Kathleen Turner Archive

Kathleen Turner was born on June 19, 1954. She is an American actress. Born Mary Kathleen Turner in Springfield, Missouri, Turner's parents were career diplomats, and she lived in four foreign countries--Canada, Cuba, Venezuela, and England while growing up. Girl has two brothers and a sister. She was a gymnast as a teenager. While attending high school in London, she also took classes at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her father, Allen Richard Turner, grew up in China and was a foreign services diplomat who was imprisoned by the Japanese for four years during World War II. When her father died of a coronary thrombosis in 1972, the family moved back to the United States.

Turner attended Southwest Missouri State University at Springfield for two years, then gained her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1977. In 1978, the 5'10" husky voiced Turner was hired as the second Nola Turner on NBC daytime soap The Doctors, but was fired the next year because the producers felt she was "not hot enough". Turner had the last laugh as she became a movie star a few years later in Body Heat, which many consider one of the sexiest films (with Turner giving one of the sexiest performances) in the history of cinema. Turner remained a film star up to the early 1990s, but has since rarely appeared in major productions.

During her heyday, Turner rose to fame as the leading-lady star of Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas, Prizzi's Honor with Jack Nicholson, Peggy Sue Got Married with Nicolas Cage, and The War of the Roses with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito. Her career began to slide with her appearances in increasingly low-budget and low-profile films. Kathleen is noteworthy for doing her own stunts in her films, and she broke her nose in V.I. Warshawski. (She revisited the role of V.I. Warshawski on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1990s in serialised dramatisations of several of Sara Paretsky's books). In addition to the television and radio work listed above, she has also appeared as a guest on Friends (as the transvestite father of Chandler Bing), King of the Hill (voice), The Simpsons (voice), Saturday Night Live, which she hosted twice, and as a defense attorney on Law & Order. Turner spoke the voice (uncredited) of sexy Jessica Rabbit in the toon-noir "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" in 1988.

In 2000 Kathleen starred as Mrs, Robinson in the London revival of The Graduate. In March 2005, she starred, with Bill Irwin, as Martha in a revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. Because of her deep voice, she was often compared to a young Lauren Bacall. When the two met, Turner reportedly introduced herself to Bacall by saying "Hi, I'm the young you." Turner was immortalized in the 1980s song "The Kiss of Kathleen Turner" by Austrian techno-pop singer Falco. Kathleen received a lifetime achievement award from the Savannah College of Art and Design at the Savannah Film Festival in October 2004.