From Rabbit to Woolf: Kathleen Turner
Kathleen Turner is, at 51, starting a new life in Italy. Hollywood and husband can watch her dust. “I’m part of that first generation of women who have done their childrearing, are financially independent and now want to explore. I feel as though I have another 50 years ahead of me.” First stop is London, where from tomorrow she will star as Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The role, for which she was nominated for a Tony on Broadway, is a long-held ambition for Turner, who announced at the age of 20 that she would play it at 50.
The third child of a diplomat, Turner spent her childhood on the move. She was on one of the last US planes to leave Havana on the eve of the revolution. “They came for us in the middle of the night, just the women and children. My father closed the US Embassy.” Venezuela was next, then London, where Turner, aged 13, resolved to become an actor. Her father deemed this so “ridiculous” that he would wait in the car while his wife attended school plays. Exasperated, Turner ran away to Stratford at the age of 19, returning after one weekend to find her father dead of a coronary thrombosis.
The family went to Missouri, which Turner found stifling She moved to New York, where she eventually landed the sultry lead in Body Heat (1981), and became one of Hollywood’s most popular stars, appearing with Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone and voicing Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? “On a night when I feel really good about myself,” she once said, “I can walk into a room and if a man doesn’t look at me, he’s probably gay.” In 1983 she married Jay Weiss, a property developer, and had a daughter, Rachel, in 1987.
Turner sizzled on stage in 1990 as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and in 2000 as a nude Mrs Robinson in The Graduate (“London cabbies were very complimentary”). In 1995 she had rheumatoid arthritis diagnosed; steroids bloated her slim frame, prompting false allegations of alcoholism, of which she said, bitterly: “In Hollywood it’s more acceptable to drink than to be ill.” Ironically, the pain led her to drink, and, eventually, to rehab.
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She often rages against Hollywood’s fixation with bland youth, hence the move to Rome, where “women of my experience and my body of work are so much more respected”. Her husband is unconvinced, so she is merrily going it alone. “When I was 20 I looked for approbation from everyone. But at 50, you wake up and think, f*** you, I don’t have to prove myself any more.”