“And it will happen to you,” writes Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, chronicling the aftermath of the sudden death of her husband. “The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”
It did happen to Kathleen Turner last year. The actor’s mother died at the age of 92. “I was shocked when I had to fill in some kind of official form at some point and I realized that I am an orphan now,” Turner says. “I never thought of myself as being parentless: that word, orphan. And that took me aback. I don’t want to be without parents. That means there’s no one to fall back on.”
It was this visceral experience that made Turner choose The Year of Magical Thinking for her latest performance at the Arena Stage in Washington, starting on Friday. Or perhaps it was the work that chose her. Both the 2005 memoir and the stage adaptation, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare on Broadway, were praised as a lucid account of grief that offered the bracing comfort of looking death in the eye.
Turner, 62, says of her mother Patsy: “It was as good a death, I think, as you can hope for. My brother and I were with her; we were holding her. One thing I absolutely adored, about an hour or so before she died, she kind of turned her head around and she went: ‘What a dumb way to die!’”
Turner lets out a gritty yet graceful laugh. “‘Wait, mom?’ But when thinking back on it I went, oh, I love that! But I miss her very much. We were close. She would go on many adventures with me and we were probably the most alike in personality; I have two brothers and a sister. So trying to understand better my life without her and value the time that we had, I thought of this.”
She has met fellow New York resident Didion, 81, over the years but is not consulting her for this production. Didion had been preparing for dinner with her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, on Christmas Day in 2003 when he had a fatal heart attack. The couple had spent the morning at a New York hospital, where their daughter Quintana lay comatose. Didion writes coolly, penetratingly and self-revealingly about losing her husband and the mysterious illness of her only daughter.
In her storied, smoky voice, Turner reflects: “Americans in particular – and I would not speak for other cultures necessarily – really don’t want to deal with death. We don’t want to even pretend it happens, unless you’re a super-Christian, I guess, of some kind, which I am not. And in fact, in a way, I think we disrespect the process, our own lives, by not honouring that part of it as well.”
Does she think that death is the end? Turner, a divorcee with one child of her own, a 28-year-old daughter, replies: “I believe in God but not in organised religion. My mother lives in me and my siblings and all the actions of our lives which have myriad ripples ... She touched many, many people’s lives. So yes, she lives on.”
Patsy Magee Turner, married to Richard Turner of the foreign service, who died when Kathleen was 17, was not always a great fan of her daughter’s choice of career. “I think for a long time she really just simply didn’t understand what the whole thing was at all,” the actor says. “I’m not sure that it was really until Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [in 2005] that she wrote me a letter and that she said she owed me an apology, that she had never fully appreciated, and that was just lovely.”
Edward Albee, the author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, died last month aged 88. The tributes and obituaries that followed made clear that he did not always suffer fools gladly, particularly actors foolish enough to meddle with his words.
“He reserved the right to give any notes he wanted regardless of the director,” Turner says. “He came backstage and he said, ‘Second act, monologue about the gardener. You left out the word “Ha!”’ I said, ‘Did I?’ I said, ‘It will be there tomorrow.’ It was, and you can be sure he was in the back listening.”
But they had a positive relationship, she recalls fondly. “In fact, when we closed the show on Broadway, there was an envelope on my dressing room table. It was Edward’s stationery and inside there’s a card in his handwriting that said, ‘You’re the reason I’m a playwright.’ So that is in my safe. It was a wonderful thought, a wonderful gift from him.”
Turner cites Virginia Woolf, for which she earned a Tony nomination, as perhaps her best work to date. On film, where she made a sensational femme fatale debut opposite William Hurt in Body Heat (1981) and was nominated for an Oscar for Peggy Sue Got Married (1987), she names The Accidental Tourist (also with Hurt) and Romancing the Stone (with Michael Douglas) as among personal favourites.
She has less happy memories of Switching Channels in 1988. “I only did one film for money and that’s the one film I dislike because I did it for money. I was pregnant and figured I wouldn’t work for a year, so grab the money and run, and I hate the film. It wasn’t all my fault, though. It was supposed to be with Michael Caine and he got stuck on Jaws 4, and so the producer hired Burt Reynolds.”
With devastating sarcasm, she drawls: “Not exactly the same thing.”
Reynolds was difficult? “He’s been saying terrible things about me for years.” A burst of laughter. “Amazing.”
In the mid-1990s, Turner fell ill. Her neck locked and she could not turn her head, and her hands swelled so badly that she could not pick up a glass. Eventually she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a swelling of the lining of the joints that left her in continual, chronic pain.
“It was crippling,” she recalls. “You stop taking things for granted when you lose them, even temporarily. What I took for granted – my athleticism, my ability to throw myself around, and just be able to move however I wanted to. When I lost that, that was a real crisis of self: who am I if I cannot do this?”
The showbiz-industrial complex that once cast her as a sex symbol now turned on her with an unforgiving lens. “I was on so much prednisone and prednisone just blows you right up, so there was all the: ‘What drugs is she on? What booze is she on?’ But the point was at that time autoimmune diseases and rheumatoid arthritis were pretty unknown, unexplained, and quite simply to have a mysterious illness was far worse than to be a known alcoholic. Lovely business, isn’t it?”
Despite their side effects, the drugs worked. Turner came back in 2000, playing Mrs Robinson opposite Matthew Rhys in a stage version of The Graduate in London’s West End. There was a predictable hullaballoo around a brief, dimly lit scene in which she dropped a towel and appeared nude. She got letters from middle-aged women saying things such as: “I have not undressed in front of my husband in 10 years and I’m going to tonight.”
Maggie Smith, meanwhile, was performing at the theatre next door in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van. Turner recalls: “They had all these police barricades around my stage door because the crowds were pretty crazy and I would be standing there signing autographs and I’d see Maggie walk out of her stage door and no one even notice her or anything. It was absolutely shocking, and then I get this note one day: ‘May I please borrow a barricade?’ So I walked it over and we went out to dinner and we were friends ever since.”
The production was a box office hit and she took it to New York, but only just. “I wasn’t even going to do The Graduate in the United States because I thought Americans are so screwed up about sex, so hypocritical, I don’t need this crap. So when we finished in London and they said, ‘Do you want to take it to New York?’ I said no, thank you very much.
“I went off and did a tour of another play and then – absolute truth – I got a film script and the character was described as ‘37 but still attractive’. I was 46 when I did The Graduate in London so I called up the producer and said, ‘We’re going to Broadway.’ So I did it at 48 on Broadway. Screw you, still attractive! But that’s real America, that’s my country, I’m afraid to say.”
Keenly aware of Hollywood’s endemic ageism, she never lost touch with her stage career: “Because I knew that the better roles as I got older would be in theatre, which is absolutely true, so that was a little foresight on my part of which I am justly proud. Next year will be 40 years as a professional and I am thankful for that, and that I still have a lot of choices because that’s not true for a lot of women, and that’s too bad.”
Turner is also a seasoned activist and chairwoman of Planned Parenthood’s board of advocates. Planned Parenthood has been a punching bag for many conservatives in election year.
“The idea that any man of any faith should tell a woman what to do with her body is so incomprehensible to me,” she says. “All I can say in these speeches is, ‘Who the fuck do they think they are?’ I don’t actually say fuck. I think I say hell.”
Asked how she feels about the possibility of Donald Trump becoming president, Turner nearly chokes on her lunch. “Utterly terrified. I really, really do believe that the American people are good and do the right thing. It truly is our nature, our national character. I cannot believe that we will fall prey to this kind of divisive, target-making rhetoric that he uses. I honestly believe that it cannot happen, that Hilary Clinton will be our next president, and I think that she is tremendously capable of doing it.”
Trump came to hog the camera as host of The Apprentice. Turner acknowledges that Clinton is not a TV natural. “Some people do not go through the camera. When I was starting out and I would say to people, ‘How do you make the camera love you?’ and they would say, ‘You can’t – it does or it doesn’t.’ I would say, ‘No, no, no, not good enough. How do I make it love me?’
“It’s true and Hillary does not go through the camera. Because in person, if you’ve ever been in the room with her, there’s tremendous warmth and you can’t understand what other people are talking about. But she doesn’t go through the camera.”
Clinton is said to have a sharp sense of humour by those who know her. Turner herself is great company. She seems to belong to another era, as if she should have been one of the smart, stylish, independent women in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. Lauren Bacall reputedly once told her: “Oh, I hear you’re the young me.”
Turner chuckles as she recalls a game they used to play. Turner would say in her husky voice: “Good evening, Miss Bacall.” Bacall would say in a lower voice: “Good evening, Miss Turner.” Turner would go even lower: “How are you this evening, Miss Bacall?” Bacall would go lower still: “Very well, thank you.”
“It was like, how low can you go?” Turner says. That is a contest people would have paid to hear.
