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Susan Sarandon recalls bizarre final phone call with David Bowie before he died

Sarandon and Bowie were in a relationship nearly four decades ago around the time they filmed the 1983 movie "The Hunger" together.
/ Source: TODAY

It’s been nearly six years since David Bowie died at age 69 after suffering an 18-month battle with liver cancer, but Susan Sarandon is still recalling bits and pieces of their time together as lovers, and as friends.

During an interview with You magazine, Sarandon remembered her relationship with Bowie and their decades-long friendship after they starred together in “The Hunger” in 1983. Though the couple didn’t make the distance, Sarandon did reveal that the two were able to stay in touch.

“Not that we hung out a lot — he had a number of health issues to deal with — but we did," she explained.

The 75-year-old actor said that the last time she saw Bowie was at the premiere of his musical "Lazarus," which took place at the beginning of December 2015, just one month before he passed away. After the show, Sarandon said that she went to the Greek island, Lesbos to highlight the refugee crisis happening on the island as a life-long campaigner.

Susan Sarandon and David Bowie attend Metropolitan Opera Opening Night Dinner at Lincoln Center on September 25, 2006.
Susan Sarandon and David Bowie on Sept. 25, 2006.Patrick McMullan / Patrick McMullan via Getty Image

She described this experience as the “toughest thing” she had ever done, explaining that it was a “never-ending stream of desperation with no recourse and no way to fix it.” Due to this, she wasn’t sleeping very well and when she knew she had to be up early the next morning, she took some Ambien.

“And I had this dream that David had called me and that we’d had this conversation and as I hung up I thought (in the dream): ‘Nobody’s going to believe me, that David Bowie called me in Lesbos,’” she said.

The dream was so vivid that Sarandon wasn’t sure it was actually a dream after all, adding, “Then later, I thought: ‘Did he actually call me?’”

“And I went to my phone and he had. I have no recollection of what that conversation was,” she said. “He died a week later. It’s all so frustrating. There was a double rainbow in New York on the day that David Bowie passed.”

Sarandon said that toward the end of Bowie’s life, the two had a friendly, touching reunion after decades of knowing one another.

“I was fortunate enough to be closer to him right before he died, the last couple of months,” she explained. “He did find me again. We talked to each other and said some things that needed to be said. I was so fortunate to be able to see him when he told me what was going on with him.”

The “Thelma & Louise” star first revealed that she and Bowie were lovers during a 2014 interview with The Guardian. She told the outlet that they had gotten together around the filming of “The Hunger” over 30 years ago.

“He's extraordinary,” she said at the time. “That was a really interesting period. I wasn't supposed to have kids, and I'm the oldest of nine and had mothered all of them, so I wasn't ever in a mode where I was looking to settle down and raise a family, so that definitely changes the gene pool you're dipping into.”

Earlier this year, the actor appeared on the “Divorced, Not Dead” podcast and revealed that if she had a choice, she wouldn’t have gotten married. When she was 17, she married fellow actor Chris Sarandon when they were studying at Catholic University of America.

"I was in college at 17," she told the host. “We kind of eventually dated. Eventually, my first sexual experience. I was so grateful. I decided to get married, and only because we would've gotten kicked out of school. So, we agreed that we would decide every year whether or not to renew."

The couple were married for seven years before they “decided to mutually move on.”

"(I) never wanted to get married the first time,” she added.

After several relationships with high profile celebrities, Sarandon dated director Franco Amurri between 1984 and 1988. They share a daughter, 36-year-old blogger Eva Amurri. Sarandon had her second and third children with actor Tim Robbins: sons Jack, 32, and Miles, 29.