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Two days before interviewing Kathleen Turner, I saw her in a Pizza Express with Miss World 1964, Ann Sidney. And two minutes after interviewing her, I saw her air-kiss Twiggy in the car park, just as Dora Bryan hove into view. Well, that's Chichester in the summer for you.
Duncan Weldon, artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre, casts in the same way that Robert Carrier used to cook take two lobsters, a gallon of cream, simmer in a bottle of brandy and serve up to the middle classes. In Weldon's recipe, theatrical lobster comes in the form of a dozen or so household names, which this season include Twiggy and Bryan in Blithe Spirit, Sidney in the sequel to The Boy Friend, Julie Christie, Rula Lenska, Zoe Wanamaker and Turner. The two-car, bridge-playing twinsets from the shires dutifully buy the tickets and lap it up.
For Hollywood's biggest-grossing female star of the 1980s, mostly in partnership with Michael Douglas and William Hurt, appearing at Chichester is the rather inevitable "fulfilment of a childhood dream". She has come to do two shows: Somerset Maugham's Our Betters, which opens in August, and the one-woman show Tallulah (which opens on July 1), in which she is the "tempestuous vamp" of an American actress who launched herself on London in the 1920s, aged only 19. Mrs Patrick Campbell said of her: "Tallulah Bankhead is always skating on thin ice and everyone wants to be there when it breaks." Bankhead, who died wealthy at 65, despite a life of unrivalled indulgence, simply described herself as "pure as the driven slush".
As Turner twirled in Weldon's office chair, smoking languidly and constantly playing with her hair, she was rather less poised and more nervy than you might expect of a film star. Also, she seemed to alter physically. Every time I looked up, she was thinner, or slightly more jowly, or a bit taller, or less beautiful. Even more noticeably, her voice constantly changed. I asked her if she thought it was a touch Germanic. "I always thought it was kind of Latina," she replied. To me she sounded like minor European royalty born on the wrong side of a posh blanket in the Deep South.
She knows how to be interviewed. She purred expertly through her well-prepared routine "My charity work is mainly for women and children's health" and you wondered what lures film stars like her away from the excitement of New York, where she lives, or from LA, where they still sign cheques for her, albeit not such large ones any more. And why come to England's south coast?
Steve Martin, to whose manically comic sexual frustration she was a witty, sizzling foil in The Man with Two Brains, used to do a gag in his stand-up show. "I think everyone should have an achievable goal in life. So I want to be the Master of Space, Time and All Being . . . Then I want to go to Europe." Maybe it's the cultural cringe so many Americans feel towards British theatre that brings her here.
"There is a kind of reverse snobbism at work, I guess. But it was in England that I decided I wanted to be an actress, and I visited Chichester when I was in high school." Since she is 42, this was in the early 1970s. Her father was a diplomat attached to the American embassy. Travelling around the world with his work, she spent practically none of her childhood in America "The biggest cultural shock of my life was going from London to Springfield, Missouri". Chichester has been on her list for a couple of years and the possibility of developing Tallulah clinched it.
"It wasn't written for me, but Sandra [Ryan Heyward] says she wrote it with me in mind. I have been compared to Tallulah. The voice, not the lifestyle. I've never stripped at parties . . . ha-ha-ha." Turner's laugh is like sandpaper made of treacle, with grace notes. It makes you want to smoke. "Tallulah really was quite scandalous. She never thought one could limit oneself to just one sex. She was very dashing and very forward. She relished her reputation. She was a real gentleman, even though she was a woman. She was honourable and gallant."
Turner appears to aspire to all those characteristics, except possibly the bedroom flexibility. She has been contentedly married to a property man turned rock musician called Jay Weiss for 14 years. She is happy for people to draw parallels between her and Tallulah because, despite the raucousness of the actress's life she was a very independent character. Turner once said she would never play victims. "A victim is someone who does nothing to change their status and just waits for God or a man to come along and solve their problems. This is not Tallulah."
The show takes place on one specific night in 1947 at a fundraiser that Tallulah held at her house for Harry Truman's presidential campaign. At first, the audience are treated as guests. "Darlings, it's so wonderful you're here early. Sit down, we can talk before the crowd comes." Turner drops into the voice. It's not that far from the shifting focus of her own, but there is a clear difference and she does it very well. I know she does it well because I have a record that Tallulah introduces, and her voice is so perfectly actressy that nobody should ever be allowed to say "darling" again unless they say it her way.
With Bankhead, Turner has found something of a perfect theatrical fit. If the show is any good, it will inevitably transfer to the West End. But a film actress in her forties, if she has laid out her stall the way Turner has, faces fewer options than in her youth. "There are fascinating women on stage, more than in film. In America we have very few women who are heroes over 40. If you have power and you're over 40 and you're intelligent, you're supposed to die or be evil or get a sex change."
She has three movies out before Christmas, in one of which she is "very evil, in a basic take-over-the-world plot". But they won't pack the punch of Romancing the Stone, Body Heat or The Accidental Tourist. This genuinely does not seem to worry her. "I certainly have the reputation in film that if you want good acting, get Turner." But over the next few years, the smart money will be on her having a good, even definitive run at the great American classics. Maybe she should start with Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And maybe she should do it with Michael Douglas.*
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