During the so-called studio era, regarded by many as Hollywood's "golden age" female stars arose possessing a certain mystique, a rare blend of raw sexuality, beauty, intelligence, drive and glamour that captured the hearts of viewers and critics alike. Greta Garbo. Lana Turner. Ava Gardner. All three possessed these qualities. Though an actress of the 1980s, tall, statuesque, whiskey voiced blonde Kathleen Turner could give any one of them a run for their money. After years working as a realitve unknown in way-off Broadway productions and in the television soap opera The Doctors.

Turner burst onto the movie scene in a star-making blaze when she was cast as the femme fatale Matty opposite William Hurt in Lawrence Kasdan's neo-noir thriller Body Heat (1981) and continued through the decade appearing in a variety of popular movies that ranged from drama to light-hearted adventure, to jet-black comedy.

The daughter of a U.S. ambassador, Turner's was a peripatetic upbringing in a fiercely competitive environment. Living in Canada, Cuba, Washington, D.C., Venezuela and England, Turner learned to quickly adjust to new situations at a very young age. She claims the experience molded her as an actress and taught her constantly re-fashion herself to meet the needs of particular situations. She first became conscious of wanting to be an actress in England where during her weekly visits to the theater, she was thrilled by the work of Diana Rigg, Christopher Plummer, Angela Lansbury and others. While attending high school, Turner also enrolled in classes at the Central School of Speech and Drama until 1973 when her father's death forced her mother to move them back to her hometown in Springfield, Missouri where Turner would take voice lessons at Southwest Missouri State University, where she would later enroll but not stay. Finding the campus devoid of the culture she craved, Turner transferred to the University of Maryland and in 1977 graduated with a degree in theater. After that she moved to New York and in between waiting tables, found work in television commercials and obscure stage productions until deciding it was time to try Hollywood.

She had just finished an unsuccessful audition when she encountered the casting agent for Body Heat. Her smouldering portrayal of the murderous Matty lead to a series of widely varied starring roles. She tried her hand at comedy in her sophomore effort, The Man With Two Brains with Steve Martin. Again she played a woman who used her sex to manipulate a man. In the erotic Crimes of Passion (1984), she played a fashion designer/hooker who gets involved with a street preaKathleen Turner. Not wanting to get typecast, Turner played a frowsy author who finds herself caught up in an exciting South American adventure with dashing Michael Douglas and sleazy Danny De Vito in Romancing the Stone (1984). The film was a smash hit and Turner found herself a star. In 1985, the trio reunited for the sequel The Jewel of the Nile and once more for Danny DeVito's grimly funny dissection of a messy divorce in War of the Roses (1989). Other off-beat roles include a beautiful but ruthless hit woman in Prizzi's Honor (1985) and an Oscar-nominated turn as a dissatisfied housewife who gets a second chance to alter her life in Francis Ford Coppola's moving Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

She reteamed with William Hurt for a supporting role in Kasden's The Accidental Tourist (1988). That year she gave a devastatingly sexy uncredited performance by voicing Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? By the early '90s, roles for Turner dried up and her appearances became more sporadic. Highlights from the '90s include her playing a hard-boiled lady private detective in V.I. Warshowsky (1991), and a positively manaical role as a suburban housewife who goes on a killing spree in John Waters funny but uneven Serial Mom (1994).