With a move to Italy and a return to the stage, Kathleen Turner is staying one step ahead of Hollywood's ageism, she tells Sharon Krum.
Kathleen Turner doesn't give you an interview as much as grant you an audience. This isn't to suggest that the 51-year-old once regarded as the definitive screen femme fatale is haughty or reserved. On the contrary, she is a witty and voluble talker. But her conversation is definitely part performance - the eyebrows that rise mischievously, the husky voice that purrs at times, the pronouncements on anything from Botox to desirability. And it all adds up to something akin to your own bracing day at the theatre.
"I do not admire young actresses whose foreheads cannot move," she declares at once, leaning forward so you can inspect her face, which, although still strikingly beautiful, does indeed bear a few lines. "I think, what the hell are you doing to yourself? Certainly limiting your ability to communicate." And communication, Turner informs you, is what she was put here for. "My husband says I can do anything I put my mind to, but the truth is the only thing I want to do is act."
Six years ago Turner famously appeared naked on stage in London, playing the role of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. Now she is back with the Tony-nominated Broadway production of Edward Albee's classic, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, playing the alcoholic, caustic Martha, whose war zone of a marriage to a university professor hits a new low one night in 1962. It's a part she announced at 20 that she would play at 50, and here she is, right on target.
"I often play women who are not essentially good or likeable, and I often go through a stage where I hate them," she says. "And then I find the reasons why they are that way, and end up loving and defending them.
"For me Martha is a tragic, wasted woman. She has great intelligence and ambition, and should have been president of the university. But then it was not possible, so it doesn't surprise me she started drinking and resented George's life outside the house. I really do see her as commentary on women then and, in many ways, now. There are still women who are not living their own lives, but living through their men or their children."
Turner spent part of her adolescence in London, where her diplomat father was posted. Resolved to become an actress, she took classes at the Central School of Speech and Drama, while cramming in as much theatre as she could.
"It's always been my first love; I never feel more alive than when I'm on stage," she says. "On film you feel chopped up; you can be acting from the neck up, or the hand; there is a lot of close-up. And I figured as I got older, the good roles for women would be in the theatre. So 15 years ago I started building a Broadway career to try and develop the chops to be accepted as a great theatrical actress."
That Turner is more directed toward theatre than film these days is both a result of her own passion and the realities of Hollywood. Women's magazines might insist that 40 is the new 30, but for American actresses today, 40 is more like the new 70.
Turner confirms this. When her film career exploded in 1981 after playing the hyper-sexual Matty Walker in Body Heat, she became celluloid's new It girl. She remained a sex symbol and a huge box-office draw through the 1980s, with The Man With Two Brains, Prizzi's Honor and Romancing the Stone, cementing her status with an Academy Award nomination in 1986 for Peggy Sue Got Married. She was also the sultry voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. "Then [when I was] about 40, the roles started slowing down. I started getting offers to play mothers and grandmothers. I'd say the cut-off point for leading ladies today is 35/40, whereas half the men in Hollywood get their start then. It's a terrible double standard."
Turner is no shrinking violet - "the older I get, the less I suffer fools gladly" - so watching Hollywood downsize her career because she was no longer a twentysomething sex bomb was not an option. Packing a suitcase was. Recently she announced she is shifting her base part-time from New York to Rome, specifically to keep working as a film actress.
"Once my daughter [Rachel, 18] starts university, I'm going to Europe, because I think women of my experience and my body of work are so much more respected there. Look at Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve and Sophia Loren, my God, I could go on. They are all working."
Hollywood, she says, is singularly and frustratingly obsessed with youth; witness the rise of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton as major stars. "I find the idea of today's icons being teenagers incredibly uninspiring. I think the Europeans have enough tradition and respect for the experience and body of work of an actress that they don't sell out to the new ones."
There may be more female executives in Hollywood now than any other time in history (most of them over 40), but curiously they are not ensuring more roles for their acting contemporaries. Turner shakes her head. "The problem is the studios are banks today, and their job is to protect invested money. The biggest ticket-buying audience is men aged 14-27, so that is who they cater to.
"What we need," says Turner, "is more women writers, writing for older women. There are some actresses who have production companies and create their own material, and I truly admire that, but it's not me." Basing herself in Rome, however - she speaks Spanish and is studying Italian - seems a good move. "Some European directors have already been in touch," she says, adding, as one eyebrow heads north, "there is some nice interest bubbling up."
Though Turner continued to make some critically acclaimed movies in her 40s - the repressed mother in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, a homicidal matriarch in the satirical Serial Mom - a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis in 1993 certainly did not help a film career that was already shifting gear. Daily intake of steroids to control pain and severe joint swelling caused her to gain weight; the tabloids had a field day suggesting she had let herself go with drinking and overeating. Nor did she contradict them.
"It hurt me very much what they wrote [she is now in remission with medication and back to her slim form], but I was frightened if the industry knew I was sick, it might hurt my career." Hollywood, she points out, can be a very forgiving town, except if you're ill. "Look at all the actors who are known drunks, go to jail for drugs, come out of rehab and go right back to work. But for me to tell people about it, they would have run."
She says that while the worst of it was the loss of mobility - "I have always been a great athlete, and suddenly to lose this portion of myself was devastating" - she understood why the public's reaction was centred on her perceived loss of sexuality. Sex symbols, she explains, are expected to be frozen in time. "People were saying, look, her face is getting heavier, comparing me to who I was 20 years ago. Which makes no sense. They didn't stop growing or changing; why would I look the same? And if I did look the same, is that not bizarre?"
For the record, Turner feels as sexy now as she did two decades ago, because, she explains, she considers "sexy" happens in a woman's brain, not her bra. "When I was 20, I had so many more insecurities and looked for approbation from everyone. But by the time I was 40 and now at 50, you wake up and think, 'f**k you, I don't have to prove myself any more', and that makes you sexy."
Guardian service
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is at the Apollo Theatre, London
