The Full Biography
Kathleen Turner. Actress. The Missouri diplomat’s daughter who made a debut so hot the decade took its temperature from her, then learned to work when the joints, and the voice, changed.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a woman in a white dress in a Florida night, looking at William Hurt as if the air itself had a motive. The year was 1981. The picture was Body Heat. What the still cannot show is Mary Kathleen Turner of Springfield, Missouri, raised in other people’s capitals, who did her own falls in adventure comedies, who spoke Jessica Rabbit without a credit, and who spent the 1990s teaching her body a second career after rheumatoid arthritis tried to end the first.
She was born on June 19, 1954, in Springfield. Her father, Allen Richard Turner, served in the United States Foreign Service. The childhood was a sequence of rooms: Canada, Cuba, Venezuela, England. The American School in London. The voice that would make a fortune was not a studio invention. It was a girl who had learned to be understood in houses that were never quite home. When her father died in 1974, she was nineteen. She came back to Missouri, studied theater at Southwest Missouri State, and then went to New York. The soap The Doctors paid the rent. The door was not a discovery lunch. It was Lawrence Kasdan, a first feature, and a part — Matty Walker — that asked her to be intelligent and dangerous in the same close-up.
Body Heat made a climate. Hurt was the Florida lawyer. Turner was the weather he walked into. Audiences who thought they had seen a femme fatale learned they had not seen this one. She did not giggle the danger. She administered it. Hollywood, which likes a simple label, called her a sex symbol and tried to leave it there.
Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks. Most men think it's looks, most women know otherwise.Kathleen Turner
She refused to be only the still. The Man with Two Brains (1983), with Steve Martin, proved she could be absurd on purpose. Romancing the Stone (1984), with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito, for Robert Zemeckis, put her in Colombian mud and asked for physical comedy she was happy to give. She did the falls. She did the heat without the glaze. A Golden Globe followed. The Jewel of the Nile (1985) sent the trio out again. The record of the stunts agrees with what she has always said about the work she wanted.
Prizzi’s Honor (1985), for John Huston, opposite Jack Nicholson, brought another Golden Globe — a hit woman with manners. Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), for Francis Ford Coppola, brought the Academy Award nomination, her only one: a woman sent back to the high school that made her, asked to decide whether the life she got was the life she wanted. The Accidental Tourist (1988) put her opposite Hurt again, this time as a marriage that had already failed. The War of the Roses (1989), DeVito directing, Douglas again, is a divorce comedy that does not blink. Then the picture people forget to put on the list: she was the speaking voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Uncredited. Unmistakable. A generation can sing the line and not name the woman who said it.
I love doing action scenes.Kathleen Turner
Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984) put her in a China Blue night that the adventure pictures had not asked for. Switching Channels (1988) was a newsroom farce that did not last. V.I. Warshawski (1991), from Sara Paretsky’s Chicago detective, was meant to be a franchise and became a warning: Hollywood would fund the walk and the voice, then lose interest when the picture did not print money on the first weekend. House of Cards (1993). Undercover Blues. Moonlight and Valentino. The Real Blonde. Small parts in The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Beautiful (2000). A turn in the Farrelly brothers’ Dumb and Dumber that treated the famous voice as a joke the audience already knew. Television borrowed her when film would not: a guest run on Friends, then, in time, Californication, The Kominsky Method, the kind of cable work that uses an instrument instead of a poster.
John Waters’s Serial Mom (1994) is a comic monument — Beverly Sutphin, suburban murder as etiquette. By then the body had already filed its complaint. In 1990 she had already taken Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Broadway and earned a Tony nomination — proof, even at the height of the film run, that the stage was not a fallback. Indiscretions followed. The West End and Broadway would become the rooms that still knew what to do with a woman who could take a speech and a pratfall in the same night.
Off-Broadway and soap work came first. The Doctors paid New York rent in the late 1970s. Kasdan’s Body Heat was a first feature for him and a first close-up of that size for her. The decade that followed is a run, not a lucky debut: The Man with Two Brains with Steve Martin; Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile with Douglas and DeVito; Prizzi’s Honor for Huston; Peggy Sue Got Married for Coppola; The Accidental Tourist opposite Hurt again; The War of the Roses as a divorce that uses a house as a weapon. Two Golden Globes. One Oscar nomination. An uncredited cartoon bombshell a generation can still hear. Julia and Julia (1987). Switching Channels. The Doctor, a supporting turn beside William Hurt that the posters did not sell. A Breed Apart. Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, a reading. The town had a category. She kept leaving it. Friends from those sets describe a professional who knew the mark, did the fall, and did not ask the crew to treat her as weather.
The stage was already a second ledger before the joints failed. Maggie the Cat on Broadway in 1990, Tony-nominated. Indiscretions. Then the long second career the film town was not booking: Mrs. Robinson in London and New York; Martha for Albee; High; Mother Courage; The Year of Magical Thinking on the road; Bakersfield Mist; Tea at Five, in which she played Katharine Hepburn and had to make another famous voice without doing a party trick. She directed. She taught at NYU. Send Yourself Roses (2008) put the arthritis and the drink on paper in her own sentences. Finding Your Feet (2017) was a small picture that still asked her to dance. The Kominsky Method used the instrument as a fact. Nurse Jackie. The Perfect Family. She kept taking the work. Manhattan remained the address. The joints remained the negotiation. Rachel grew up in those rooms. The walk changed. The appetite for a part did not. Waters got Beverly Sutphin. Albee got Martha. The 1980s posters got only the temperature. The stage kept the instrument. NYU kept a class. The memoir kept the joints and the drink on the record in her own sentences.
The Foreign Service rooms are the first instrument. Canada. Cuba. Venezuela. The American School in London. A girl who had to be understood in houses that were never quite home. When Allen Richard Turner died in 1974 she was nineteen. She came back to Springfield, studied theater at Southwest Missouri State, and went to New York. The soap paid. Kasdan’s first feature asked her to be intelligent and dangerous in the same close-up. She did the falls in Colombia for Zemeckis. She did the hit woman for Huston. She did the high-school return for Coppola. She spoke Jessica Rabbit without a credit. Then the joints filed their complaint and the town cooled. She did not leave the profession. She changed rooms.
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the Florida night, not a diagnosis. In the early 1990s the pain arrived before the name. Rheumatoid arthritis, diagnosed in 1992, when she was thirty-eight. She could hardly turn her head. She was told she might not walk. She drank to manage what the medicine did not. The famous voice changed. The industry, which had rented the voice and the walk, cooled. She has been public about the disease and about the drink. Recovery was not a press release. It was work. The instrument that remained was the one she had always actually had: timing, appetite, a mind that would not play dumb.
Six things most people never knew
- The voice is a life of rooms. Canada, Cuba, Venezuela, London. A Foreign Service childhood, not a studio vocal coach.
- She did the stunts the adventure required. Romancing the Stone is a comedy because she is willing to be ridiculous in mud.
- Jessica Rabbit is her speaking voice. 1988. Uncredited. People quote the cartoon and skip the actress.
- One Oscar nomination, for Peggy Sue Got Married. 1986. Prizzi’s Honor brought a Globe, not a nomination from the Academy.
- The arthritis and the drinking are both on the record because she put them there. She would not let either become a rumor with her name attached and no sentence from her.
- Mrs. Robinson was a dare that paid. London first, then Broadway. The body heat was never the whole instrument.
She married the real-estate developer Jay Weiss in 1984. Their daughter, Rachel, was born in 1987. The marriage ended in 2007. Motherhood did not end the work; the joints tried to. Colleagues from the 1980s pictures describe a professional who knew the joke and the mark. Waters got the version of her that could kill with a casserole. Albee, when he cast her as Martha, said he heard an echo of the original revelation. She had been waiting for that part since college.
The later years
The years after the first fame are a stage life, and a New York life. Home has been Manhattan more than any studio bungalow — an apartment, a daughter, a calendar built around rehearsals rather than call sheets. Jay Weiss, the real-estate man she married in 1984, was the household through the arthritis years. Rachel Ann Weiss, born in 1987, grew up while her mother learned to walk again. The marriage ended in 2007. The work did not. In 2000 she opened The Graduate in the West End as Mrs. Robinson — a brief she has described, without shame, as money and a dare. Broadway took the production in 2002 and nominated her for a Tony. In 2005 she played Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway, opposite Bill Irwin, and received another Tony nomination. Edward Albee heard, in that voice, an echo of the original revelation. She had been waiting for Martha since college.
She directed. She taught acting at New York University. She published Send Yourself Roses in 2008, a memoir that named the joints and the drink without asking for a standing ovation. High, on Broadway in 2011, put her in a nun’s habit and a play about addiction that the town did not keep. The Year of Magical Thinking went on the road. Mother Courage. Bakersfield Mist. A one-woman evening built from the life. Television, when film was unsure what to do with a woman whose walk had changed, used the instrument: Sue Collini on Californication, a run on The Kominsky Method, guest work that treated the voice as a fact instead of a souvenir. The Perfect Family (2011). Nurse Jackie. She kept taking the jobs that still had a sentence in them.
The rheumatoid arthritis, diagnosed in 1992, is managed, not gone. Methotrexate and the other drugs gave her a second gait. Recovery from drink is a fact she will still name in a room that asks. She does not request congratulations for remaining visible. She asks to be cast. In her seventies the close-up is older. The attitude is the one she defined when the men thought it was the face. That is a more useful vanity than the one the 1980s posters sold.
After the spotlight moved
It has not moved so much as changed rooms. Every actress asked to be only a temperature is still walking through the door Body Heat opened and the one Turner refused to close when the joints failed. Jessica Rabbit still talks in her register. Martha is the part that proved the Florida night was a beginning, not a category.
She came out of Springfield and a string of embassies, made a debut that altered the decade’s idea of danger, did her own comedy in the jungle, spoke a cartoon bombshell without credit, named the disease and the drink, and then took the stage when the camera hesitated. If you only remember Matty Walker, you have the still. If you remember the uncredited rabbit, the Tony night as Martha, and a woman still working after the body rewrote the contract, you have her.
Portrait: ShashiBellamkonda from Potomac, USA · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons