Kathleen Turner Reveals the True Price of Fame

Four years after her star-making debut in the erotic thriller Body Heat, the two-time Golden Globe–winning performer appeared on the cover of this magazine in July 1985, ahead of the release of The Jewel of the Nile, in which she starred opposite Michael Douglas. Now, as she gets ready to reunite with her co-star on the final season of the Netflix comedy The Kominsky Method, the 66-year-old actor revisits and revises excerpts from that conversation.

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“I have an older brother and sister who were both at college then, and what I regret the most now is that my father never knew any of us as adults, because we’ve all turned out well.”

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“I still don’t have that much vanity. I don’t spend a lot of my time or energy on how I look, or how I’m able to move, or how I’m able to handle eight shows a week. The shows are the focus, not how I look doing them.”

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“Fred [T. Gallo], the producer, tried to be very sensitive about who was on set. I didn’t feel like I was in this arena, like some kind of gladiator. There was a sense of closeness that made it feel so much safer. But even so, you can’t touch and be touched without emotions being aroused. It’s not possible.”

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“I actually remember one of my first thoughts being, ‘Oh my god, there’s a record of me now that’s always going to be there.’ I had never thought of film that way. That was a shock.”

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“When I’ve taught courses at NYU, I would tell students, ‘You dance with the camera. Its job is to be your partner. It leads or you lead, but it is a lovely dance.’”

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“I shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

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“The thing that I didn’t say and might have said was that I gave him the script to read before I went off to film it. I said, ‘I think you ought to know what I’m doing.’ He read the script and had no problem with it. Seeing it, though, was so tough on him. And of course, I’m blithely going, ‘But, it’s okay, you read it.’ Idiot. Anyway, I did not take into account the impact of the visual.”

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“If something came up, and he said, ‘I don’t think you should do it,’ I’d say, ‘Look, here’s the line. Tell me what to do in the house. Tell me if you hate this piece of furniture. Tell me if you think I’m raising Rachel wrong. But don’t tell me what to do in my work.’”

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“My daughter’s pretty great.”

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“Look, the price of fame really is just a question of time. If I go to the grocery store, it would usually take me 20 minutes, but I’m going to allow at least 30, because people are going to stop me and say, ‘Oh my god, you’re Kathleen Turner. I’d like to say hello.’ And you say hello back. So it just adds minutes, as you go on. You’ve simply got to allow more time.”

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“Hasn’t changed a fucking bit. I’m never going to retire. There’s no reason. Why would I? As long as I can walk and talk and think. Let me take that back. As long as I can talk and think.”

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“I remember walking into my building, which was then on 23rd Street, and the doorman looked up from his paper and went, ‘25 mil, huh?’ And I went, ‘I’m sorry, what?’ He went, ‘So they’re suing you for 25 mil.’ I went, ‘They are?’ Nobody had bothered to tell me.”

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“When I look back at this interview, there’s nothing I would disagree with now, or cringe and say, ‘Oh god, I wish I hadn’t said that.’”

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Interviewed in 1985 by Martin Torgoff