor would camp it up big-time as Parsons, while Tim sauntered by as a young Joseph Cotton. Given his theatrical experiments and confrontational politics, he would have made an apt Orson Welles. Indeed, as he was now writing, producing and starring in his own plays, he could now be described as a genuine auteur. 1985 had also seen him put on Slick Slack Griff Graff, written with Adam Simon. This would be followed by another Simon collaboration, Carnage: A Comedy which explored the difference between old-school scamster evangelists and the new breed of dangerous, often white supremacist zealots. Robbins would return home with Carnage, putting it on at New York's Public Theatre, where it was roundly panned for being "condescending, arrogant and inept". Ouch.

. No matter. 1986 would see Robbins feature in two of the biggest productions of the year. First came Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise as a renegade hot-shot at the Naval Flying School, engaging in macho contests in the sky and shower-room. Meg Ryan would make her big picture debut as a grieving widow, while Tim would appear as Sam "Merlin" Wells, one of Cruise's peers, usually to be spied in the back-seat of incredibly fast aircraft.

Where Top Gun was a rip-roaring success, Tim's next picture was an unmitigated disaster. Based on the Marvel comic and executively produced by George Lucas, Howard The Duck was intended to be triumphant mixture of groovy story and state-of-the-art SFX. Briefly, a smart-arsed alien duck arrives on Earth and befriends punk rocker Lea Thompson (interestingly Tori Amos auditioned for the role) who, along with obnoxious wannabe scientist Tim, attempts to hide him from the authorities, until the appearance of a dark overlord set on ruling the world forces them to change their plans. Robbins was pretty good, introducing the supercilious and slightly dumb character he'd use several times over his career. His attempts to communicate with Howard by quacking were pretty amusing, particularly when Howard countered with "Undoubtedly one of Earth's greatest minds here".

As said, the movie was a bomb. Budgeted at $37 million, it took just $16 million at the box office and received several Golden Raspberries (Tim was nominated as Worst Supporting Actor), generally being regarded at worst film of the year. Robbins, though, was now building a serious reputation and this was heavily boosted by his next movie, Five Corners. Written by the author of Moonstruck and set in the Bronx in 1964, this saw John Turturro released from jail after having stalked and attempted to rape pet-store worker Jodie Foster. Now he's after her again, much to the chagrin of Tim, who stopped him the first time but has since become a civil rights activist and pacifist, thus struggling with the notion of using force to foil Turturro once more. An odd comedy, the movie was very well received in the indie world and saw Robbins touted as a potential star.

1988 saw him justify these predictions in no uncertain terms. Accepted as one of the finest ever baseball movies, Bull Durham saw Kevin Costner as an ageing catcher brought onto a minor league team to teach and control a new wild-card pitcher. This is Tim, as "Nuke" LaLoosh, a kid with an amazing arm but a sorry excuse for a brain, whose lightning-quick fast-ball is likely to end up in Row Z. The pair endure a fraught relationship, Costner's wisdom bouncing off the walls of Robbin's hilariously ill-founded arrogance. Then further complications arise when uber-fan Susan Sarandon appears. Each year, she picks the Durham Bulls' best prospect and takes him under her wing and into her bed, endeavouring to improve both his game and his mind. This year it's Nuke, though she gradually comes to recognise a far deeper bond with Costner.

. With Robbins brilliantly pitching Nuke as a clumsy, wilful, exuberant man-child (the producers actually considered him unfunny in the dailies and demanded he be replaced, his position only being saved when writer/director Ron Shelton threatened to quit), the film was a major hit. He would now be sent scripts and not have to battle for work in Los Angeles, allowing him to move back to New York. It also provided him with a life partner in Sarandon, an actress some years his senior but a kindred spirit in terms of her outspoken liberal politics. They also shared a far-reaching view of culture, Sarandon being well-read and well-travelled and having lived for a time with director Louis Malle and Italian director Franco Amurri, with whom she'd had a child, Eva. After filming Bull Durham, Sarandon would return to New York, with Robbins moving to London to film Erik The Viking. The Robbins family were aware that Tim was lovestruck, but didn't consider it serious as Sarandon might be returning to Amurri. Then the call came saying he was going to be a dad, Jack Henry being born in the Spring of 1989. Another son, Miles Guthrie (a name recalling Tim's musical youth) would follow soon after.

Robbins' next release would see him reunited with John Cusack for Tapeheads, the pair playing a couple of wannabe video directors - Robbins being the electro-wizard and Cusack the marketing brain. Filming funerals, weddings, "living wills" and dodgy Scandinavian rock bands, they endure all manner of silliness before finally hitting the big time. Far better was Miss Firecracker, where Holly Hunter played a small-town girl with a free-and-easy reputation who attempts to emulate her glamorous cousin Mary Steenburgen by winning the local beauty pageant. Robbins would play another cousin, Delmont, who, having been recently released from an asylum, arrives in town on a freight train and plots to sell the broken-down family mansion to developers.

It was another tremendous performance, in an enchanting movie, Delmont being an unconvincingly flash bluffer who eventually falls for down-to-Earth seamstress Alfre Woodard (she delivers the top-notch line "He makes my heart hot").

. Following these would come the aforementioned Erik The Viking, a rude, slapstick mediaeval farce written and directed by Monty Python's Terry Jones. Tim would play the title role, a viking too sensitive to engage in rape and pillage who accidentally kills a woman and seeks redemption by undertaking a hazardous quest to release the world from endless winter. There would be many cameo appearances, none of which made the movie much funnier.

With Bull Durham having given him Hollywood clout, Robbins now took on another big studio movie in the Robin Williams vehicle Cadillac Man. Here Williams played a smarmy, womanising car salesman who must sell 12 cars in one day or lose his job. Problems arise, though, when Tim drives his motorbike in through the plate-glass shop-front and threatens to mow everyone down with a machine-gun AND blow the place to pieces if the man who's sleeping with his wife does not come forward (the wife is Annabella Sciorra, working in the dealership's office). Williams is not the guilty party but he usually is and, besides, he needs to clear this up quickly so he admits to the adultery and spends the rest of the movie trying to talk Tim out of mayhem while the SWAT teams' fingers itch outside.

It was an odd film, bouncing between comedy and drama, but Tim was effective - paranoid, distraught and psychotic in equal measure. And there was one classic moment when the hostages start loudly discussing their own problems and he's forced to yell "Everyone f***ing shut up! This is MY thing!"

Now he was a box-office draw, it was predictable that Robbins would lend his presence to indie films and more unusual projects. Next came an amusing cameo in Michael Almereyda's Twister, where a weirdo family led by Harry Dean Stanton was trapped in a Kansas mansion by an approaching tornado. There'd also be a small but telling part in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, where architect Wesley Snipes broke New York race boundaries by beginning an affair with a white temp (Sciorra once more). Robbins, along with Brad Dourif, would play the sniffy bosses who deny Snipes a partnership.

Between these two would come one of Tim's finest performances, in Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder. This was a truly strange and moving experience, Robbins playing a Vietnam vet whose son has been killed in an accident and whose marriage has failed. Now working for the US Mail and living with Elizabeth Pena, his life becomes a series of deaths and terrifying near-accidents as he slides into a paranoid-schizophrenic state. But it any of it really happening, or was he the subject of some kind of chemical experiment in 'Nam? It was often depressing, but hugely enthralling, with a psychedelic sense of distance and the visceral.

Deservedly, like many of Robbins' movies, it would become a cult classic.

. Such was his performance, Jacob's Ladder should really have raised Robbins onto the A-list. But, having very publicly spoken out against the Gulf War, he found himself regarded as something of a pariah. Thankfully, help was on hand. At the time, Robert Altman was trying to put together Short Cuts, a multi-faceted piece that would explore the underbelly of Los Angeles just as he had with Nashville in the Seventies. Robbins had tested for a role, but the project had been shelved and Altman had moved on to a new work, to be called The Player. Recalling Tim's impressive test and considering him to have many of the qualities of Orson Welles (smart, stubborn, rebellious), Altman chose him for the lead but, given the actor's persona non grata status, the producers refused, prompting Altman to threaten to leave the project himself, just as Ron Shelton had done with Bull Durham. Once again, Robbins was saved by his director.

This was great news for Robbins. He'd seen Nashville while at Senior High and the movie had opened up the possibilities of cinema for him. Now he would see first-hand how Altman pulled off such ambitious projects - an experience he would later bring to bear on his own Cradle Will Rock. The Player saw him as Griffin Mill, a hot-shot Hollywood executive as superficial and manipulative as they come. He's also entirely paranoid, fearing for his job and, gradually, for his life once he starts receiving threats from a writer whose work he's discarded. As comedy combines with mystery and romance, his life begins to unravel as the writer is killed, investigations are underway and he gets involved with the dead man's girlfriend, Greta Scacchi.

It was an amazing movie, shot like a documentary with a welter of superstar cameos. It was also strangely prophetic in that in Habeas Corpus, a fictional movie featured in the film, Susan Sarandon played a saintly spectator in a gas chamber sequence. Under Robbins' direction, she would soon do something similar, to Oscar-winning effect.

Winning a Golden Globe, Tim was now back on top, and he cemented his position with his directorial debut, Bob Roberts. Roberts was a character he'd invented for Saturday Night Live back in 1986 (he'd also written and performed songs for Tapeheads that were credited to Bob Roberts), inspired by Tim's feelings when he returned to New York for Five Corners and saw that many of the old family stores had been replaced by yuppie outlets. Roberts was a populist Republican politician who'd win over audiences with folk songs that sounded traditional but were reactionary rather than humanitarian (The Times They Are A-Changin' Back being one example).

The movie was an Altman-style drama-documentary (indeed it was inspired by Altman's own Tanner '88, and used many of Altman's cast and crew from The Player) that saw Robbins/Roberts as a candidate for senator, campaigning in Pennsylvania, his message, satirising US politics of the %u201880s and %u201890s, being that greed is good. As with Altman's pictures there was a raft of cameos, Gore Vidal playing the liberal opponent who's viciously smeared, Alan Rickman being the devilish advisor, and Sarandon, buddy Cusack and early co-star Helen Hunt popping up. There'd also be a debut for Jack Black, who'd sing backing vocals.

. Once more Robbins had come up trumps, this time revealing his ability as star, writer and director, and he was Golden Globe nominated once more. Critic Bill Zehme claimed he had the rarest of gifts, the ability to be both contemptible and attractive. After Jacob's Ladder and The Player, he was on a quite extraordinary run. And this continued when he reunited with Altman for the at last unshelved Short Cuts. As said, this drew together the disconnected lives of many of LA's denizens, Robbins playing a motorcycle cop who's constantly cheating on his wife. He loves the deception and believes his cover-up lies to be quite brilliant, but wife Madeleine Stowe sees right through him and finds him utterly hilarious.

From this exquisite ensemble piece, he moved on to another starring role, this time in the Coen brothers' take on screwball comedies of the %u201830s, The Hudsucker Proxy. Here shyster director Paul Newman plots to bring his own company to ruin so he can snap up the shares for nothing and thus take control. To do this, he hires innocent and apparently dunderheaded mail-room-boy Tim as president. Simple Tim, though, has a simple invention up his sleeve ("You know . . . for KIDS") and spoils everything in the nicest possible way.

The Hudsucker Proxy saw the Coens messing about to great visual effect, and Robbins revealed a gift for physical comedy that would later make Nothing To Lose such a joy. He was now at the peak of his powers, ready to play his part in one of the most popular movies ever made - The Shawshank Redemption. Based on a Stephen King short story, this saw Robbins as Andy Dufresne, a white-collar worker jailed for life for murder. Inside, he strikes up a friendship with top procurer Morgan Freeman, fights off (and occasionally succumbs to) homosexual rapists and gradually finds favour with the authorities by working tax dodges for them. All the while, though, he's committed to a far greater plan.

Penned and directed by Frank Darabont, the movie was both an aggressive portrayal of prison life and a moving picture of male bonding, all the better for giving relationships space to grow (a rarity in a world where films give only the most essential information). At the box office, however, it was not a success. That came with the video release, when word-of-mouth turned it into a mega-hit, a transformation completed when it was nominated for seven Oscars.

Robbins now rejoined with Robert Altman for Pret-A-Porter, an expose of the fashion industry set in Paris. Tim and Julia Roberts would play reporters who ignore the shows in favour of drinking and having sex in their hotel room, all the while mindful that their affair (like the industry) is far removed from real life, and will not survive the return home. Many real fashion reporters considered this to be "libellously inaccurate", but it was certainly fun to watch.

The same year, 1994, saw Robbins attempt a full-blown romantic comedy with IQ. Paired with rom-com queen (and former Top Gun co-star) Meg Ryan, this saw him as an earthy garage mechanic who falls for Einstein's niece (Ryan) and must pry her away from her pompous but brilliant fiance Stephen Fry - Ryan believing that only academic genius is good enough for her. Einstein, though, played by Walter Matthau, believes Tim is a better bet and, along with his boffin buddies, tries to convince Meg that he is indeed a brain of the highest order. Sounds sweet, was sweet.

After this pleasant fluff came Robbins' heaviest project to date. Re-entering the director's chair he took on Dead Man Walking, the real life tale of Sister Helen Prejean, a nun who forged an understanding with an unrepentant Death Row inmate while struggling to hold onto her Christian beliefs and her sympathies for the families of his victims. The story had been brought to Robbins by Susan Sarandon, who'd met Prejean while filming The Client in New Orleans, but he'd dallied over it for so long (he was actually trying to redraft Cradle Will Rock) she'd threatened to take it elsewhere. Finally getting down to it, he wrote a superb script, then drew excellent performances from both his partner (as Prejean) and Sean Penn as the killer Poncelet. Both actors would be Oscar-nominated, with Sarandon winning. Robbins himself would be nominated as Best Director, but the film itself would miss out - somehow The Postman sneaked in ahead of it.

While getting back to work on his script for Cradle Will Rock, Robbins returned to the screen in Nothing To Lose, an excellent but weirdly overlooked comedy that saw him paired with Martin Lawrence. Essentially, it's an odd-couple road-movie. Robbins believes his wife is sleeping with his boss and takes off, a desperate Lawrence tries to car-jack him and both of them wind up in the desert with no money. Cue some caustic badinage, hilarious punch-ups and genuinely side-splitting confrontations with villains and creepy-crawlies. Robbins' frenetic attempt to get a spider off his jacket is possibly his funniest screen moment ever.

Next came Arlington Road, a smart but clumsily-contrived thriller where Jeff Bridges played an academic specialising in terrorism, who comes to think his new neighbours Tim and Joan Cusack might be up to something (Cusack was in the Saturday Night Live cast when Robbins introduced Bob Roberts, and is, of course, the sister of his friend John). Does Robbins' benign smile mask a murderous psychosis, or has Bridges' work made him paranoid? Right to the end you cannot be sure.

Immediately following Arlington Road came the long-awaited Cradle Will Rock, with Robbins back as writer/director. He'd actually started writing it right after completing Bob Roberts, but no producers would take it up, not even after the success of Dead Man Walking. Weirdly, it was Joe Roth at Disney who financed it, to the tune of $25 million, and that after just one reading and one meeting. The movie would see Robbins using much of what he'd learned from Altman, drawing myriad stories and characters together. It would also see him enhancing his reputation as a new Orson Welles. Not only was the film complex, visionary and politically rebellious, it was also based on an experience in Welles' own life.

Set in the %u201830s, Cradle Will Rock concerned the efforts of Welles and John Houseman to stage a play, called The Cradle Will Rock, that promoted union activity in the time of the Great Depression. Given that the pair were being financed by the Federal Theatre Programme, set up to provide entertainment for the masses in bleak times, the authorities decided that such incendiary material would not be appropriate, and shut them down, forcing them to march 1000 people to another venue. Robbins took this as a basic premise for his tale, then added more political strands by introducing left-wing artist Diego Rivera, capitalist benefactor Nelson Rockefeller (played by John Cusack), and Bill Murray as a worn-down ventriloquist who thinks the Commies are infiltrating Vaudeville. The result was an incredibly busy film, mirroring Altman but also catching the restless, relentlessly wise-cracking spirit of movies from the %u201830s. It was occasionally moving, and usually amusing, but perhaps a little too consciously clever to be truly engaging.

After a brief cameo as the President in the second Austin Powers movie, Robbins moved into the new millennium with a clear agenda - he would continue to take big money from big-budget movies in order to finance his excursions into the indie world, as well as his ongoing theatre projects. 2000 saw the worst example of this mercenary behaviour in Brian De Palma's Mission To Mars, an inept farrago of a movie, despite the occasionally impressive SFX. Robbins' tactics were clearly respectable in one sense but his presence on a cast-list was causing genuine fans to endure some execrable rubbish.

Thankfully, he moved on to better fare with High Fidelity, which saw John Cusack running an independent record store, aided by Jack Black (who'd earlier appeared in both Bob Roberts and Dead Man Walking). Cusack has trouble with the ladies and looks back over his catalogue of romantic failures, the most recent of which has involved his girlfriend leaving him for New Age guru and former neighbour Tim. In the film's funniest sequence, the pony-tailed and unbearably supercilious Robbins goes to the shop to clear the air ("Conflict resolution is my job") and sparks in Cusack a series of fantasies that involve Tim being beaten to a bloody pulp.

After this came another weak one in AntiTrust where Tim played a seemingly sweet Bill Gates figure who poaches computer wunderkind Ryan Phillippe then is gradually revealed to be a murderous corporate monster. Better, and a great deal weirder, was Human Nature, written by Charlie Kaufman, of Being John Malkovich fame. Here Tim was a massively repressed scientist who's attempting to teach mice to eat with forks. Though he's being pursued by sexy French assistant Miranda Otto, he dates Patricia Arquette, a controversial author he doesn't realise is incredibly hairy. Then he discovers Rhys Ifans, a man raised as an ape and tries, via electric shocks, to control his wild libido and savage nature ("When in doubt, don't ever do what you really want to do"). Add some Disney-style dance routines and you have a patchy but beguiling movie.

Now came another strange choice in The Truth About Charlie, Jonathan Demme's remake of Charade. Here Thandie Newton finds her new husband has been killed in Paris and discovers that he's been committing nefarious acts under numerous assumed identities. Suddenly various unsavoury characters are pursuing her for a missing $6 million, Tim showing up as a comically straight-laced government agent who's suspicious of absolutely everyone. As so often before, his overweening decency disguised a thoroughly untrustworthy mind.

Though 2002 had seen the Actors' Gang put on an adaptation of The Boys, where journalist Helen Hunt helped fire-chief Tim compose eulogies to the men killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre, the next year brought more political controversy for Robbins and Sarandon.

Having taken an anti-war stance over Iraq, they arrived at the Oscars waving peace signs (at the 1993 ceremony they'd brought attention to the 100s of AIDS-infected Haitians interned at Guantanamo Bay) and, like Sean Penn, were blasted by the press for undermining the US war effort. Consequently they found themselves smeared by their inclusion in a pack of cards called The Weasels, alongside the likes of Penn, Barbra Streisand, Martin Sheen, George Clooney, Ed Norton and Oliver Stone. Robbins countered by calling the Bush administration "chicken hawks", referring to their propensity for sending people to war when they hadn't actually served themselves. He was forced to apologise when it was noted that the term's secondary meaning refers to older men who chase after young boys.

. It was a difficult time for Robbins as his anti-war statements also meant that he had his invitation to a screening of Bull Durham at the Baseball Hall of Fame withdrawn. And this was a guy who, on September 12th, 2001, halted his Los Angeles production of The Seagull and drove clear across the country to New York where he worked at Ground Zero, serving food and collecting boots for relief workers. The accusations of anti-Americanism simply do not wash.

Back at work, Robbins would hit another high with Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Here he, Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon played estranged buddies, haunted by a terrible event that overtook Robbins when they were children. Now Penn's daughter is murdered, Robbins having returned home that night covered in blood and claiming he may have killed a mugger. Bacon must investigate and the respective wives make hard choices as self-preservation and revenge arrive on the agenda.

It was classic drama, with Robbins superb as the accused handyman retreating into introversion as the past catches up and the present boils over. His scenes with suspicious screen wife Marcia Gay Harden and under interrogation by the police were intense and beautifully played. No wonder that he won another Golden Globe and won his first Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.

Naturally, he moved on to another oddity, Michael Winterbottom's future-world epic Code 46. Here the world's cities are oases in a cruel desert and they are packed with people, meaning serious ID is necessary for entry. Naturally, paperwork fraud is a monstrous crime so when Samantha Morton is accused of it, investigator Tim must travel from Seattle to Shanghai to sort it out. Unfortunately, he falls for her but cannot continue the relationship as his papers allow him only 24 hours away, his problems becoming increasingly complicated in a bio-tech society supported by cloning and the erasing of memories. He'd follow this with the Will Ferrell comedy Anchorman, providing a cameo alongside Ben Stiller and old pal Jack Black.

With a presidential election on the way, we are bound to hear more of Tim Robbins in the near future. In 2000 he was pilloried even by his liberal Hollywood peers for backing Ralph Nader and thus undermining the Democrat cause - and this despite his ongoing and outspoken support for the Screen Actors' Guild. Safe to say he and Susan Sarandon will go their own way, speaking their minds and producing blistering screen performances as they do. They use their extraordinary talents to both entertain and provoke discussion and, for this, they must be regarded as two of cinema's most important figures.

Dominc Wills