Kathleen Turner Claims Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson & Warren Beatty All 'Competed' Over Her
Kathleen Turner says that Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty once competed to win her affections — and that none of them emerged victorious.
In an interview with Vulture, Turner, 64, recalled, “You have to remember that my first big role was Body Heat, and after that I was a sexual target. I understood later, from Michael Douglas, that there was a competition between him and Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty about who would get me first. None of them did, by the by.”
Turner, who has nabbed two Golden Globe Awards, found success in the 1980s in movies like The Man with Two Brains and Romancing the Stone.
Turner said that she bristled at the attention from Douglas, 73, Nicholson, 81, and Beatty, 81.
“I don’t like being thought of as a trophy,” she explained. “Let me tell you, when Jack and I were shooting Prizzi’s Honor a bunch of us went to his place up on Mulholland [Drive]. Jack said, knowing Warren’s interest in me, ‘Why don’t you call Warren and tell him I don’t have a corkscrew.’ ‘Why?’ ‘You’ll see how fast he gets here.’ There was an unspoken assumption that women were property to be claimed.”
Turner continued, “Another time I was at a dinner party and there was an empty chair next to Jack. I sat down in it and had a delightful time. After a while — because I was shooting the next day — I said I had to leave and drove back to the Chateau Marmont. I get there and the phone rings. It was Jack: ‘How could you do that to me?’ ‘Do what?’ ‘You were my date and you left!’ And I said, ‘I was your date? No one informed me.’ Assumptions like that are why I’ve never lived in Los Angeles. Every time I go to that city I feel insecure.”
Turner is not the only famous actress to open up about warding off Beatty’s interest. Last month, Rosanna Arquette said on Watch What Happens Live that she turned Beatty down in the ’80s. “He’s very handsome, beautiful, but it just didn’t feel like it was for me,” Arquette commented. “But that was in the old, old days.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Turner talked about feeling isolated by the cast of Friends when she played Chandler’s father. “I didn’t feel very welcomed by the cast,” she said. “The Friends actors were such a clique — but I don’t think my experience with them was unique. I think it was simply that they were such a tight little group that nobody from the outside mattered.”
