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Kathleen Turner Opens in: “Red-Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins”

On March 21, 2010, in Celebrity, by admin

A few days ago, a middle-aged man rattled Kathleen Turner with a compliment — or, apparently, what he imagined to be one. Long fixated on the actress’s drop-dead steamy performance in the 1981 movie “Body Heat,” he sidled up to her to confess that while he was growing up, Turner was his Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Penélope Cruz rolled into one.

“He says to me, ‘You haunted my teenage years, you were my ideal of the female,’ ” she recalls, a look of supreme disbelief crossing her face. “It’s so weird! I thought to myself: Next year it will be, what, 30 years since the movie came out? I mean, COME ON!”

Turner is chortling in that smoky Jessica Rabbit voice of hers as she sits in the green room of the Philadelphia Theatre Company on the Avenue of the Arts here. She relates the encounter as if to illustrate how completely she has moved on from those impressions she left on screen as a young actress, how she’s managed to emancipate herself time and again from the career expectations that others have tried to impose.

“I think I’ve always been lucky that I’ve been able to put blinders on, so that it never occurred to me to do what I’d already done. You know, I was offered ‘Body Heat 2, 3, 4 and 5.’ The truth is, after I do one kind of dramatic role, I tend to look for the opposite. The next thing I did was ‘The Man With Two Brains’!”

That eternal quest for something new — between those early films, after all, she performed flips into a pool as Titania in Arena Stage’s 1981 “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — has landed her for the moment in Center City Philadelphia, where she has been preparing for one of the more unusual transformations of her acting life.

It’s one of the few times, in fact, that Turner, 55, is portraying a real person, the rambunctious Texas liberal Molly Ivins, in a new one-woman show about the late syndicated columnist’s work and life that officially opens Wednesday.

An American character

“Red-Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins” is a 75-minute foray into the psyche of a sassy commentator perhaps most celebrated for a single word: “Shrub,” the withering nickname she gave to George W. Bush, a politician who symbolized for her all that seemed wacky in the reward system of American politics.

Written by a pair of newspaperwomen — Bethesda-based Margaret Engel, a former Washington Post staffer, and her twin sister Allison, communications director at the University of Southern California — the play styles Ivins as a live-wire wit who, in her profane, folksy way juiced up the public discourse. (You may recall that the first of her books was titled, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?”) And she accomplished this from a perspective honed far from the Beltway.

“She was our Mark Twain,” says Margaret Engel, an author and executive director of the Alicia Patterson Foundation in Washington, an organization that awards grants to journalists for investigative and research projects. “She really is the larger-than-life American character who comes around quite rarely, and had a way of seeing things with a clarity you don’t find often.”

Seated next to her sister in the theater company’s bright lobby, Allison Engel adds: “I think, also, it’s that she really was able to have this prescient national voice, from Austin, Texas.”

“Not from the power corridor,” Margaret chimes in.

Though working journalists are all but stock characters in movies and plays, their lives are hard to turn into compelling monologues: It’s the people they cover who tend to supply the drama. The Engels, however, thought Ivins was a life force worth an audience’s time.

Thanks Washington Post.

Kathleen Turner’s is BACK!

On October 18, 2009, in Celebrity, by admin

To be sure, Kathleen Turner today looks a lot different from the siren who made movie goers sweat in 1981′s “Body Heat.” Stalled for years by rheumatoid arthritis and the alcoholism that ensued, the 55-year-old actress has been to hell and back.

But in Showtime’s raunchy, rowdy, David Duchovny-helmed “Californication,” the girl prove’s she’s still got it — the power to enthrall audiences with her throaty drawl, the ability to make all other characters fade into the background when she steps into a scene.

Of course, it’s hard to focus on anything else when Turner’s Sue Collini, a middle aged Hollywood agency exec. with the mouth of a porn star and the sexual appetite of a college co-ed, sucks the finger of her favorite foot soldier and object of desire, Charlie Runkle (Evan Handler), and shoves it in her skirt with nary an explanation but a breathy groan. What she does say in the series can’t be printed here. Collini is over the top and out of line, and Turner loves it.

“I like doing outrageous things. I seem to be sort of making speciality of it, being this crazy middle aged woman,” she told ABCNews.com. “When I’m doing something, I don’t think about what other people are going to think about it. Just doing it is where I get my kicks. Then of course, to see it with other people, you realize how out there it is.”

The “out there” factor drew Turner to “Californication,” much to the delight of series creator and executive producer Tom Kapinos.

“I’ve grown pretty cynical at this point but when I come up with a character, there’s a prototype in my head, and for Sue Collini, I thought ‘Oh, Kathleen Turner,’” he said. “And when you’re doing TV, you think Kathleen Turner and you end up with someone far down the list. But we called her, and the deal closed within a day. I figured I’d have to call her and plead and promise that she wouldn’t be having sex with animals or something.”

Nope, though maybe it helped his case that “Californication” hasn’t broached bestiality (yet). Turner was hungry for a role with meat, something she said is hard to come by for middle-aged women in Hollywood these days.

‘Californication’ Character Parallels Turner

“If you don’t have stage training, you’re truly limited. They don’t write good roles for women. If you’re not immediately identifiable as the ingénue or sex symbol, they don’t know what to write. Write a character? I mean, a character? Who has thoughts and feelings and opinions? They don’t know how to do it.”

With Sue Collini, Turner’s found a role she can dig into, and a character that mirrors some of her favorite qualities.

“She’s ballsy, which I like. I would give myself credit for that. She’s unapologetic; I’ll go with that one too. She has a good sense of humor, and I like that.”

Turner’s funny as well, with a dry, self-depreciating wit that no doubt evolved as armor necessary to survive in the acting industry for so long.

She blew up with “Body Heat,” which still maintains its status as one of the sexiest movies ever, but after rising to the A-list and starring in a handful of movies, including “Romancing the Stone” with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito and its sequel, “The Jewel of the Nile,” she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and her career screeched to a halt. Told she would end up in a wheelchair, Turner went on an aggressive course of drugs that ravaged her mind and body. The woman who once said “On nights when I feel great about myself, if I walk into a room and a man doesn’t look at me, he’s either dead or gay,” became unrecognizable to her fans. As the disease worsened, she turned to alcohol.

“When you’re in chronic pain, It’s very hard to realize the effect it has on your mind as well,” she said. “It’s a constant depressant. It really mucks up your thinking. If you go to a restaurant, is the bathroom downstairs? Because I can’t go there if it is. So yeah, you try a lot of stuff, in my case, excessive drinking for a while to kill pain. And it does, it does kill pain, but it causes even more.”

Turner’s arthritis went into remission after years of treatment; it took longer to kick the drinking. She acted throughout — notably on Broadway in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and on TV playing Chandler Bing’s gender-bending father on “Friends.” (Her comment on that role: “That was silly wasn’t it? I had never been a woman playing a man playing a woman before. It was amazing!”) But after wrapping filming on “The Graduate” in 2002, she checked into a Pennsylvania rehab center, and kicked the habit for good.

She’s thrilled to be working again in better health, but oh, how things in Hollywood have changed. Megan Fox is hot and all, but they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

“One of the things that’s happened over the last ten years is a kind of mean spiritedness about sex, sex being used as a weapon, instead of a glorious celebration of it,” Turner said. “There’s a mean spiritedness to humor now too. I just don’t think that’s appealing.”

“I think a lot of these young actors and actresses are in a really tough position,” she continued. “I always managed to keep my private life quite private. You never saw pictures of my daughter or my home. I don’t know that they can do that anymore, so they’re constantly on stage, as it were. I think that pressure must be awful. And I think they’re too skinny. I do, I worry. I have a daughter and when she was growing up, I was like ‘You look great, don’t listen to any of this s**t.’”

Asked if she saw a younger version of herself in any of the industry’s rising stars, Turner chortled and said she “would never be so arrogant as to think that. Everyone is themselves, everyone is unique.” She herself intends to keep playing the part of the sensual seductress so long as she’s given a set or stage.

“I’m not ready to say a middle aged woman no longer has sexual drive or appeal. That’s really offensive. We’re damn sexy, man.”

Thanks for the great article ABC.

Tagged with: abcnews.com • bestiality • body heat • Californication • charlie runkle • friends • Gay • Hollywood • Kathleen Turner • rheumatoid arthritis • romancing the stone • Showtime • sue collini • the jewel of the nile • war of the rose

Kathleen Turner Talks About Her New Role on Californication

On September 23, 2009, in Celebrity, by admin

Early in the first episode of Season 3 of Showtime’s Californication, Kathleen Turner, playing Hollywood agent Sue Collini, sweeps into the office of her newly hired junior agent Charlie Runkle (Evan Handler), says several unprintable things, plants a few images in viewers’ heads that they’d probably rather forget and exits with a crisp, “Collini out!” She’s like a big, feral cat, with a growl that’s every bit as scary as her bite.

“I tend to look for something I haven’t done before,” says the star, who has wowed audiences for more than 25 years on film (Body Heat, Romancing the Stone, Prizzi’s Honor, The War of the Roses) and on stage (Tallulah, The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) . “One of the Californication producers kept going by me and whispering, ‘Money, money, money.’ I think he meant that we were going to rake it in on this series partly because of what I was doing. I think it was a compliment.” She laughs her throaty laugh. “But it’s odd, you know, when one can’t be quite sure.”

MORE: What do you like about playing this character?
KATHLEEN TURNER: It’s truly some of the most outrageous stuff I’ve ever done, in terms of the language and some of the sexual references. I thought, well, thank god my daughter is grown up. Every week, we had a table read-through of the next week’s show, right? And half the time I had to ask what they were talking about. I think at first they thought I was joking, but then clearly I wasn’t. I’d say, “I don’t understand, what does that word mean?” And then I think they just started making stuff up to confound me.

What did they say when they approached you about doing the role?
Essentially they called and said, “We’re thinking of it in terms of a nymphomaniacal, sociopathic agent.” I said, “Well, I haven’t done that yet.”

Was there anything they wanted you to do that you balked at?
Yeah, there was one thing that I told Tom Kapinos, the creator, “Look, I can’t do that.” And he said, ”Fine.”

What was it?
I don’t want to talk about it because I really didn’t want to do it.

I understand. Do you have sex scenes?
Yeah, but I probably show the least skin on the show. As I said, “Look, guys, been there, done that, you know? It’s your turn now.”

She reminds me a little of legendary agent Sue Mengers. . . or what I imagine Sue Mengers might have been like.
I always think about that. I actually met Sue Mengers years and years ago. I was staying at the Chateau Marmont; it must have been the first film I was out [in LA] for. And I remember her coming over for coffee and telling me that if I didn’t sign with her, she was going to strip and lie down naked in the middle of Sunset Boulevard. And I thought, this woman is out of her mind. Why would I want someone who is out of their mind [to represent me]? But I certainly have never forgotten that coffee.

But she wasn’t necessarily in your mind when you were playing the character?
No, no, I don’t do imitations.

What else are you working on these days?
I was at Arena Stage in Washington helping with a one-woman show based on Molly Ivins. I knew Molly, and it was very odd for me to play the life of someone I had known. And really moving. It was more difficult than I would have anticipated.

In your memoir, Send Yourself Roses, you talk about how you pursued Edward Albee to let you play Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? You really made that happen for yourself.
I did, yeah. He was not interested in doing it again, even though the last time it had been done was ’76, with Colleen Dewhurst. But he had no feeling that it needed to be done again. So I had to prove to him that it did. I was amazed, frankly, because even though I set out to do it, and waited 30 years to get to do it because I had to get old enough for the darn thing, that when it really came together, there was this moment of it being scary—like, “Wait a minute, do I really have this much control? I don’t think so.” But it was an affirmation that was stunning.

Have you always been that proactive in getting the work you wanted?
One of my great friends still is a guy named Michael Zettler, who wrote the first play I did in New York, off-off-Broadway. Stephen Zuckerman was directing. I’d been in New York for two months and I went down to audition, and Michael says he remembers turning to Stephen when I left and saying, “Well, I think she’s decided to take it.” So perhaps that’s my nature. Anyway, so far, so good.

How is your rheumatoid arthritis these days?
It’s tough. I may have to use the fall for another surgery, a knee replacement. I’ve had seven surgeries in the last 10 years. It’s not that any more damage is happening, because the new drugs are fantastic; it’s the damage that was done before we were able to arrest the disease. I have accepted a Broadway show in the spring, a new play—I can’t say any more about it—so I’m thinking that I may have to get this operation done, because doing eight shows a week for 10 months is no joke.

Well, I know that there are many people who are inspired by the way you’re dealing with the disease.
I just cannot imagine not acting. I really, truly can’t. So whatever it takes to keep going, that’s what I have to do.

Season 3 of Californication debuts September 27 on Showtime.

Tagged with: body heat • Californication • evan handler • Hollywood • Kathleen Turner • prizzi honor • romancing the stone • Showtime • sue collini • tallulah • the graduate • the war of the roses • who's afriad of virginia wolf

Kathleen Turner Opens in: “Red-Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins”

Kathleen Turner’s is BACK!

‘Californication’ Character Parallels Turner

Kathleen Turner Talks About Her New Role on Californication

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