Susan Sarandon Never Expected Split With Tim Robbins

If it seems strange to you that Susan Sarandon spends much of her time at an underground ping-pong club, you're not alone. "If you'd told me a year ago I would own a ping-pong club I would have laughed until I fell on the ground," she told Telegraph in a recent interview. "It just kind of happened."

Ping-pong isn't the only change in her life recently. Last December, Sarandon, 63, shocked everyone by splitting with her partner of 23 years, Tim Robbins, 51, who she met on the set of 1988's Bull Durham. "People were coming up to me in the street and saying 'I cried and cried when I heard.' Well, I was sadder! I didn't think it would ever happen, either," she said. The couple never married but have two children together, Jack, 21, and Miles, 18. "I thought that if you didn't get married you wouldn't take each other for granted as easily. I don't know if after twenty-something years that was still true," she said of the relationship.

The actress, who's now involved with her partner in the ping-pong venture Jonathan Bricklin, 31, reflected about her time with Robbins. "You bring people into your life at certain times. Maybe you have a relationship to have children and you realize that it's fulfilled after that point," she said. She was tight-lipped about reports of her romance with Bricklin, saying, "You have to have a sense of humor. There are lots of people in my life at the moment." Sarandon currently stars in the financial drama Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. –AMY LEE