Kathleen Turner

Kathleen Turner (born June 19, 1954) is an American actress.

Early life

Born Mary Kathleen Turner in Springfield, Missouri, Turner's parents were career diplomats, and she lived in four foreign countries (Canada, Cuba, Venezuela, and England) while growing up. Turner has two brothers and a sister. She was a gymnast as a teenager. While attending high school in London, she also took classes at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Her father, Allen Richard Turner, grew up in China and was a foreign services diplomat who was imprisoned by the Japanese for four years during World War II. When her father died of a coronary thrombosis in 1972, the family moved back to the United States.

Kathleen graduated from the American School in London in 1972. She attended Missouri State University at Springfield for two years, then gained her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1977.

Career

In 1978, the 5'10" husky voiced Turner was hired as the second Nola Turner on NBC daytime soap The Doctors, but she was fired the next year because the producers felt she was "not hot enough".

Turner had the last laugh as she became a movie star a few years later in Body Heat, which many consider one of the sexiest films (with Turner giving one of the sexiest performances) in the history of cinema. Turner remained a film star up to the early 1990s, but has since rarely appeared in major productions.

During her heyday, she rose to fame as the leading-lady star of Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas, Prizzi's Honor with Jack Nicholson, Peggy Sue Got Married with Nicolas Cage, and The War of the Roses with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito. Her career began to slide with her appearances in increasingly low-budget and low-profile films.

Turner is noteworthy for doing her own stunts in her films, and she broke her nose in V.I. Warshawski. (She revisited the role of V.I. Warshawski on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1990s in serialised dramatisations of several of Sara Paretsky's books.)

In addition to the movies and radio work listed above, she has also appeared as a recurring guest star on Friends (as the transvestite father of Chandler Bing), King of the Hill (voice), The Simpsons (voice of Malibu Stacy creator on the episode "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy"), Saturday Night Live (which she hosted twice), and as a defense attorney on Dick Wolf's Law & Order franchise.

Although uncredited, Turner provided the voice of sexy Jessica Rabbit in the toon-noir Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988.

In 2000, Turner starred as Mrs. Robinson in the London stage revival of The Graduate.

Because of her deep voice, she was often compared to a young Lauren Bacall. When the two met, Turner reportedly introduced herself to Bacall by saying, "Hi, I'm the young you."

Turner received a lifetime achievement award from the Savannah College of Art and Design at the Savannah Film Festival in October 2004.

Awards

She was nominated for an Oscar for best actress in 1987 for her role in Peggy Sue Got Married. She received two Golden Globe awards, both for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, for Romancing the Stone (1984) and Prizzi's Honor (1985) and she won the L.A. Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress for Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion (1984).

Personal life

Turner lived with agent David Guc from 1977 to 1982. She married New York real-estate mogul Jay Weiss in 1984. She and Weiss have a daughter, Rachel Ann Weiss, born October 14, 1987.

Turner was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 1992. On December 3, 1999, Turner checked herself into Marworth in Waverly, Pennsylvania for alcohol abuse. The ravages of both illnesses have taken their toll on this once classical beauty, but she turned them to her at least temporary advantage with an incredible performance as Martha, the middle-aged, slatternly, blowsy anti-heroine of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway in 2005, opposite Bill Irwin, evoking memories of Elizabeth Taylor's Oscar-winning movie performance from 1966.

Political involvement

Kathleen Turner serves on the board of People for the American Way. She was one of John Kerry's first celebrity endorsements and reportedly invited him to see her as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. She has been a frequent donor to the Democratic Party and related causes.

Trivia

There is a band named Kathleen Turner Overdrive, wordplay on the rock band Bachman Turner Overdrive.
Turner was immortalized in the 1980s song "The Kiss of Kathleen Turner" by Austrian techno-pop singer Falco.

Filmography

Body Heat (1981)
The Man with Two Brains (1983)
Romancing the Stone (1984)
A Breed Apart (1984)
Crimes of Passion (1984)
Prizzi's Honor (1985)
The Jewel of the Nile (1985)
GoBots: War of the Rock Lords (1986) (voice)
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
Julia and Julia (1987)
Switching Channels (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) (voice)
The Accidental Tourist (1988)
Tummy Trouble (1989) (voice)
The War of the Roses (1989)
Serial Mom (1994)

External links

Official website
"Drama Queen", an in-depth interview and profile in The Guardian, March 18, 2000

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Kathleen Turner