Kathleen Turner — strong, earthy, sexual, unforgettable. With a voice and persona likened to Lauren Bacall, she first crept into our psyche in the sizzling 1981 film Body Heat, opposite William Hurt. Now, since March, this two-time Golden Globe Award winner has been “romancing the stage” in the grueling down-and-dirty, Tony Award-nominated role of Martha in the Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Her portrayal of the alcoholic desperate housewife who disdains her droll college-professor husband and craves attention from her distant college-president father is a role she seems destined to play.
Mary Kathleen Turner was born in Springfield, Missouri, in 1954. The daughter of a disciplined diplomat dad, she moved with her parents and three siblings to at least four different countries, going to high school and drama school in London before moving back home after her father died in 1973. She earned a B.F.A. from the University of Maryland in 1977, then moved to NYC and landed a role on Broadway, in Gemini. Daytime TV fans may remember her late 70s stint as the sultry Nola on The Doctors.
Turner wed second husband Jay Weiss in 1983, a year before the release of the edgy and controversial Crimes of Passion (about a fashion designer/closet prostitute). During the 80s, she teamed with Jack Nicholson in Prizzi’s Honor (as mob assassins), debuted as the voice of Jessica Rabbit in Disney’s animated Roger Rabbit films, and earned an Academy Award nomination in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married. It was her trio of films with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito — the romantic-adventure sagas Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, and the dark divorce flick War of the Roses, that made her a box-office sweetheart. (A former teen gymnast, Turner has performed many of her own stunts.)
"I don’t think I’ve ever quite understood my own sexuality. I think other people have placed a lot more importance on it than I ever have."
In 1992, Turner was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a joint-stiffening autoimmune disease that threatened to confine her to a wheelchair. Her daughter, Rachael Weiss, was then in kindergarten. Determined to lead an active life, this resident of NYC and the Hamptons, who has been known to sing with her husband’s rock group, The Suits, has soldiered on.
When her RA was treated with chemotherapy and steroids, the tabloids ran photos of her looking bloated and unsteady, labeling her “a drunk.” Ironically, her eventual attempt to drink away her physical pain actually did lead to alcohol rehab in 2002, where she got her condition and her coping mechanisms under control. Thanks to the new biologic-agent drugs, Turner’s disease has stabilized, but she still lives with chronic pain.
Turner has said that she felt most at home on the stage, where she didn’t have to tone everything down — her voice, her bearing, the moves of her 5’10” frame. In 1990, she earned a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Maggie in a Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She toured nationwide in 2000 in the one-woman show Tallulah (Bankhead), and appeared (nude) on stage in The Graduate, in London (2000) and in NYC (2002).
Over the years, Turner has been described by colleagues and the press as “difficult to work with.” Woolf producer Liz McCann counters, “She’s a most misunderstood actress and she’s been great to work with.” Director Anthony Page said Turner “seemed like Martha before she even spoke.” She had “a look of voluptuousness, a woman of appetite, a look of having suffered, as well.” The buzz is strong for a Tony Award win. She has proved that she is the master of her fate, the captain of her soul...
Turner chatted recently with The Sheet on a Thursday — after a matinee day. She generously extended her voice to express her honest insights on addiction, health, sexuality, family, and her career.
"I am assertive, which of course, in a man is not considered ‘difficult.’ In a man, it would be considered an attribute."
HAMPTON SHEET:
How are you?
KATHLEEN TURNER:
A little weary on Thursdays after the two shows, but I’m fine, I’m good.
HS:
By the way, you’re fantastic in Virginia Woolf.
KT:
Well, I sure love doing it. You find things every night, or in every show. You’re never doing the same thing. Albee told us that...his plays have a theme, have meter, and if he closes his eyes, he can hear if the play is on track or not. Anthony Page, our director, said within the measures, it’s jazz. You know what you’re doing, but you get to play it like jazz every night. But at the same time you improv. It’s always changing.
HS:
So you feel that every night, you bring to it something different of yourself?
KT:
Yeah, and how the other person’s energy is, how the audience reacts. You know, you find yourself drained.
HS:
Have you learned more about yourself through the play?
KT:
The biggest struggle with Martha was to let go, to let her be so wild and so awful and so physically out of control. You just want to protect yourself and not look like an ass, but you can’t do that with Martha.
HS:
As a child, you lived abroad with your family in several countries. Did this make it easier for you to set out on your own in NYC, to make it as an actor?
KT:
Yeah, I think so. I was used to big cities. After four years in London, in high school, you’re used to getting yourself around. I didn’t have any money, so I was always used to economizing and planning what luxuries I could afford. You know in New York, you could always get a job; you go to a temp agency or find a good restaurant, and as long as you’re willing to work, you’ll work. The best jobs have some freedom in your schedule so you can get auditions and calls.
HS:
I think having no money when you’re younger gets rid of the fear of having no money.
KT:
Well sure, you deal with what you’ve got. My friends and I joke sometimes that one day we want to come back as our kids.
HS:
Since your 1981 film debut in Body Heat, you seem to have sought out sultry and seductive roles. Have you always been extremely confident in your own persona and with your own sexuality?
KT:
No, I don’t think I’ve ever quite understood my own sexuality. I think other people have placed a lot more importance on it than I ever have. However, it’s a nice tool, it’s a nice asset. When you feel great about yourself, and when you feel powerful, it’s like sexuality is a work in progress. Imean one day I feel this way, the next… a complete bundle of insecurity (laughing)!
HS:
We’ve read that your second husband, (then fiancé) Jay Weiss, objected to your nudity in Crimes of Passion. How did you work that out?
KT:
He didn’t object altogether just to the nudity, it was the whole whore thing — the whole Hollywood, cheap, 50-bucks-a-night thing—that he couldn’t understand; he thought it was degrading. Before that, he had seen Body Heat, and we met during Romancing the Stone, so he saw some of that, but I think he hadn’t seen this character before, and he was actually kind of shocked, you know.
HS:
How did you meet Jay?
KT:
I was looking for an apartment — he’s involved with real estate — and I was having trouble finding a place. A mutual friend said that he was involved in the business and maybe he could help me.
HS:
He’s younger than you, a blip on the scale in these times. But you once told me, “You have to get ’em young and train ‘em!” Has this proved true?
KT:
Jay and I joke that I renovated him. And he likes being renovated, I guess. He seems to think that he’s a better person. I think he’d give me credit for that.
HS:
What has kept your marriage and family together—through fame, film locations, illness, loss, addiction?
KT:
Part of it is that he’s stable, he’s always in one place. When you have a relationship where there are two people who are always traveling, or their job takes them all over, and you don’t have somebody home, it’s tough. I need a home base, and he’s that. It would be difficult to raise children if we were both “[moving] around,” so I’ve always thought it would be very tough to be married to an actor. To me, and to Jay, you don’t walk away. Nobody’s leaving here, so you’re just going to have to adjust, deal with it, learn what to do.
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Bill Irwin as George and Kathleen Turner as Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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