Kathleen Turner (born June 19, 1954) is an American actress.
Kathleen Turner: Early Life
Born Mary Kathleen Turner in Springfield, Missouri, the daughter of diplomat Richard Turner, she had lived in four foreign countries by the time she entered college. She 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. When her father died in 1973, the family moved back to Springfield.
Kathleen Turner: Career
She 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 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.
In addition to the television 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), and Saturday Night Live, which she hosted twice.
In 2000 Turner 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.
Kathleen Turner: Awards
She was nominated for an Oscar for best actress in 1987 for her role in Peggy Sue Got Married. She received two Golden Globe awards, both for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, for Romancing the Stone (1984) and Prizzi's Honor (1985).
Kathleen Turner: Personal life
Turner married New York real-estate mogul Jay Weiss in 1984. They have a daughter, Rachel Ann Weiss, born 1988. Turner was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 1992. In 2005, Weiss and Turner announced they were ending their marriage.
|
