‘I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way’: Kathleen Turner’s best films – ranked!
As she nears her 72nd birthday, we honour the actor whose ‘smoked honey’ vocals added to her vampy persona on screen, whether bringing Jessica Rabbit to life or crushing Michael Douglas between her thighs
20. Marley & Me (2008)
Turner goes full-on drill sergeant for one scene as a dog-trainer, her forearms covered with scratches. Marley the irrepressible yellow labrador retriever knocks her to the ground and gives her a more vigorous humping than any co-star since William Hurt in Body Heat.
19. The Estate (2022)
Unrepentant vileness is well within Turner’s wheelhouse and this bad-taste comedy gave her a late-career chance to bare her claws again. She is the cantankerous aunt whose family (including Toni Collette, Anna Faris and David Duchovny) clamber to get in her good graces – and her will.
18. Monster House (2006)
“I mostly just groan and make all kinds of scary noises,” said Turner of this animated horror-comedy, underselling her inimitable voice work. She plays a woman whose spirit fuses with a house after being buried in its basement. Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty) called the director, Gil Kenan, a “hack” and the executive producer Steven Spielberg a “moron” after his script was rewritten, though he later retracted the second insult.
17. Naked in New York (1993)
This is a Woody-Allen-esque theatre-land comedy strewn with star cameos: Tony Curtis, Whoopi Goldberg, Timothy Dalton and Turner, who appears as an acting legend miscast in the debut production by an up-and-coming playwright (Eric Stoltz). “Which are you, man or boy?” she asks the young greenhorn, then interrupts before he can answer: “Doesn’t matter, I’m partial to both.”
16. The Accidental Tourist (1988)
Turner and William Hurt are reunited with the Body Heat director Lawrence Kasdan, but the result couldn’t be more dissimilar. Adapted from Anne Tyler’s novel, it stars Hurt as a travel writer grieving for his late son when he meets a ditsy dog trainer (Geena Davis). Turner is his wife, seen in the first 10 minutes asking for a divorce before resurfacing later when she changes her mind. She does a decent job in the thankless role of a capricious scold impeding her ex’s happiness.
15. The Real Blonde (1997)
As the world’s least encouraging agent, Turner impatiently clicks a pen between her teeth as a prospective client (Matthew Modine) pours his heart out, then chomps on a sandwich during his swimsuit audition and blithely asks: “Do you think you could play a rapist?” As for losing her rag with him for turning down soap operas, Turner must have been playing that bit from the heart: her own career kicked off with 86 episodes of the daytime soap The Doctors.
14. A Breed Apart (1984)
The Bee Gee Maurice Gibb scored this ridiculous eco-thriller starring Rutger Hauer as a mountaintop recluse – half Rambo, half Dr Dolittle. When he isn’t shooting hunters, Hauer plays the tuba, sponges oil off gulls’ wings and relaxes in the tub with his giant python (not a euphemism). His sanctuary is imperilled by the arrival of a mercenary (Powers Boothe) hired by a Mr-Burns-style mad millionaire (Donald Pleasence) to steal eggs from an eagle’s nest. Meanwhile, Turner rents boats to tourists, but has the hots for Hauer (“I think you need me”) and permits him to suck her toes.
13. Switching Channels (1988)
This update of the screwball masterpiece His Girl Friday relocates the action to a cable news channel. Burt Reynolds, a last-minute replacement for Michael Caine in the Cary Grant role of editor, had daggers drawn with Turner, who took the Rosalind Russell part of his ex-wife and lead reporter. “Burt was just nasty,” she said, later naming him as the worst kisser of her career; he in turn called her “overrated”. Remarkably, the film is zippy and funny, Turner’s comic mania never growing shrill.
12. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
“One of the saddest characters I ever had to play.” That was Turner’s verdict on Mrs Lisbon, whose daughters kill themselves. This woozy, gauzy picture was the directorial debut of Sofia Coppola, who had played Turner’s kid sister in her father Francis’s film Peggy Sue Got Married. Whenever Turner let any vitality seep into Mrs Lisbon, Coppola would tell her: “Kathleen, you’re coming to life! Pull back.” To get in character, she imagined a plug in her heel: “I would pull the plug and let all the life drain out of me.”
11. VI Warshawski (1991)
As the gumshoe protagonist of Sara Paretsky’s series of detective novels, Turner gives an assured, swaggering performance that deserved a far better movie and possibly even a franchise. The actor pushed hard for realism, insisting on a bruise after being socked in the face, and nixed the idea of a strapping gent swooping to her rescue: “I didn’t spend two goddamn hours building up this goddam heroine for a man to come along and say: ‘Oh, let me!’” Script approval was hers, but not, alas, the final cut. “We filmed some wonderful material – much better than what made it into the final version,” she said.
10. Julia & Julia (1987)
Naff yet naggingly eerie, Turner’s second consecutive time-slip movie (after Peggy Sue Got Married) suggests Sliding Doors in the style of Antonioni. She plays Julia, a travel agent who loses her husband (a wincingly Italian-accented Gabriel Byrne) on their wedding day and watches her life split into two parallel realities. Bizarro highlights include hooking up with and later killing a character (played by Sting) who buys a plane ticket from her (“Do you know Dubrovnik? Neither do I!”) and projects slides of her face on his bedroom wall. Shot on HD video by the Visconti-Fellini collaborator Giuseppe Rotunno, this is equal parts giallo, arthouse and Euro-pudding. But no matter how daft it gets, Turner never gives less than 100%.
9. Romancing the Stone (1984)
The thrills in this Indiana-Jones-esque ripping yarn look feeble now, but the evident affection between Turner (as the romance novelist Joan Wilder) and Michael Douglas (as her co-adventurer in South America) sparkles like the emerald at the end of their quest. The film critic Roger Ebert compared them to Allen and Diane Keaton in the way they “always seem to be on the same wavelength in their comic dialogues”. The film also made plain the extent of Turner’s range: playing an ingenuous lonely-heart was a departure for an actor seen largely as a femme fatale. Avoid at all costs the 1985 rush-job sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, which Turner agreed to make only after the threat of a $25m lawsuit for breach of contract.
8. Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
Turner received her only Oscar nomination to date for playing 42-year-old Peggy Sue, who faints at her high-school reunion and gets the chance to be 17 again with all her adult knowledge intact. It’s a richly sympathetic performance, but the production was sullied for her by her co-star Nicolas Cage and the reedy, strangulated voice he adopted to play her sweetheart: “I cringe to think of it,” she said, vowing never to work with him again. However, their paths crossed once more: in 2008, Cage successfully sued Turner for libel and she issued a public apology to the actor after she claimed in her memoir, Send Yourself Roses, that he had been arrested for drunk-driving and stealing a chihuahua.
7. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Back in the days before Pixar and DreamWorks, when A-list voice actors were the exception rather than the rule for animated movies, Turner performed so vividly as Jessica Rabbit (“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”) that you could virtually see her on screen. Her casting riffed cleverly on her own vampy persona, while the character’s “heaving breasts”, she said, “had to be drawn after I recorded her lines so that the undulating motions would match the cadence of the sultry voice”. And what a voice: over the years, it has been called “husky”, “tobacco-cured” and “scotch-laden” and described as a “tomboy chortle” with a “smoked-honey texture”.
6. The War of the Roses (1989)
A-listers at the top of their game, Turner and Douglas gleefully took their chemistry from Romancing the Stone and its sequel in a brutal new direction as the married Roses, who make it their life’s work to destroy one another during an ugly divorce. The comedy of seething domestic discord has rarely been played with more savagery or vim – certainly not in The Roses, the pallid Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch version of the same source material. Turner goes to town with scenes such as the bedtime frolic that ends prematurely when she crushes Douglas between her nutcracker thighs.
5. Serial Mom (1994)
John Waters’ black comedy about the bloodthirsty hypocrisy of family values felt passé when it came out, perhaps because The Stepfather had already wrung the nastiness out of an identical scenario seven years earlier. But Turner is a riot as Beverly Sutphin, the model housewife and secret psycho. She mows down (and then reverses over) one victim, stabs a neighbour with a pair of scissors and kills another by dropping an air-conditioning unit on his head. Best murder? Bludgeoning a woman with a leg of lamb to the sound of Tomorrow, the anthem from Annie. Best scene? The obscene phone call: “Is this the cocksucker residence?”
4. Prizzi’s Honour (1985)
John Huston directed this crisp mafia comedy, his penultimate film, while wheezing from emphysema with an oxygen tank at his side. It’s a sly, spry work with elegant turns from Jack Nicholson and Turner as the mob assassins whose romance gets complicated when each is given a contract to kill the other. Driving a lipstick-red Excalibur and sporting assorted hats and fascinators, Turner positively shimmers with glamour and delight. She also gives one of her career-best line readings after confessing to her beloved that she performs three or four hits a year. “That many?” gasps Nicholson, only for her to soothingly reassure him: “Well, it’s not many when you consider the size of the population.”
3. The Man With Two Brains (1983)
Looking to send up her image after Body Heat, Turner lobbied hard to star in Steve Martin and Carl Reiner’s delirious comedy as Dolores, the ultimate avaricious femme fatale and the one character on her CV who could give Serial Mom a run for her money. Cruelly funny as she endlessly defers Martin’s conjugal demands while hooking up with the gardener’s hunky assistant, she also delivers some unhinged lines perfectly straight (“Were you out on the lake today kissing your brain?”) and is finally rejected by her husband with the unbeatable kiss-off: “Into the mud, scum queen!” It’s the only film for which Turner has requested a body double: “I was seriously offended by the scene in which my character is about to have her ass rubbed. I did not think it was funny at all. I told them to get someone else’s ass to rub.”
2. Body Heat (1981)
Steamy neo-noirs oozing with the sort of sex that could never have been shown under the Hays Code were big in the 1980s, and Body Heat is one of the stickiest and sweatiest. Recycling Double Indemnity’s plot about a patsy – in this case, a lawyer played by William Hurt – the film draws much of its potency from Turner, making her film debut at 26. “You’re not too smart, are you?” she asks Hurt. “I like that in a man.” When he offers to mop a stain from her blouse, she asks: “You don’t want to lick it up?” Double Indemnity’s Barbara Stanwyck herself later told Turner: “The only one who could’ve done it better was [me]”.
But while the film helped Turner discover “the concept of using sexuality as one of my acting abilities”, it also brought out the worst in Hollywood’s men: “After Body Heat, I found out that Michael Douglas, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson would have competitions to see who could get me.”
1. Crimes of Passion (1984)
This is the Turner prize: proof that, for a few years, she was the most adventurous Hollywood performer of her age. That Ken Russell’s satirical psychodrama-horror-comedy was released just months after the multiplex-conquering Romancing the Stone only adds to its radicalism. But it was also part of Turner’s career-long campaign to maintain control of her image after Body Heat. After that movie, says the film historian Karina Longworth, Turner “was determined to choose projects that would complicate her persona”.
Here, she plays a buttoned-up fashion designer, Joanna Crane, who moonlights by night as China Blue, a bubblegum-chewing, platinum-wigged sex worker with a cracking line in dirty talk: “I never forget a face, especially when I’ve sat on it.” The film’s subplot about a horny reverend who huffs poppers at peep shows, carries a satchel of sex toys and becomes murderously obsessed with China Blue serves as a commentary on the hypocrisy of the religious right. Casting Anthony Perkins in that part enables a cross-dressing climax that deliberately revisits Psycho.
Russell’s movie is also a take-down of the nuclear-family facade and a critique of the contradictory demands placed on women. Turner considered it “some of my best work”, which is all the more impressive considering Russell was “a mad, self-sabotaging genius [who was] drinking a great deal at the time” and Perkins “had an appalling drug habit. He was doing drugs in front of everyone.” Both men, she said, were “nearly impossible to work with”. Nevertheless, the film is rapturously sleazy and confrontational, sizzling with pink-and-purple neon, and so relentlessly lurid that it seems only right that the cinematographer’s name is Dick Bush.