Kathleen Turner’s voice has to be heard to be believed. With age, her trademark husky purr has deepened to a sonorous rumble, and you can almost feel the vibrations when she talks.
‘People call it smoky, whisky – sexy comes up a lot,’ growls Turner. ‘Sometimes for charity auctions, I auction off an answerphone greeting: I say ‘Hi, Bob can’t come to the phone right now, but he’ll get back to you as soon as he can’,’ she murmurs, breaking into an earthy laugh. ‘That goes for big bucks.’
It’s no surprise, then, that the award-winning actress – who famously provided the sultry drawl of cartoon sex bomb Jessica Rabbit – has called her new stage show Finding My Voice. A cabaret-style celebration of her favourite songs interwoven with tales from her colourful career, it’s Turner’s first foray into the world of music – at the tender age of 63.
‘I never really tried professionally, because the leads were always sopranos, so what good was that to me?’ she says, eyebrow arched. ‘I don’t really like musicals anyway. I’ve never understood why people stop talking and start singing.’
The daughter of a foreign service official, Turner was 12 and living in Venezuela when she announced her dream of becoming an actress. ‘I don’t think I’d even been to the theatre then, but I was a voracious reader, and I would see myself acting out all these wonderful heroines. My father did not think this was a respectable thing at all. I might as well have said I wanted to be a street walker.’
The family moved to London the following year, ‘and then I saw real theatre, and the best theatre. In those days a ticket to the gods was cheaper than the cinema, and I was entranced. I remember very clearly one night thinking ‘Oh my god, I could be paid for this’. And then it became a solid ambition.’
Back in the States, Turner studied drama (‘My father died before I turned 18, so the opposition was gone’), and appeared in a TV soap before landing her first big screen role as murderous Matty Walker in the 1981 film Body Heat. The erotic thriller was a huge hit, and she found herself flung firmly into the limelight.
‘I didn’t have any idea what the impact would be,’ she says. ‘I did not think of myself as some kind of femme fatale; I was a tomboy my whole life! I kept thinking that I would cast a smouldering glance, and the audience would crack up.’
Nobody cracked up. Turner went on to become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading ladies, winning Golden Globes for Romancing the Stone and Prizzi’s Honour, and an Oscar nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married.
But at the height of her fame, Turner became increasingly unwell. By the early 90s, her feet were excruciatingly painful, ‘and I couldn’t get into any of my shoes – I had to wear my ex-husband’s sneakers. No one had any idea what was wrong; the podiatrist asked me if I wasn't a little vain, trying to wear shoes that were too small for me.
‘Soon I couldn’t use my arm, and then I couldn’t turn my head because my neck was frozen. It was like having the flu all the time.’
After a year of unbearable pain, Turner was eventually diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a crippling inflammation of the joints. She carried on working, ‘but not much. I was lucky to get out of bed. I had to have steroids or I couldn’t have walked, and even then they said I would be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. That was the worst period, because if I can’t move, I can’t act, and acting is my life. It was terrifying.’
Bloated by the steroids, Turner’s face became increasingly puffy, ‘and it was very, very hurtful because people assumed that that was drunkenness, and of course it wasn’t at all. But the truth is that they would hire a drunkard, but they wouldn’t hire someone with a mysterious disease, so it was wiser to let them think what they wanted.’
But it wasn’t long before fiction became truth. Turner found herself relying on vodka to numb the pain, ‘and I lost control of it. I didn’t realise how much I was drinking, and it got to a point where my ex-husband and friends said ‘You’re drinking too much’. I enjoy my cocktails now, but I stopped for a few years because I needed to be sure that I wasn’t an alcoholic.’
With newly-prescribed drugs transforming her health, Turner reinvented herself as a stage actress, famously baring all as Mrs Robinson in the sell-out 2000 production of The Graduate in London’s West End. Going naked didn’t bother her one bit (‘You’re in character’), and she recreated the role on Broadway two years later. ‘By then I was 47, and it was great! I got letters from all these women saying ‘I have not undressed in front of my husband for years, and I’m going to tonight’.’
As well as acting, Turner, who is divorced with one daughter, has directed and taught the craft, but it was playing the lead in Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children – a role with five songs – that inadvertently led to her new-found passion for singing.
‘I worked with a vocal coach and a pianist, because I wanted to feel confident, and I found I really enjoyed it,’ she recalls. ‘Last Fall I said ‘Let’s do this seriously’, so we found songs that we all liked, and I would find myself telling them a story that the song reminded me of. And then we said well, look at this, we have a show!’
The music in Finding my Voice ranges from Every Time We Say Goodbye to On The Street Where You Live, but definitely doesn’t include I Feel Pretty, which Turner hilariously sang as Chandler’s drag queen dad in the hit US sitcom Friends. ‘I did not consider that singing!’ she exclaims. ‘That was great fun. A woman playing a man playing a woman? I’ve never done that, and I’m rather attracted to things I’ve never done.’
Including, it seems, taking a song-led show to the West End. ‘This is my fourth career,’ says Turner, the queen of reinvention. ‘I’ve got acting, I’ve got directing, I’ve got teaching, and now I have singing. And why not? I’m only 63. Maybe I’ll come up with another one.’
Kathleen Turner: Finding My Voice is at The Other Palace, London, from April 17 to May 6.
An edited version of this feature appeared in Waitrose Weekend in January 2018. (c) Waitrose