Kathleen Turner on Hollywood’s dark secrets – and her friendships with Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas

Kathleen Turner opens up about the truth behind her close friendships with Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas, and the misogyny of Hollywood’s golden era.

“I am not Hollywood,” celebrated film star Kathleen Turner tells Stellar. No, she says, her heart has always belonged to the theatre, hence why she based herself in New York long ago, rather than Los Angeles. A move to the US east coast early in her career also enabled her to avoid the amorous attentions of “Jack”, “Michael” and “Warren” – friends and acting colleagues so famous that they require no surnames.

At the time, the three well-known ladies’ men were in competition to see who could claim her first. None succeeded.

“My first [film] role was a lead [in 1981’s Body Heat], so I never had that in-between stage of trying to get into a film, to get noticed by producers and directors,” she says. “Looking back, I was so innocent. They would ask me to come over and I would say, ‘Oh, thank you, that’s very nice. But I have to work’.”

To illustrate her point, Turner recalls an evening during which she inadvertently gave Jack Nicholson the cold shoulder. “I don’t think Jack would mind me sharing this,” she begins, before explaining how she found herself seated next to him at an industry dinner, not realising it was a set-up.

‘Looking back, I was so innocent.’ Kathleen Turner has opened up about the golden age of Hollywood. Picure: AP Photo/Peter Kramer

Turner – who had to be on set the next day – excused herself early to head back to her hotel. Once in her room, the phone rang. It was Nicholson, somewhat confused. “He says, ‘How the hell could you do that to me? You were my date!’ And I said, ‘I was your date? I don’t recall you asking me.’

“He explained that because I was a single woman that it was understood [that I was his companion for the night]. And I was like, ‘Screw you, asshole. No-one asked me.’ So I learnt very early in LA [that] you always have your own transportation and you should never rely on anybody else. I avoided all those pitfalls because I was too ignorant … but also because I didn’t need [the men].”

Turner suspects her close friendship with Michael Douglas – her co-star in the 1984 comedy Romancing The Stone and 1989’s The War Of The Roses – might have been tested had things become amorous. “Look, I love the man, but he is old-fashioned,” she tells Stellar with a laugh. “I give Catherine [Zeta-Jones, his wife] all the credit in the world. She has done a great job with him. First of all he would never, ever have supported having another star, at that point, in his life. And that would never have worked. I had no intention of being second to anybody, certainly not a man.”

As for whether she would ever make another Stone sequel with Douglas (following 1985’s The Jewel Of The Nile, which also co-starred Danny DeVito), she baulks. “What, with our grandchildren? I seriously doubt it. I love those guys, but we honestly don’t need to do it again.”

After Body Heat put her on the map, Turner says she was “offered Body Heat 2, 3, 4 and 5” but instead opted to star alongside Steve Martin in the comedy The Man With Two Brains. “There’s no secret [to my longevity] except I decided not to repeat myself – not to get stuck in one role, one genre or one rut, as it were. To keep exploring and learning and growing. [To this end] I have been rehearsing my own show, which I hope to bring to Australia. I’m always told to talk about the beer there,” Turner says of making conversation with Aussies. “My show is kind of a cabaret with stories and songs.”

Music runs in the family. Her only child, Rachel Ann Weiss, is a professional singer. “She lets me accompany her sometimes,” she jokes. “My daughter is a natural singer, but she doesn’t feel driven as I have always towards acting. It’s very different.”

Turner’s drive has sustained her through highs and lows, including those brought on by pain from her rheumatoid arthritis. “There was a time when I would not take a leading role because I was never sure I could physically do it,” she says.

Of course, some jobs did not require much physical work – take her uncredited stint as the voice of cartoon sex siren Jessica Rabbit in the 1988 blockbuster Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which she made while pregnant. “I had resigned myself to not working for a year. But I was able to literally waddle into the studio to do my voice work.”

Other screen appearances haven’t aged as well, in particular her 2001 role as Chandler’s transgender parent Helena on Friends, which she simply saw as a new acting challenge. “They wanted me to be a woman, playing a man [who was] playing a woman, and I had never done that,” she says. “You can’t imagine all those years ago they would have asked a trans person to play that part. I hope they would rethink it today.”

In any case, Turner, 68, believes some of her most interesting work has been done in recent years. Now she’s dipping her toes into political satire, playing Dita Beard in the upcoming miniseries White House Plumbers, which relays the farcical true story of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy (played by Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux), the men behind the 1972 bugging of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. “These idiots thought they could strap on a wig or a fake moustache and waltz through unquestioned. It’s absolutely mind-blowing to me,” she says.

Turner admits she had a great time on the set (“We laughed all the time”) but insists the theatre is her true calling. “The great roles – all the women’s roles – are in theatre. They don’t spend the time or invest in the backstory of women in film as they do onstage. And I always knew that. When I [did] Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? [on Broadway in 2005] that was something I had been aiming at for 30 years. Yes, they made a film of it, but it was appalling. [Playwright] Edward Albee hated it.”

Turner saves her harshest criticism for the 1966 film adaptation, which earnt star Elizabeth Taylor her second Best Actress Oscar. “I have been correcting her performances for years,” says Turner, who also starred onstage in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in 1990. “What a terrible voice she had.” Of course, the same would never be said of Turner’s famously sultry growl -and she proudly agrees: “I love it.”

White House Plumbers premieres at midday on Tuesday, May 2 on Foxtel.

Originally published as Kathleen Turner on Hollywood’s dark secrets – and her friendships with Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas