Kathleen Turner Body Heat (1981)
Kathleen Turner (born June 19, 1954, Springfield, Missouri) starred as Matty Walker in Body Heat (1981) — her first feature film role. She would go on to Romancing the Stone (1984), Prizzi's Honor (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986, Academy Award nomination), The War of the Roses (1989), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, voice).
Turner was a stage actress and soap-opera lead before Body Heat
Turner's father was a Foreign Service officer; she grew up in Cuba, Canada, Washington D.C., Caracas, and London, where she attended the American School in St. John's Wood. She trained at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (BFA, 1977), and moved to New York to do off-Broadway. From 1978 to 1979 she played Nola Aldrich on the NBC daytime soap The Doctors. By 1981 she had a Broadway credit (Gemini) and a soap résumé and no film roles. (wikipedia)
Wallis Nicita brought her in to read for Matty
Casting director Wallis Nicita had seen Turner on stage and brought her in to read for Lawrence Kasdan (in Body Heat). The audition was reportedly cold — Turner read the railing scene at Miranda Beach without warming up the voice. Kasdan stopped the reading.
"I remember walking out and thinking, well, that didn't go well. Two days later they called me back." — Kathleen Turner, Vanity Fair (2017)
The voice was the casting decision. Turner's tenor — about an octave below the casting bracket Hollywood had been using for women in 1981 — was the property the role required. Matty Walker has to sound like a woman who has run a long con; Turner's voice sounded like a woman who could have. See Kathleen Turner's Debut for the full audition story.
"She had this low voice, and she was beautiful, and she was very still. She didn't perform. She just sat there and was that woman. I knew on the first read." — Lawrence Kasdan, The Hollywood Reporter (2021)
The performance was a rookie's at scale
Turner had never been on a film set when production began. The first scene she shot was the Pinehaven porch break-in — a sex scene with William Hurt (in Body Heat) the day after they met.
"My first scene in my first movie was the porch where Bill kicks in the door. We hadn't met. I think we said hello in the makeup trailer. I had no idea what I was doing. I just decided I would do everything Larry told me to do, and that I would be still." — Kathleen Turner, Vanity Fair (2017)
The decision to be still — to refuse to perform what the audience would project onto Matty — is the performance's central technical move. Pauline Kael named it on first viewing:
"She's the most provocative new actress to appear in a movie in a long time. She has a face that suggests there's something secret going on inside her, behind her eyes." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981) (book, 5001 Nights at the Movies)
Turner's career arc after Body Heat
Body Heat opened a door Turner walked through fast. Robert Zemeckis cast her opposite Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone (1984), then The Jewel of the Nile (1985); John Huston cast her in Prizzi's Honor (1985); Francis Ford Coppola cast her in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), for which she received her only Academy Award nomination. She voiced Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). She was, for most of the 1980s, the leading female star of mainstream studio cinema. (wikipedia)
The 1990s slowed. Turner has spoken openly about a years-long undiagnosed bout of rheumatoid arthritis that interrupted her career and required steroid treatments that affected her appearance. She returned to the stage — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Broadway, 1990, Tony nomination), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (London/Broadway, 2005–06, Tony nomination) — and continued to work in film and television.
| Year | Film | Role | Director |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1981 | Body Heat | Matty Walker | Lawrence Kasdan |
| 1984 | Romancing the Stone | Joan Wilder | Robert Zemeckis |
| 1985 | Prizzi's Honor | Irene Walker | John Huston |
| 1985 | The Jewel of the Nile | Joan Wilder | Lewis Teague |
| 1986 | Peggy Sue Got Married | Peggy Sue | Francis Ford Coppola — Oscar nom |
| 1988 | Who Framed Roger Rabbit | Jessica Rabbit (voice) | Robert Zemeckis |
| 1989 | The War of the Roses | Barbara Rose | Danny DeVito |
| 1991 | V.I. Warshawski | V.I. Warshawski | Jeff Kanew |
| 1994 | Serial Mom | Beverly Sutphin | John Waters |
| 2003 | Monster House | Constance (voice) | Gil Kenan |
Turner on the role's place in her own life
In a joint interview with Hurt three decades later, Turner returned to the film's central technical choice — to play Matty as a woman whose every line might be the truth or its perfect counterfeit:
"I was 26. I had to play a woman who lies for a living, and I had to play her so the audience couldn't tell when she was lying. The trick was to mean every word — every word — at the moment I said it. Even the ones that weren't true." — Kathleen Turner, Vanity Fair (2017)