Kathleen Turner

Interview, August, 1995 by Graham Fuller

GF: You began acting in movies comparatively late. You were twenty-six when you did Body Heat.

KT: I suppose that's late for a woman. I was never an ingenue. I did stage for years - that's where my desire was.

GF: But when you arrived you made a hell of an impact. How did you take to Hollywood?

KT: I never took to Hollywood.

GF: Have you ever lived out there?

KT: I rent houses in L.A. when I'm filming. I find the isolation there terrifying. There's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to be with people. I'm not a beach bunny. You get in the car and you sit and you wonder where the fuck to go if you're not working. People live in these enclaves. They work so hard to get all this money and exposure and become world-renowned, and then they shut themselves up in these houses with ten-foot walls and glass on the top, and everyone who comes to see them has to go through a security check. I always thought the point was to have a bigger life, to meet more people. So I don't understand Hollywood.

GF: Don't most actors have to live there to progress through the industry?

KT: No. I'm quite satisfied with my progress. I don't want to be that available. I've always wanted the separation. I had a great deal of pressure to move out there after Romancing the Stone came out and I'd become very popular. But I didn't think it was necessary to move, and people came to me anyway. I have no desire to play most of the roles being offered, so why move there?

GF: Do you have a distaste for the industry?

KT: Yes, in some ways. I don't think it's about the work anymore. It still was when I started, but now it begins and ends with money. It's absurd in this day and age when we need so much money for education, for health, for people, that a hundred million dollars can be spent on a film. It's obscene to me that an actor would take a fee of fifteen million dollars for a film. I'm not saying that all L.A. actors are like that. I'm not a New York snob in that way, O.K.? But those values are seriously askew to me.

GF: You've never been scared of playing characters who are unappealing or unsympathetic.

KT: No, they're very real, but what's important to me is that they learn something; they must have growth. When Larry [director Lawrence Kasdan] sent me the script of The Accidental Tourist [1988], I said, "I'd love to play the crazy character [the Geena Davis role]," and he said, "I was really thinking of you as the wife." So I read half the script again and called him and said, "The wife - absolutely." She's the one who really learns.

GF: I know that you've talked a lot over the years about the dearth of good roles for women. . . .

KT: No, I really haven't that much. I mean, I manage to find satisfying roles. When I have spoken about it, it's been to say that women are responsible for creating their own roles. I'm not very active politically. The causes I work on offer immediate, practical, accessible help, and politics has never meant that to me. But I was talking with Bella Abzug, the grand dame of New York politics - this was six, seven years ago, when we had two women senators - and I remember she said, "How the hell do you expect ninety-eight men to legislate for women? How can they know what we need, and why should they? But if they elect forty-eight more women, we'll see what we'll get in the way of women's legislation." It's exactly the same in movies: Get more women producers, writers, directors. Why should we expect men to do it for us? They can't.