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| Birth Name(s) : Mary Kathleen Turner |
Date of Birth: June 19, 1954 |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Jay Weiss |
| Profession:
Actor |
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Full Kathleen Turner Biography
After making a stunning feature-film debut as the sultry schemer in Body Heat (1981), this sensual, throaty-voiced leading lady earned a reputation for willingness to try virtually anything on-screen. A University of Maryland graduate and former gymnast (a skill she used in The War of the Roses by the way), Turner began acting in the 1970s and enjoyed a stint on the daytime soap "The Doctors" before her Body Heat breakthrough.
She confounded expectations by next appearing as a comic femme fatale in a goofy farce, The Man With Two Brains (1983), and in 1984 she continued expanding her screen persona as an environmentalist in A Breed Apart and a woman who moonlights as a hooker (named China Blue) by night in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion (1984).
But it was the sleeper hit Romancing the Stone (also 1984) that cemented her stardom with mainstream moviegoers; as a mousy romance novelist who "lives" one of her own stories, she won a legion of fans. She followed it with a bravura turn as a Mafia hit lady, opposite Jack Nicholson, in Prizzi's Honor (1985), reteamed with Michael Douglas for a Stone sequel, The Jewel of the Nile (1985), then earned an Oscar nomination playing a time-traveling housewife in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). She went on to play a woman living out two lives in Julia and Julia (1987), a feisty TV anchorwoman in Switching Channels (1988), the seductive voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (also 1988, followed by two subsequent short cartoons), and William Hurt's frigid wife in The Accidental Tourist (1988).
She again reteamed with Mi chael Douglas as their Romancing the Stone costar Danny DeVito moved behind the camera for the very black divorce comedy The War of the Roses (1989), then came a cropper as the solo lead of the poorly made adaptation of Sara Paretsky's Chicago private eye story V.I. Warshawski (1991). She electrified Broadway as Maggie in the 1989 revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," but her return to films in 1993 was less salutary for her career: House of Cards and Undercover Blues were both seen as failures. Her most recent credits: Naked in New York and John Waters' Serial Mom (both 1994). |
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Additional Kathleen Turner Biography
Turner was born in Springfield, Missouri, the daughter of Patsy Magee and Allen Richard Turner, who was a U.S. Foreign Service officer and schoolteacher; he grew up in China (where Turner's great-grandfather worked as a Methodist missionary) and, as a diplomat, had been imprisoned by the Japanese for four years during the Second World War. Because of her father's career, Turner lived in four foreign countries (Canada, Cuba, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom. Turner has two brothers and a sister. While attending high school in London, she was a gymnast and also took classes at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
In her early years, Turner was interested in performing, despite her father's lack of encouragement: "My father was of missionary stock," she later explained, "so theater and acting were just one step up from being a streetwalker, you know? So when I was performing in school, he would drive my mom and sit in the car. She'd come out at intermissions and tell him, 'She's doing very well.'"
Turner soon launched a successful film career, making her debut in 1981 as the ruthless Matty Walker in the neo-noir thriller Body Heat, which many consider one of the sexiest films ever. Empire Magazine cited the film in 1995 when it named her one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in Film History. The New York Times wrote in 2005 that, propelled by her "jaw-dropping movie debut Body Heat... she built a career on adventurousness and frank sexuality borne of robust physicality."
The brazen quality of Turner's screen roles was reflected in her public life as well. With her deep voice, Turner was often compared to a young Lauren Bacall. When the two met, Turner reportedly introduced herself by saying, "Hi, I'm the young you." In the Eighties, she boasted that "on a night when I feel really good about myself, I can walk into a room, and if a man doesn't look at me he's probably gay."
In recent years, Turner has found renewed success on the stage. After Nineties roles in Broadway productions of Indiscretions and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which she earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress), Turner starred in a London stage version of The Graduate in 2000, a role that made headlines around the world.
The BBC reported that initially mediocre ticket sales for The Graduate "went through the roof when it was announced that Turner, then aged 45, would appear naked on stage". While her performance as the middle-aged Mrs. Robinson was popular with audiences (with sustained high box office for the duration of Turner's run), she received mixed reviews from critics. The play transferred to Broadway in 2002 to similar critical reaction. In her next stage performance, however, Turner would receive almost unanimous critical acclaim.
When the show opened, Turner's performance was extremely well-received, inviting comparisons to Elizabeth Taylor's Oscar-winning movie performance from 1966. The notoriously jaded New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised Turner at length, writing:“As the man-eating Martha, Ms. Turner, a movie star whose previous theater work has been variable, finally secures her berth as a first-rate, depth-probing stage actress....At 50, this actress can look ravishing and ravaged, by turns. In the second act, she is as predatorily sexy as she was in the movie Body Heat. But in the third and last act she looks old, bereft, stripped of all erotic flourish. I didn't think I would ever be able to see Virginia Woolf again without thinking of Ms. Hagen. But watching Ms. Turner in that last act, fully clothed but more naked than she ever was in The Graduate, I didn't see the specter of Ms. Hagen. All I saw was Ms. Turner. No, let's be fair. All I saw was Martha.”
As Martha, Turner received her second Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play. The show transferred to London's Apollo Theatre in 2006 and a 2007 national tour of the play was also scheduled.
Turner lived with agent David Guc from 1977 to 1982. She married a millionaire New York real-estate mogul named Jay Weiss in 1984, and their daughter, Rachel Ann Weiss was born October 14, 1987. Turner was born into a Methodist family and has said that she has "taken on a certain amount of Jewish tradition and identity" since marrying her husband and raising their daughter in the Jewish religion. In 2006, Turner announced that she and Weiss were planning a trial separation.
By the late Eighties, Turner had acquired a reputation for being somewhat difficult: what the New York Times called "a certifiable diva." She herself said was that she was "not a very kind person" and actress Eileen Atkins has referred to her as "an amazing nightmare." According to her colleagues on Virginia Woolf, she has since become easier to work with.
Turner serves on the board of People for the American Way, is chairperson for Planned Parenthood of America, and supports Amnesty International, Childhelp USA, and Citymeals-on-Wheels. She was one of John Kerry's first celebrity endorsements and reportedly invited him to come see her as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. She has been a frequent donor to the Democratic Party. She has also worked to raise public awareness of RA. |
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Kathleen Turner Quote(s)
| A woman my age is not supposed to be attractive or sexually appealing. I just get kinda tired of that. |
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