One cinematic journey

I hear Kathleen Turner before I see her. She has a guttural, slurring voice that is several fathoms below the surface of normal female speech.

As I sit waiting for her with my head in a book, this voice rolls up and out across the restaurant like a breaker. We are on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, around the corner from her apartment overlooking the Hudson River.

She has stopped to say hello to some friends on her way to my table. She has her back to me and I am filled with a sudden trepidation as I wait for her to turn. Her voice, as she herself has put it, is more recognisable than she is these days.

It seems a cruel fate to be frozen in the public memory as a lithe, icy-yet-smouldering, husky-voiced actress in your mid-twenties but that is what the 54-year-old Kathleen Turner has to contend with every day.

She was even offered that draughty Sharon Stone role in Basic Instinct and turned it down on the grounds of it being too tacky.

Certainly it is no exaggeration to describe her as an icon of 1980s cinema, not least because Body Heat, her first film and first box-office hit, was made in 1981 and her last big hit, The War of the Roses, was made in 1989.

Way to the top

In Body Heat she played a cold-hearted femme fatale opposite William Hurt and delivered the unforgettable line: “You're not too smart. I like that in a man.''

She was pretty chilling in her second film, The Man With Two Brains, as well. It was a comedy. A trilogy of romantic comedies with Michael Douglas followed — Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile and The War of the Roses — and these made her one of the most bankable female stars in Hollywood.

There was an Oscar nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married and then her turn came as Jessica Rabbit, the cartoon figure in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, to which she lent her voice.
But then, in the 1990s, she seemed to disappear off the radar.

There were sightings of her looking bloated and raddled; reports of her having become an alcoholic. She didn't deny them. She thought them preferable to the truth.

She had rheumatoid arthritis, a crippling auto-immune disease that affects the tissue in the joints, and the steroids she was taking for it were the cause of her changing appearance and making her look puffy — though drinking to kill the pain didn't help.

As things transpired, she did become an alcoholic and went into rehab in 2002. But instead of becoming a recluse when she came out, she reinvented herself as a stage actress, an acclaimed one, both on Broadway and in the West End: first as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, then in an award-winning performance as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

After that, in 2006, she got a divorce and sat down to write an autobiography.

And here I am, sitting at a corner table in the restaurant, waiting for her to turn round. When she finally does, the air tightens.

She gives a toss of the head and a smile exposing expensive American teeth — she had them fixed after the studios complained that, because she had spent part of her teenage years in London, she had “English teeth''.

When she sits down, I see she is wearing a silky Chinese jacket and no make-up. Her skin is not smooth and she has a low brow, with thick, dusty blonde hair that spills over her shoulders.

For a moment, this adds to an impression that her features are somehow too small for her face, then they seem to come into focus and I realise that there always was something snubby about her look.

Hers was an enigmatic beauty, neither obvious nor bland — chiselled from wood rather than sculpted from marble. And something about the way light catches her eyes, one hazel, one blue, as she tilts back her head makes her suddenly unmistakable.

“Friends of mine,'' she growls with a backward look over her shoulder. “Like just about everyone around here, they work in the theatre.''

She has lived in the theatre district of New York for most of her adult life, eschewing Hollywood because she didn't want to raise her daughter there.

“Your engagement with the world is completely out of whack in LA. I mean, all their body-image problems. Once I had a daughter, there was no way I was going to bring her up out there.''

She is quite unstarry in her habits, she tells me. She takes buses and potters around the grocery store and the pharmacist. Chats to the garbage men she sees every morning on her way to the gym.

Crippling affliction

“You know, RA [rheumatoid arthritis] is a very bad disease. Very difficult. You have a permanent low-level feeling, a constant temperature and nausea.

“I was 37 when I was diagnosed and I thought, why should I expect to be incapacitated? It wasn't as if I had done a stupid stunt that broke my neck — though, boy, I came close to that.
In her autobiography, Send Yourself Roses, she writes that she wants to apologise to anyone she was unpleasant to when she was drinking.

Her decision not to reveal the truth about her illness was one she took with her agent and her husband. The logic was that, in Hollywood at least, it is more acceptable for you to drink or do drugs than to be ill.

Contracts are more likely to waive insurance for drink and drug addiction, than for serious illness.

She lives alone these days, after being married for 22 years to Jay Weiss, a wealthy New York property developer. She reckons she and her husband are still great friends — just happier apart. Her daughter, Rachel, is a 20-year-old university student. “She's a terrific kid but I am kind of hoping she will leave home soon.''

Turner is pretty good on the self-analysis, describing herself as “funny, smart, irreverent, silly, stubborn and demanding''.

Her self-awareness even extends to admitting that her self-awareness is probably down to her having had the same therapist, a woman, for the past 25 years. “It's preventive really. She's a sounding board. My shrink has told me I have unresolved issues.''

Such as? “My father dying when he did. I was 17. A great time of transition in my life.'' Her father, an American diplomat, died suddenly of coronary thrombosis while on a posting to London. “His death left me with an inherent insecurity that I would fight to hide.''

Our waitress arrives, an actress between jobs. That was what Turner was doing when she was cast in Body Heat and she went back to waitressing while waiting for the film to be released.

“For all I knew, it was going to be a flop and I needed to carry on paying the rent. But then, suddenly, Bill [Hurt] and I were hot.''