The standard response to Kathleen Turner, sexpot and movie star turned much-praised stage actor, is to remark on how amazingly normal and unHollywood she is. She drinks, she smokes, she swears; the day I meet her, she eats a hefty BLT without even so much as a hint of mayo-induced panic. She does her own supermarket shop and flags down her own taxis. She speaks five languages, talks about politics and sex with a frankness and intensity that is positively Parisian and has been known to read, well, books.
Most amazingly, she has had no cosmetic surgery nor even, it seems, a surreptitious lunchtime squirt of Botox (you can tell that she's telling the truth about her face; ask if she has ever been tempted by the knife or the needle, and she doesn't launch into the smokescreen of a pseudo-feminist tirade, she simply rolls her eyes, raises an eyebrow, and says sardonically: "Urr, Ye-es!")
How, then, to explain her new book Send Yourself Roses? Not only is it breathless, cheesy, badly written and full of ropey cracker-barrel wit trying to pass itself off as deep insight; it's also suffering from an identity crisis. Is it memoir, or self-help? Turner writes early on that when her friend and co-author, Gloria Feldt, told her that she should write an autobiography, the idea did not appeal: it seemed "egotistical." Slowly, though, the thought occurred that she might have something to offer other women.
"I am 53," she says, when I ask about this change of heart. "We are the first generation of women who are financially independent. Our mothers didn't have their own resources like we do and once the daily child-rearing is over - once the child moves out of the house - instead of [women] feeling useless or whatever, there is this wave of creativity. Women are going back to work. They're reinventing themselves. I thought I could support that, even increase that. So it has got a lot of philosophy in it and a lot of my beliefs."
The long and short of this "philosophy" is what we can learn from her career and, specifically, from the inspirational (or not) characters she has played. Most chapters contain a box in which she summarizes the plot of a film or play, lists its cast and quotes a line by her character. This works better in some places than others. For instance, when she quotes Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - "I'm loud and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in this house because somebody's got to, but I am not a monster" - you do feel (if you can temporarily forget how drunk Martha mostly is) a certain sense of girl power. Ditto murderous Matty, whom she played in the 1981 movie Body Heat: "You aren't too smart. I like that in a man." But when she is reduced to quoting Joan Wilder, the romantic novelist in Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile ("Exotic ports, great parties, spectacular sunsets - it's not enough!") or Joanna Crane/China Blue, the sportswear designer-cum-hooker who is the dubious star of Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion ("B movies have always been my inspiration"), you start to feel at sea. Eat your heart out, Simone de Beauvoir. Add to this her chapter titles - Banish the Yet; Separate the Real from the Reel; Take the Lead, Lady! - and the effect is akin to being slapped briskly round the face with a copy of Variety.
But perhaps Send Yourself Roses is an aberration. Though she seems pleased with it (the book moved her mother to tears, in a good way), she doesn't go on about it; my guess is that the motivational-speak was mostly a way to bank a fat publishing check without spilling too many beans. Not that she has many beans to spill. Turner has just divorced her husband Jay Weiss, a property developer, after 20 years of utterly faithful marriage and they still have lunch every week. "We're best friends. The week our divorce became final in December, he wrote me a little note: 'You are, and always will be, my best friend.' It's nice."
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