Kathleen Turner is en exotic blonde actress who became a major film star of the 1980s. In addition to her good looks, her most compelling feature is her voice, which she claims is distinctly her own creation. The accent is a little British, a little Spanish, and a little otherwordly, which made her the perfect choice for the off-screen voice (uncredited) of the animated bombshell Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988).
Kathleen Turner's father was a career foreign-service officer who held jobs all over the world, taking his family with him on his travels. While a teenager in England, she decided to become an actress. After her father died and her family moved to Missouri, she continued studying theater and eventually made her initial breakthrough on a daytime soap opera, The Doctors.
Kathleen Turner honed her skills and gained valuable experience during her 20 months doing daytime drama, and it paid off when she was cast as the female lead in Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981). It marked not only Kathleen Turner's debut in motion pictures but also Kasdan's, and it was costar William Hurt's second movie. Despite the relative inexperience of the writer-director and his two actors, the film was a surprise hit, and Kathleen Turner was immediately touted as a future star, thanks to her sultry, sophisticated performance.
She went on to choose an eclectic mix of films during the balance of the 1980s, including the STEVE MARTIN comedy romp, The Man With Two Brains (1983), and the intense, steamy Ken Russell indulgence, Crimes of Passion (1984). Then, in short order, she suddenly fulfilled the prophecies of the critics, scoring along with MICHAEL DOUGLAS in the $100-million-grossing Romancing the Stone (1984), followed by the disappointing but still commercially successful sequel, Jewel of the Nile (1985).
Kathleen Turner played opposite Douglas yet again in the black comedy War of the Roses (1989). She gave strong performances during the mid- to late 1980s in such critical and box-office standouts as Prizzi's Honor (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and The Accidental Tourist (1988), the latter film reuniting the Body Heat team in an entirely different (and more sedate) movie.
Though she was in a couple of commercial flops, such as Switching Channels (1988), Kathleen Turner's career was among the most varied and most successful of any actress during the 1980s. In 1989, Kathleen Turner costarred with Michael Douglas in The War of the Roses, an acerbic black comedy about divorce in America. In 1991, she played gumshoe V. I. Warshawski in an unsuccessful neo-noir thriller. Undercover Blues (1993) was a comedy thriller about married spies (Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid) trying to stop an old adversary from selling stolen weapons. But mostly matronly roles awaited her during the 1990s.
In 1993, for example, she played the mother who is trying to pull her daughter out of a fantasy world in House of Cards and was convincingly sympathetic. Perhaps her best role of the 1990s, however, was in John Waters's Serial Mom (1994), a dark comedy about a suburban housewife who murders people who upset her view of the world. On trial for multiple murders, she is acquitted after she befuddles one witness by flashing him. Thereafter, she stalks a young woman who didn't know better than to wear white shoes after Labor Day, following her into the ladies' room to dispatch her for her transgression.
Since then, Kathleen Turner has appeared in Moonlight and Valentino (1995) as an overbearing ex-stepmother of Elizabeth Perkins. She played the fairy godmother in A Simple Wish (1997). In 1999, she appeared in Baby Geniuses, but, more significantly, she played the uptight, dominating, overly religious mother of the beautiful Lux sisters in The Virgin Suicides. The latter was a great performance in a relatively marginal independent film, adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides and directed by Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola. Unfortunately, not all of the roles offered to Kathleen Turner were of that caliber.
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