Kathleen Turner made her film debut 30 years ago in the blockbuster thriller, Body Heat. Since then, she’s been leading lady in numerous films and on stage and she’s earned Tony nominations for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Turner sits down with Alec to talk directors – from stage and screen; raising a daughter in New York; dealing with rheumatoid arthritis; and her passion for performance: “If I couldn’t act, I’d just curl up, shrivel up and die … I can’t live without it.”
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Kathleen Turner made her film debut thirty years ago in the blockbuster thriller Body Heat. Since then, she's taken on the female roles actress's dream about playing, a word often used to describe her work brazen. On screen, We've seen her in Peggy Sue Got Married, Precy's Honor, The Accidental Tourist. On stage, she's earned Tony nominations for Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. Yet, her career has not been without disappointment. Her most recent Broadway play, High closed last year after just eight performances. Now she's taken it on tour. She's performing in San Francisco later this month. I had lunch with Kathleen at Telepan Restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The restaurant was between shifts, getting ready for dinner service, vacuums blaring around us, dishes being stacked. As we talked Kathleen Turner, his mind is always at work. Give her half an hour and she'll solve the country's problems. So I've got an idea if you want to hear it. I think we should have a day when all women don't go to work. If a handful of people in this country are going to decide whether or not we will receive health care, whether or not we have control over our bodies as to when we wish to have a child, then what would happen of the workforce one day, just with two and reminded those people in Washington how important we are. Do you think that for you? Because I know this is true for me that at some point, maybe not throughout your career, but at some point there was a struggle to stay interested. No. I I think I was brought up this way. My father was a foreign service officer. We were always in a sense politically are you know? Growing up? And I swear to gosh you when I was about ten years old, my father we were at some event, you know, like the fourth of July in Caracas, Venice whatever or something, you know, and my father said, please remember that you know your behavior reflects on your country. And I can remember thinking vividly, oh my god, whatever I do is going to be what people think of the US, which is a heavy burden for a ten year old. Let me tell you that might have been unfair of him, It might have been a little rough. He honestly believed it. And that sense of being part of something and being responsible for something, I think was instilled in meizens surely, very much so in some regard. But at the same time, have you found it's been hard for you to stay interested in this business throughout you mean in the business of acting? Yes, no, No, I certainly don't. I think make as much of a priority of it as many other people I know in the industry. But if I couldn't act, I just curl up, shrivel up and die. Yeah. No, I can't live without it. Yeah, has your attitude world have changed? It's gotten more passionate. And well, I branch out now now because I've been doing this for over thirty years now, and now I can teach as well. Now I can direct as well. But the but the reason I say this is because, and I could be wrong, and this is my opinion. This is the business, especially movies and television, the business let's go of you or you let go of it as interesting. And I wondered if at some point in your career where you made films, especially there's a decade where you make all these stones. Yeah, the world and all this stuff is going, but you strike me somewhere where you let go of it. I suppose so, But did you lose interest? It was no. I never wanted to live in Los Angeles. I had a daughter. I was never going to bring up a girl out in l A. Your daughter was born where here in New York City, only raised her here. She has only lived here. So from that period, the last movie you played like a leading lady in Sereal mom My mom right, that's when I got room with authorities. She's These things sort of came around at the same time, a combination of circumstances. Yeah, yeah, she was, and I got are A. She was in kindergarten. So just all of a sudden, you just won't go out there anymore. I couldn't fake it. I couldn't fake looking and acting well, you know, there was I was. It was very, very hard to to move at all. We didn't really know what was going on for a long time, you know. So I had all the fantasies of some kind of dread disease that no one had been able to diagnose that was killing me. And then when they did diagnose it as all right, then they started pumping me full of steroids and and you know what that does, yeah yeah, And so at that for about a year and a half, my entire woh, I'd say longer, I'd say at least two years. My entire focus was on being able to restore myself to some normality of life. We lived in a brownstone when I couldn't get up and downstairs, so we had to sell that and move into once level apartment. You know. But in the same way, I think I had always been ambitious to it and working for growing up into a full blown theater at coming home that happened in between films. I would always go back to the stage. I met too many actors in Hollywood, in l A film actors who were terrified, I've ever going back to the stage. They were afraid perhaps they had lost an edge or something. Secondly, they were terrified that they'd be attacked because they had been filmed successes, you know, that the critic unfair way, somebody would be after them, you know, just because they had the name yeah yeah, yeah, which I didn't, you know, when I did Captain Hodgson Roof, which is my big Broadway comeback in I remember I auditioned for and I didn't get the part. I'm sorry, Okay, do you want a break? No? No, no, no, no, it's okay. Who was it? Danny Hugh Kelly? He was great, he was so continued, yes, yeah, well okay, Well you didn't do so bad, you know, I started along. Williams is a good one to fall back. I'm not a bad one. Yeah, so I did Captain hot Tin Roof. Honestly, Michael Das was calling me up. Jack Nicholson was calling me up. Warm Baby was calling up and saying, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. You know they'll just kill you. And I said, you know, you don't understand. I'm better on stage, and I think I am. But I also found that making films for me. I had an agent who once said to me, if you never did another movie again, what would you be missing? And at that point I was looking at the movies that I could do, the ones I was doing, where things were if we all went to work and everybody did their job perfectly, if everybody was perfect, would change the world. No, the best we can with mediocrity, even if we were. It's a killer. You go into the script is like okay, and we think we're gonna be able to maybe somehow we're gonna be able to make it better. My problem with film more now is that I find it's boring work. I mean not. I'm not talking about the material. I'm talking about the process of day acting for twenty minutes, walking away for an hour we said everything, coming back acting the same material, just from a different angle again, maybe shooting to three pages a day. Right, it's so boring. It's so boring. A TV show, You're wrong, a TV show. Tell me, oh the coming back? About that? I just hated the commitment. I hated the idea of being that tied down. I thought, if I had to do the same character year after year, I would definitely slip my throat. Well yeah, because you think this mark on my throat here? Yeah, I had sewed up. But I've been doing a TV show and the thing I like about it, the thing the thing I thought i'd hate about it. You know what I like is I like being home in New York. Biggie, I'm home. We shoot the show here. People think we're funny, and as soon as they wrapped me. In the end of the day, I wiped my cat makeup off my face, and I'm at a restaurant with my friends in Manhattan at eight o'clock every night. I have a life. I have a great life from the shooting. But you never do a serious really talking about oh what a hard breaker? Does this ever happening? This is the first time it's happened to me, I thought, so, I really did, and you know, and the audience response, which I was never entire really sure if the play was as strong as it needed to be. However, you reach point in the amount of work that you do and your willingness to commit, you cannot have any doubts anymore. You simply say, I absolutely believe in this. That's how you must behave Although in the back of my mind there will retain some doubts as to the the play itself, had no doubts as to the performances, or the audience response or the heart of the material about addiction versus faith, you know, which is to me a fascinating kind of concept. What did the place say about that that is a constant battle, that there is no winner, that addiction has no cure, and that faith can be part of of making life livable again and breaking the bonds of addiction, but there is no cure for either, which perhaps was not as uplifting as some people might have voted on by Ashman this is Broadway. But it never ever occurred to me that we'd only be open a week. I mean the first thing I did, of course, it was just getting sick as it all. You know they only do this too, Boddy, when when you finished a long run or a long commitment to our season of something, you get sick because you care, and you get you get so sick. I remember I would be sick. I was doing a play and I had the flu. You get to the Saturday Matt May, and you know you have to do the Saturday night show. So now you're rolling into your seventh show. You did two on a Saturday, and I'd lay on my bed in my addressing room and I'd say a prayer. I'd say, please God, I hope people come and rob the box office of the theater, and while they're here, they come up here and shoot me in my bed and kill me because I can't go down there and do this goddamn show again. Is your daughter interested in the business. She is a singer song right, with an amazing voice and me easy ability, and her songs are just I'm I'm stung, and she's this charming, compassionate, interesting woman. I'm like, I like my daughter. Wow. But but well, you know, there are a few years in there, in the teenage years, when you really wonder how the heck she's going to turn out. I mean you really, and you feel it's outside your control. You did what's good and all this stuff, and she just turned out so good. There's my daughter's fifteen, and there's some days you don't know yet. There's some days I want to send her to Afghanistan. But without a doubt, there were many days when I had that feeling when you look at your career then, because this is something I do which I don't do, I don't think back, I don't want, I don't care. No, there is no museum of Turner in my house or anywhere else, no shrines to her. But when you think about it, when you think of like when I look back of myself and when I was beginning in this business, I'm like that poor schmuck because I didn't remember that if I only focused on my work. I have to tell you something terrible. I agree with you. You were often a schmuck. Yes, you were just very full of yourself a lot of the time. Really, I believe so. You think so much. Yes I do. I think I was. I would say no, I did. I didn't even get a bit of this one. But there you go. I probably was too well. I was gonna say, yeah, yeah, you call a spade a spade here. Yes, indeed, I'll call you law turner for nothing. Don't. But anyone who has worked with me, See, the only people who would say that are people who have never really worked with me. But when you look back, when you do look back and think about what you were like, they're making films to each other. Well, we can have more of that too, in a moment, more in a moment. But make all the film, these great films. When you look back at her, what do you think of her? What was she like to you? What were you like when you were first starting? I make you did but naive? I think I was very naive. Film kind of happened to me, you know. I came to New York to be a Broadway starter. I was always I grew up in London, great theater shows and stuff. I never had any contact with film or with TV making. Well. I first moved to New York. I got a sup bumper. I was on the same Yeah you would, because you were going on somewhere past in the hallway. And then came buddy that I always thought. I remembered you were shot body Heat and you came back to say hello to some of those people, of course, and came to New York and had a drink with some of them, and I got to see so I say hello, good body fleetingly and you were just shot by. They all looked at you like you were you know, secretariats. No, not just that people you say, you know, well, where have you been you? I haven't seen you for six months. I've been shooting a film, you know, a movie in Los Angeles, like, oh, what's it called Body Heating? It went, oh, honey, okay, I confess I went went out to be a porn star. Yes, but then you made those movies in that. Was there something you wish you did differently? No? No, I turned out a lot of things. You know, it turned down your basic body heat two three, four five. You know, after romancing a lot of events. It seems as though every time you have a success in one sort of genre, then you're just supposed to do that. Yeah, but you already did that. They want to make five of those in a row because it proved successful. But it's not interesting to me. I proved it was successful, thank you very much, but just in a voyeuristic way for me. Give me an example, what was it like working with John Houston? Very interesting? Tell me because I idolized Houston. I mean, you got to work with John was the one before his last Pristine's Honor was his last Means You film. You know, we had terrible, terrible Emphasema couldn't move without oxygen tank. You know, he would see him count the steps he would have to take to get from one place to another, you know, sort of counting the breaths that he would need. Didn't stop he's thinking any but he would I think probably gave us more, gave Jack, I mean, more more liberties than he would have I think so, because he would have someone pointed that out to you, to someone who knew his methods, say that to you his daughter, and it's a different Houston on his film. Yeah, he would say all right, you know, you show me something and then we'll go. So I'd look at Jack Nicholson go, well, okay, how about we started the scene where like I'm face down over the arm of the sofa and you're just pulling away at the camera company, you know, and Jack goes, oh, yeah, that's great. I mean we aren't. So you know, my idea was the who's on top in the bed scene, you know, when we've ultimately rolled off the edge of the bed, with Jack going my back, my back the whole the time anyway, So he would give us more freedom I think than than yeah, and they come in and say yes or no or you know, right direction or whatever. But there was one day in particular when it was a scene where the day where the character really had to break down in fear of her life because she'd been caught out, you know essentially, and we're shooting in this terrible aclaustrophobic little house which made every angle and lighting the issue impossible. And he would have the camera and everything he's set up, I've waited four hours coming. We'd be one run through and he'd say, no, I don't like it this way and going and I ain't taking another four hours, hour after hour after hour, so you're ready to scream and cry and kick with frustration. And I overheard him say to one of the first ads, do you think she was ready? Now? Not the youth? So I yes, I was ready. That was the only time he really did that to me. Who was the director that you think out to? Who was the director you really admired Coppola? Coppola from yeah, tremendously. He had such an extraordinary grasp of the possibilities of the images, in of what the camera could do and when I could see. And I learned so much from him. Bizarrely, some of my best work, I think was for Ken Russell. You know who's certifiable I mean, but then he's he's certifiably a genius too. How many movies did you make with only one? Oh? He had a way of For example, in Crimes of Passion, there's a scene and she's his fifty dollar hooker on Hollywood Avenue at night. The scene takes place in this hotel room and the walls are papered with this shiny, hideous pink and purple shiny wallpaper, and he had a flashing neon light set over to the side that was like the motel sign on the street. Yeah, that was the only light. Are acting I had to take place within the timing and the pulsing of that neon lamp which he regulated, you know, and the reflections that came off the wallpaper. It's genius. The older I get, the more it's all technical to me. Now, I agreed, you either have the inspiration or you don't. I don't need anybody to inspire me to play the part. Typically, But but in the theater where you've done all this complex material, who were the theater directors who were the most memorable to Who's someone who you just had loved working with him in the theater cat Tin Rufe, whose name, of course just left my head, British director, absolutely brilliant. Yes, and then also with Virginia Wolf, which was some of the most anthony page some of the most gentle misdirecting directing I've ever had. I mean, you didn't really realize until much further into the process how much he was actually giving you. You know, when you did that part, I really got to the end of Martha finally you did. Yeah, but it took that whole time. Was it tough? To do that. No, it was glorious. It was glorious to feel so used up. It was so satisfying. You understand, there's a thing that that's happens, and then you don't have to share this opinion. I understand. But like Elizabeth Taylor, like Bacall, like Stock or Channing, you're asked to play women who have a lot of authority. You're asked to play women who straightened people out a lot in the show, or don't depend very independent woman and and and there's a kind of a forcefulness to that. Do you find that you would rather play the other side of him? You can't play the weak women. You'd victim, you know. And I think that's a real limitation. Yeah, something in me would just kick and scream and come out. I just know that if I actually said, okay, okay, okay, I'm gonna do this poor help us little woman who doesn't fight for anything, I would betray it somewhere down the line, I know I would. What do you want to do next? What's the part you having done in the theater? I just got a whole slew, which is always nice. Having just lost my job. You know, they lost you? Yes, thank you a couple of interesting ideas you've come up. One is o play called The Killing of Sister George. Do you remember this? Oh about a pretty stradio drama. I'm not sure how I feel about it, which is very intriguing to me. There's a great deal of humor and everything. At the same time. The woman is absolutely wretched, awful, abusive, you know, qualities that I truly despise. The other side I just adore. So I gotta have you know, we're gonna sit down and have a reading on that one. Is there other alb you want to do? Well? He's writing a new one, yeah, which is interesting. Was that experience like working with him? Very hands on, he's very press he's very very present. At the time though his partner of thirty or five years was dying. In fact, it was a race between whether we open on Broadway first or his partner would would breathe his last So I'll be probably gave us less attention then he has in many, many, many years, which I rather liked, because he can be difficult. He's very very controlling about the interpretation of material. Yes, and he's not as good a director as he thinks he is. Do you go to the theater much you watch a movie goer and a theater goer. I go to theater more than films. I always have. You know, when your show is canceled, you say, and the idiots put money in that, you know, which just makes you angry, because, of course there's no rhyme or reason. I liked Good People. I was interested by the play. It's intricate, interested in writing, and I think that Francis McDormand it's lovely, lovely work. Then of course that was the Book of Mormon. Honey. I don't usually laugh out loud and public, and I was simply cowling. And at the end of the show, this guy in the aisle behind me had his phone out and he said, I'm tweeting Kathleen Turner, Pete and her partents. I said, go right ahead, go right ahead on um how I'll be very honest with you about something. I've been in tremendous physical pain myself for the last couple of years, very bad back from doing a play on a raped stage when we did street Car two. I never had one back problem in my life, and I was fairly young that I was thirty four. I did that play in I was thirty four. My back has never been the same. Now I can't take anything because I can't work in my business. In this business, I can't be high. I used to make that mistake. I made it bad, you know. In terms of when the r A was at some of its very very worst. I was doing show on Broadway, and I was doing indiscretions with the raped stage by the way, which really can kill you any case. As soon as that curtain came down Sunday night until Monday night, I drank because I'll tell you, alcohol kills pain. But you have to stop by Monday night because you have to be back on stage Tuesday. So I would get through the week thinking, you know, four over nights, three more nights, two more nights until I can start. I couldn't take pills. You can't take pain pills. You can't thank the TV show. I can't take pills. You're not clear, you're not timed, you know. Yeah, it's so good. I found extraordinary people to help me in terms of physical therapy, swimming, massage, on and off. I bet I've quit smoking. I don't know how many times it's okay, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, right, Well I'm quit at the moment. We'll put that. Let's again smoking, yes for you. I'm so proud of you, and acupuncture and and every single day. The thing that has helped, the single most thing, the best is pilates. That's what I take is the best. Has it ever affected your work? Have you had to work from a show where you were agony? Oh? God? And in Discretions there was three story metal staircase that the characters had to go up and wait on a catwalk up there. I kept tissues and a mirror and lipstick and powder up there, and by the time I got to the top of it, I got to get sit down with the gun. I would be sobbing I have better on it, And then I would hear a line from Roderiese and I would wipe my face, put the lip soup back on, repad on my nose, and go back down. And that's what got me through it every single night, which is letting myself stop. By the time I got up, I have had nine operations on my knees and my feet and and stuff and hand and things, but I have never had that back problem. I've always been lucky. Do you still have the house, and I just sold it. You sold it in November. The kids grow up, they don't want to spend the summer out there. And then my husband and I divorced five years ago. How do you like being single? Love it? I love it twenty two years, twenty two years. And now you know what I love. I love to get home, be in front of the door of my apartment and know that no one else is inside. It's such a relief. I don't have to take care of anybody. I think maybe it's more of a woman thing. I don't know. But first thing I'm going to do tomorrow is go get my hair all cut off. What are you doing? I don't know, I don't care. So tomorrow I'm gonna go in and say, do something creative for me. What do you do when you want to like us A that chapter is over? Do you get to get cut? Well? No, I'm that's not like it's not the same as for women. You are some dramatic alteration in your physical appearance. I um, uh, God, I wonder that's a very good question. What do I do when I want to signify a big change in my life? I probably um I hate change. I hate change. I think all change is good, well usly. I mean, it's not easy, but it's always good. Maybe for Kathleen Turner, I do hate change. Kathleen's comment reminded me of a quote that is stuck with me. This was Rauschenberg's obituary in the New York Times. I said this. Painter Robert Rauschenberg died in two thousand eight. In his obituary, he was quoted talking about his first solo show, everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics. Rauschenberg recalled Meni, Picasso, the Surrealist, and Matisse. That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change, and if I may add to that, Rachenberg said, nothing can avoid changing. It's the only thing you can count on because life doesn't have any other possibility. Everyone can be measured. I love this by his adaptation to change. And that's the thing I'm really working on now, is so I really I was shown this is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing