Prepare yourself, because Kathleen Turner is unapologetically playing the middle-aged broad she is.
The two-time Golden Globe-winning actress, whose great moment of Filmic Being started in the early eighties with Body Heat, doesn't sashay into a downtown Toronto hotel room. She enters it almost invisibly, so unlike what one expects, it requires a double take to make sure it's her. This is the woman, after all, whose sultry movie performances earned her the sobriquet "cinematic Viagra."
In town to receive the International Legacy Award from Best Buddies Canada, a national charitable organization, Ms. Turner is actively involved in Childhelp and Amnesty International.
Now 57, her pretty features seem too small in a moon-like face. She is no longer slim, and is dressed in the kind of flowing pant suit most age-conscious women avoid more assiduously than white bread. The only thing she carries well is her trademark low voice, which she utilizes for all its luxury, like a velvet shawl she is happy to frequently throw over her shoulder for show-stopping effect.
But if her onlookers hold onto an iconic image of her as a femme fatale, that's just too bad. Part of being a broad is telling it like it is, and she relishes the role, booming out her lines from the stage of her small upholstered seat. She talks about sexuality and aging, divorce and acting, as though this is the best act of her life.
"It's tough sometimes because you always feel that you disappoint people because you don't look the way you looked 30 years ago." She pulls a face. "Well, get over it. I don't!"
But isn't it hard when beauty is part of your identity?
"I've seen too many women make this mistake of trying to look like their younger selves. And you don't. And you can't."
Still, she doesn't mourn the loss?
"But I'm much more interesting now," she growls, flashing a sudden smile of expensive teeth. "I am! It was fun," she adds devilishly. "And I can look at endless old pictures of myself and think, 'Wow, how pretty is she?' "
She is on a roll now, blowing candour into the room like long plumes of cigarette smoke. Wasn't she aware of her beauty?
"No, never," she retorts. "I thought I was a really good actress. And perhaps this is why I don't mourn because I don't think I was that wrapped up in how I looked. Good protection in the long run," she says, baring another high-wattage smile and letting the timbre of her voice do all the work.
Of course, cojones have always been one of Ms. Turner's prodigious assets. After a string of high-profile movies in the eighties – The Man With Two Brains, Peggy Sue Got Married, Romancing the Stone and The War of the Roses – she disappeared from the scene in the nineties after a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, a crippling auto-immune disease. Steroids made her look puffy, and she had a brief spell with alcohol addiction to deal with the excruciating pain.
But once that was under control, she re-emerged on the stage. In 2000, she performed the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, appearing in the much-ballyhooed nude scene at the age of 48.
"That was a real up-yours," she says, laughing. It was a role she created, she points out, but after performing it in London's West End, she refused to go to Broadway with it. "I said, 'No.' The U.S. is so hypocritical about sex." She then changed her mind. "I got a film script and the character was described as 37 but still attractive, and that pissed me off. I said, 'Oh yeah? Okay, I'm 48. Let's just see who's still attractive.' So I called up the producer and said, 'Yes, I'll do [ The Graduate]on Broadway.' "
Perhaps it's more anger than defiance that drives her, I venture.
"There's a lot of anger that is a fuel," she says, lifting her face as if to a camera lens. Was it partly the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis at 37? She has undergone nine operations. Both knees have been replaced.
"It started long before that," she says, her voice like a slap. "I think that might have added to the list, God knows," she continues with a moue. "But it's more a sense of injustice, things being wrong, that makes me angry."
If anger governs her choices, confidence and a love of risk-taking are not far behind, it seems. She was known for performing many of her own stunts on film, including the chandelier-swinging scene in War of the Roses. As if to defy her status as a gay icon, she once appeared on the popular sitcom, Friends, as Chandler Bing's transgender father.
"You can't grow if you don't take risks," she says of her acting choices. "I have to be willing to risk failure because, of course, I want to know how far I can go."
To much acclaim and a few Tony-award nominations, she has acted in many stage productions ( Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tallulah, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) but recently, the reviews have not been kind. "One-note Janie" is how a critic from The Wall Street Journal wrote of her performance in this summer's short-lived Broadway production of High, in which she played a profanity-spewing nun who was a former alcoholic.
Does she worry she is always playing a version of herself?
"Oh, I don't know about that," she says, rearing back in her chair, suddenly off-stride from her confident march through the interview. She considers the question silently for a moment, then regains her footing with a slight shake of her head. "I found out over the years that I'm not good at victims. I'm not convincing to myself or to others."
We move on to her personal life. She and her husband, Jay Weiss, a New York property developer, divorced in 2006 after 22 years of marriage. They have one child, a daughter, Rachel, a 23-year-old singer/songwriter who is recording her first album. "The fact is, love changes in some ways. It matures as people do." Ultimately, she says, they wanted to live their lives in different ways. "I think of myself as a citizen of the world. ... And he was seeing it as pulling back a bit and having a life that's more private."
There have been some romantic skirmishes, mostly with younger men. "I think they're bolder perhaps," she says. But mostly it's quiet on the sex front. "I just don't find many interesting men lately. It's very boring," she says with dramatic world weariness.
"I haven't met many men who are confident enough," she says, leaning forward as if off a stage to speak to a fan in the front row. "I think I intimidate them." She lights up the room with her fence of teeth again. "I'm really not very intimidating inside my head, but I think they're all chicken."