Kathleen Turner

When, one summer day, I meet Kathleen Turner at her Upper West Side town house in Manhattan, she's wearing a pale blue miniskirt and a tennis top, and she's yawning. I can't tell whether she's been working out or sleeping, but there are intimations of drowsiness, so I suspect the latter. Once she lights up a cigarette and looks me in the eyes, I'm not so sure I haven't stepped into Body Heat 2. But I should be so lucky.

Eight Broadway performances a week entitle even the gutsiest of American actresses to an afternoon nap. Playing the bedridden Invalid Yvonne, who is tragically in love with her son (Jude Law), in Jean Cocteau's Indiscretions (Les Parents Terribles) hasn't stopped Turner from investing the role with her natural ebullience and sexiness. Languor, the Turner way, is a ticking bomb.

If she has never surpassed her performance in Body Heat, her 1981 debut, Turner has given us a broadside of formidable broads over the years. She was the streetwalker who penetrates a cop with his own nightstick in Crimes of Passion (1984); ballsier than Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito in Romancing the Stone (1984), The Jewel of the Nile (1985), and The War of the Roses (1989); the Mob hit woman in Prizzi's Honor (1985); the tobacco-cured voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988); and a homicidal Donna Reed in Serial More (1994). She made testosterone curdle.

Although sweet in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and a concerned room in the underrated House of Cards (1993), to her immense credit she has seldom set out to be nice. Her spot-on portrayal of a brisk businesswoman ineptly trying to win the love of her ex-husband's daughters in next month's women's picture Moonlight and Valentino typifies Turner's undiminished commitment to serious acting. Are you listening, Hollywood?

GRAHAM FULLER: How does being back on Broadway with Indiscretions compare with your experience in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1990?

KATHLEEN TURNER: Better. Indiscretions is more of an ensemble, which I truly enjoy, and it's better constructed and richer characterwise. It plays better with audiences. I liked playing Maggie the Cat, but she's the only great woman, I think, that Tennessee [Williams] wrote. His other women are just wimps. They're all fading away, in love with ghosts or impossible men, and endlessly bemoaning their fate. It's not my style.

GF: Is playing Yvonne more taxing for you than Maggie was?

KT: Very much so. Thank God, Yvonne dies. When we were rehearsing, the days we didn't get through the third act would leave me with a tumult of emotion. I was a horror. At home, my husband would say, "Go back and kill her, would you?" But now we have the whole arc; I can go through her process and it's O.K. If she didn't die, I don't think I'd sleep at all.

GF: She's carrying around a lot of demons, isn't she?

KT: She's a child in many ways, but she's the only innocent one of the bunch. Although she's quite ready to throw a temper tantrum and use any kind of emotional blackmail on her son, she's not deliberately setting out to destroy lives.

GF: It seems to me that whatever you do, on-stage or in films, you do with incredible flourish.

KT: I'm usually quite physical, and I enjoy that.

GF: It makes even a neurotic, passive-aggressive woman like Yvonne extremely vivid. Am I right in saying that you have a great deal of confidence?

KT: Not always about personal life choices, but about my ability to do the work - yes, I am confident. I hear of actresses who have stage fright, but I say, "Let me start!" Then I can fix anything.

GF: Do you ever get nervous?

KT: Yeah, but the cure for that is to get onstage and get the curtain up.

GF: Why are you so confident?

KT: I think I was born that way. I think my seven-year-old daughter was born that way. I have a brother who's a psychologist. He says that three quarters of the world are born feeling that they will be affected by the world; one quarter are born knowing that they will affect the world. I don't know why. It never occurred to me that I couldn't change things that needed changing or couldn't have what I wanted if I worked hard enough and I was good enough. I don't expect gifts.

GF: Do you think your upbringing gave you confidence?

KT: Yes. My father was a diplomatic officer. As a diplomat's daughter, you have to learn to present yourself very early on. You can say, "Hi. I'm so-and-so," or prepare to be ignored for a year or two. Which I was not. And I remember thinking, as I traveled from one country to another, that no one here knows anything about me. So I could be anybody, I could speak as I wished, act as I wished, dress as I wished. I never really was that inconsistent, but I could have been.

GF: Were you an attention-seeker?

KT: Of course.

GF: Your father died when you were seventeen. Were you traumatized?

KT: Totally. Well, I lost my life. Suddenly we had no home. I hadn't lived in the States for nine years. I didn't go to a McDonald's until I was eighteen, for Christ's sake. We suddenly ended up in Missouri with my mother's parents, and I went from feeling that I had the whole world to play in to feeling that I had lost everything. So I just went onstage every night, every night, every night. I dealt with it that way.