BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Mary Kathleen Turner
Description: Actress, USA
Known For: Film – “War Of The Roses” – 1989
Location: United States of America
Date Born: 19th June 1954
Location Born: Springfield, Missouri, United States of America
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BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Kathleen Turner
Mary Kathleen Turner (born June 19, 1954), better known as Kathleen Turner, is an American film and stage actress and director.
Turner came to fame during the 1980s, after roles in Body Heat (1981), Romancing the Stone (1984), and Prizzi’s Honor (1985), the latter two earning her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. In the later 1980s and early 1990s, Turner had roles in The Accidental Tourist (1988), The War of the Roses (1989), Serial Mom (1994) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Turner later had roles in The Virgin Suicides (1999), Baby Geniuses (1999), and Beautiful (2000), as well as guest-starring on the NBC sitcom Friends as Chandler Bing’s cross-dressing father Charles Bing, and in the third season of Showtime’s Californication as Sue Collini, the jaded, sex-crazed owner of a talent agency. Turner has also done considerable work as a voice actor, namely as Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), as well as Monster House (2006), and the television series King of the Hill.
In addition to film, Turner has worked in the theatre, and has been nominated for the Tony Award twice for her Broadway roles as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Turner has also taught acting classes at New York University.
Turner was born in Springfield, Missouri, the daughter of Patsy (née Magee) and Allen Richard Turner, a U.S. Foreign Service officer who grew up in China (where Turner’s great-grandfather had been a Methodist missionary). Turner was raised in a strict conservative Christian household, and her interest in performing was discouraged by both of her parents: “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 [there] and sit in the car. She’d come out at intermissions and tell him, ‘She’s doing very well.'”
Due to her father’s employment in the Foreign Service, Turner grew up abroad, and graduated from the American School in London in 1972. Her father died of a coronary thrombosis that same year, and then the family moved back to the United States. At age 19, Turner began volunteering at a local Planned Parenthood office. She attended Missouri State University in Springfield for two years, then studied theater at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1977. During that period, Turner acted in several productions directed by the film and stage director Steve Yeager.
Stardom during the 1980s
After Body Heat, Turner steered away from femme fatale roles to “prevent typecasting” and “because femme fatale roles had a shelf-life.” Consequently, her first project after this was the 1983 comedy The Man With Two Brains. Turner co-starred in Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito. The film critic Pauline Kael wrote of her performance as writer Joan Wilder, “Turner knows how to use her dimples amusingly and how to dance like a woman who didn’t know she could; her star performance is exhilarating.” Romancing the Stone was a surprise hit: she won a Golden Globe for her role in the film, and it became one of the top-ten-grossing movies of 1984. Turner teamed up with Douglas and DeVito again the following year for its sequel, The Jewel of the Nile.
Several months before Jewel, Turner starred in Prizzi’s Honor with Jack Nicholson, winning a second Golden Globe award, and later starred in Peggy Sue Got Married, which co-starred Nicolas Cage. For Peggy Sue, she received a 1986 Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Personal life
Turner married the real estate entrepreneur Jay Weiss of New York City in 1984, and they had one child, their daughter, Rachel Ann Weiss, who was born on October 14, 1987. Turner had been born into a Methodist family, but she has said that she has “taken on a certain amount of Jewish tradition and identity” since marrying her Jewish husband and raising their daughter in Judaism. In 2006, Turner announced that she and Weiss were planning a trial separation.Turner and Weiss carried this forward to a divorce that became official in December 2007, but Turner has said, “Jay’s still my best friend.”
By the late 1980s, Turner had acquired a reputation for being difficult: what The New York Times called “a certifiable diva.” She admitted that she had developed into “not a very kind person,” and the actress Eileen Atkins referred to her as “an amazing nightmare.” Turner slammed Hollywood over the difference in the quality of roles offered to male actors and female actors as they age, calling the disparity a “terrible double standard.”
In 1990, Turner received unfavorable publicity when a deliberately lit fire at the Happy Land Social Club, located in a building managed by her husband, claimed 87 lives. The club was operating without a license and the building had been cited for numerous fire safety violations,[30] but The New Yorker quoted Turner saying, “the fire was unfortunate, but could have happened at a McDonald’s.”
As a result of her altered looks and weight gain from her rheumatoid arthritis treatment, The New York Times published this statement in 2005, “Rumors began circulating that she was drinking too much. She later said in interviews that she didn’t bother correcting the rumors because people in show business hire drunks all the time, but not people who are sick.” Turner has had well-publicized problems with alcohol, which she used as an escape from the pain and symptoms of acute rheumatoid arthritis. Turner has admitted that owing to her illness, she was in constant unbearable agony and that as a result, the people she was closest to would suffer from it, as she was constantly drinking to relieve the pain and it made her a very difficult person. A few weeks after leaving the production of the play The Graduate in November 2002, Turner was admitted into the Marworth hospital in Waverly, Pennsylvania, for the treatment of alcoholism. “I have no problem with alcohol when I’m working,” she explained. “It’s when I’m home alone that I can’t control my drinking…I was going toward excess. I mean, really! I think I was losing my control over it. So it pulled me back.”
Memoirs and interviews
In the middle 2000s (decade), Turner collaborated with Gloria Feldt on the writing of her memoirs, Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles. The book was published in 2008. In the book, Turner claimed that Nicolas Cage had gotten drunk, and stole a chihuahua that he liked. In turn, Cage filed a lawsuit against Turner and her book publisher in the UK who took an excerpt from the book and posted it on their website (pre-publication). Cage’s argued defamation and damage to character and the case won, resulting in retractions, legal fees, and a donation to charity. Turner later publicly apologized. During an interview on The View, Turner apologized for any distress she might have caused Cage regarding an incident that took place 20 years earlier.
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 1978, Turner made her acting debut in the television NBC daytime soap The Doctors as the second Nola Dancy Aldrich. She soon launched a successful film career, making her debut in 1981 as the ruthless Matty Walker in the thriller Body Heat.
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.
Turner rose to prominence as the star of Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito.
After Jewel, Kathleen Turner starred in Prizzi’s Honor with Jack Nicholson, winning a second Golden Globe award, and in Peggy Sue Got Married with Nicolas Cage. For Peggy Sue, she received a 1987 Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
In 1989, Turner teamed up with Douglas and DeVito for a third time, in The War of the Roses.
This film was a must for all married couples.
Turner remained an A-list film star leading lady until the early nineties when rheumatoid arthritis began to seriously restrict her activities.
The 1980s song “The Kiss of Kathleen Turner” by Austrian techno-pop singer Falco was in her honour.
Films include
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)
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
Julia and Julia (1987)
Switching Channels (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
The Accidental Tourist (1988)
The War of the Roses (1989)
V.I. Warshawski (1991)
Undercover Blues (1993)
House of Cards (1993)
Serial Mom (1994)
The Conspiracy of Silence (1995)
Moonlight and Valentino (1995)
A Simple Wish (1997)
The Virgin Suicides (1999)
Baby Geniuses (1999)
Prince of Central Park (2000)
Monster House (2006)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia