MOVIES : She Packs the Heat : In a new career twist, Kathleen Turner is a hard-boiled detective in ‘V.I. Warshawski,’ and uses her star power to play it her way

The Hamptons are just oozing into happy hour when Kathleen Turner kind of twirls into her local watering hole--”Hi! Hi, you guys. Hi, Tomas,” she says pulling off her dark glasses, letting the screen door bang behind her.

In Hollywood, she is still one of the most bankable actresses, a post-modern, old-fashioned sultress who first steamed up the lens 10 years ago as Matty Walker in “Body Heat” and has spent the better part of the decade as the keeper of the Bacall flame. But here in this Long Island town where she has summered every year for almost as long as she has been a star, Turner’s just another good customer who has dropped by to go over some catering arrangements for her wedding anniversary the week after next.

That she has two movies opening this year--”V.I. Warshawski,” a detective thriller from Disney that opens Friday, and “House of Cards,” an indie tear-jerker coming in the fall--seems to matter less than either her anniversary plans or the fact that Turner, after back-to-back shooting schedules, is finally on vacation.

Her sun dress is baggy and she scuffs her sandals across the wood floor as she heads toward the bar. “Oh, god,” she says plopping into a corner seat flagging the waitress for an ice water and a vodka tonic--”a real drink,” as she puts it. “I have to go into the city later this week for two days of press junkets and then I’m off for the whole summer,” she says wrapping her smoky voice into a bow of a smile.

She spent last summer on Broadway, this perennially restless actress, playing Maggie in the much touted revival of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” She got good reviews in the New York Times and the cover of Vanity Fair. Before that it was “The War of the Roses,” another successful teaming with Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito. Now come these two films, low-profile projects with virtually unknown directors.

It is a surprising move even for an actress who has delighted in taking chances with her career and potshots at her image. “Romancing the Stone,” “The Man With Two Brains,” “Crimes of Passion,” “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Switching Channels,” “Prizzi’s Honor,” the voice of Jessica in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”--clinkers and winners alike, Turner emerged pretty unscathed. As Time critic Richard Schickel wrote in his review of Ken Russell’s “Crimes of Passion”: “It’s a dangerous performance, but she never falls off the high wire.”

Here against the dark wood and green velvet of the restaurant’s bar, Turner looks less like a vacationing star than a schoolgirl who has cut Friday afternoon classes with the nuns to hang out with her friends, smoke and talk about boyfriends and what you want to be when you grow up. She is very friendly, very relaxed and talks very, very fast, skipping across topics--her daughter, Rachel; her husband, real estate developer Jay Weiss; her movies; Hollywood; Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas--like she was biting off the tops of other people’s ice-cream cones. Her voice is still throaty--from years of training and more years smoking her favorite brand of Canadian cigarettes--but her looks are Irish, not patrician, approachable, not off-putting. In a world of Madonna and Linda Hamilton Nautilized physiques, the 37-year-old Turner is kind of a welcome throwback to a time when stars had colored hair, capped teeth, a killer smile and it was the legs, not the pectorals, that the camera loved. She seems like the kind of woman who found out she could make a lot of money in a skin-tight dress in front of a camera, but is happiest sitting here in her sundress and sandals killing an hour before she heads home to throw something on the grill for her family.

“Rachel--she’s 3 1/2 now--had a great swimming lesson this morning and then my husband left his wallet on the boat and I had to run and get it--it’s really Camp Weiss here,” she says. “Jay’s been coming here for years and he has his beach crowd down. We see the (Jann) Wenners and the (Billy) Joels and Mick and Ann Jones. We’ve got lawn tennis and swimming and forget it, we’ve got it all.”

And another plume of smoke goes by.

About the movie. . . .

“Oh, I had been working on ‘Hardboiled’ (a detective film with Douglas) for five years,” says Turner. “And we had a terrific script and I thought the character was swell, flippant, a good sense of humor, well able to take care of herself. There were some problems like she shot all these people and one of my premises is that women don’t have to do this. I’m extremely tired of this screenwriting gap I keep encountering, like how do we get out of this scene? Oh, shoot everyone and move on. I mean, extras are dying. So I talked to Michael and we tend to butt heads a lot and so they sent me rewrites. Well, they killed all the humor, all my reasons for doing it and so I said no.”

The next sound Turner heard was the thud of the “V.I. Warshawski” script hitting her doorstep. Or rather the doorstep of her agent and former boyfriend David Guc. (At the time, Turner was already on the pre-Broadway road with “Cat.”) Producer Jeff Lurie had bought the rights to the popular Sara Paretsky mystery novels and wanted Turner to play the feisty female detective, Vicky Warshawski.

Turner, an avid reader, was familiar with the hard-boiled but self-deprecating private eye and quickly signed on. Although Tri-Star, the original studio, eventually put the project into turnaround, Disney “bought it the next day, the smart little buggers,” says Turner. It was Disney that brought Jeff Kanew on board, a director with a slim portfolio of credits: editor of “Ordinary People,” director of “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Troop Beverly Hills” and “Tough Guys.” Turner went from working with John Huston and Francis Ford Coppola to who?

“Yeah, except ‘who’ turned out to be OK,” she says. “I think a powerful actor can protect a (less-powerful) director and I liked Jeff a lot, his sense of humor and that he had gotten a sense of humor about themselves out of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in ‘Tough Guys.’ I think if Disney had said it had to be Jeff and I hated his guts it would have been a problem, but that never came up.”

It was a difficult shoot last winter for the film, which also stars Charles Durning, Jay O. Sanders and 15-year-old Angela Goethals. Sixteen weeks in Chicago and Los Angeles with Turner typically doing many of her own stunts, one of which gave her a broken nose. “I’m such a klutz,” she says, laughing. “But I think it’s better if you do your own stunts--it’s more powerful, you can get the camera in closer.”

Turner and Kanew also resisted a lot of studio pressure to soften the film, particularly some of its violence--in one scene Turner’s Warshawski is literally punched in the face--and in its shootout ending when Turner dispatches the bad guys herself while rescuing a drowning child.

“There was a lot of pressure to change things,” she says. “Disney is very supportive but very hands-on, talking to us every day and I’m not really used to that. But I said, ‘No, I’m not going to make all those safe choices.’ I didn’t spend two hours building a goddamn heroine to have someone come along and say, ‘Let me help you now.’ So they backed off.”

For Turner, the interest in ‘V.I. Warshawski” seems less a passion to do this particular movie than an opportunity to create another protagonist similar to her earlier characters: Joan Wilder, Barbara Rose, Peggy Sue, Matty Walker--all independent, feisty, funny, resourceful women who show as much intelligence as they do leg.

“Yeah, she is sort of in my tradition although a little less glamorous,” says Turner raking a hand through her hair. “Or maybe she’s just less stylized, more modern day, more current. I didn’t want to be sensationalistic so audiences will say, ‘Oh, my god, a woman is doing all that,’ or ‘Oh, my god, a woman is getting punched in the face.’ At the same time, that scene where she gets hit is really the reason I did the film. I’m tired of women being used for effect.”

Which brings Turner to a discussion of roles for women in Hollywood these days. For someone whose film career is due in no small measure to her Bacall-like image--she once said that any man who wasn’t attracted to her “on the nights that I’m ‘on’ must be gay”--Turner seems blithely unconcerned about her future opportunities in front of the camera. While fellow actors, namely Meryl Streep, have complained loudly about the industry’s diminishing roles for women no longer in their 20s, Turner seems to have her escape all mapped out.

“I think as you get older you do more theater,” she says flatly. “Honest to god, the more interesting roles for women are in plays and you look forward to the time you are not the love interest, which means you have a man protagonist and you are the second banana. The roles for women like that are much stronger in theater and I think that should translate into film. I mean, there is such a strong body of women actresses working today, and we make them (studios) so much money, that they have to write for us. It would be stupid not to provide me with material. So I assume that is happening.”

Despite Turner’s refusal to live anywhere but New York, she has no immediate plans to return to the stage to follow up her role in “Cat.” “Broadway is such a big commitment,” she says frowning slightly. “Rehearsals and a minimum of six to eight months on stage and, frankly, eight months of a character is about all you can take.”

Instead, Turner says she is awaiting the release of “Warshawski” and with it the possibility of sequels. “Who knows when they’ll decide,” she says. ‘We’ll wait and see how the release goes. But there is a lot of other ground we can cover (in future films)--her relationships, other stuff from the books. That was one of the problems I had with ‘Romancing’--we explained everything about (Joan Wilder) in the first movie so the only thing left to do was run around and get in those situations.”

Getting into those kind of adventuresome situations is second nature to Turner. She is fond of pointing to her peripatetic childhood spent in Venezuela, Cuba, Canada and Britain--Mary Kathleen Turner was the third of four children born in Missouri to a career diplomat--as the reason for her own career as an actress.

“I think a lot of actors have that background,” she says. “Learning to present yourself to a new school, or in my case, a new country. I was the most entertaining one in the family. People were always telling me to shut up at the dinner table and let the other people talk. ‘But they don’t have anything to say and I dooooo, ‘ says Turner, laughing at her own emphasis. ‘I do and I’m soooo interesting.’ ”

The daughter of two non-college graduates intent on scaling Washington’s diplomatic pecking order, Turner says she knew she was a special child “because I could go into any embassy in the world and say I was Dick Turner’s daughter.”

That world came to an abrupt halt with her father’s death in 1971 while Turner was still a high-schooler in London. The return to Missouri with her mother and siblings was less than smooth; in her short hair, clunky boots and British accent Turner was yet another outsider. This time, instead of assimilating, she took refuge in the theater department of Southwestern Missouri State University--where she studied alongside Tess Harper and John Goodman-- and later at the University of Maryland. “I never really rebelled,” she recalls. “I just got it all out in acting.” It was also the time when Turner began to realize she could trade on her looks as well as her chutzpah.

“I never thought I was beautiful,” she says. “No, I never did. I thought I was like Doris Day: blond hair and dimples and freckles. I had this one horrible year when I was 13 when I got heavy and my mother called me ‘Moon Face.’ Thank you, mother! When I grew out of that phase I said to myself, ‘Don’t ever do that to yourself again, don’t ever wish you were somebody else.’ Now, I just think I am a good-looking American woman, not beautiful.”

She moved to New York upon graduating in 1977, intent on a stage career. “I had gone to more theater than film in England and all my ambitions were toward Broadway,” she says. Almost immediately she landed an agent, Guc. Next came a small role in an Off-Off-Broadway show; a part on “The Doctors” soap opera, playing Nola Aldrich, a less-than-keen-witted nurse; and nine months after her arrival in New York, a part in a Broadway production, Albert Innaurato’s comedy “Gemini.”

But the real news wasn’t made until Turner landed the role of Matty Walker in Lawrence Kasdan’s “Body Heat,” playing opposite William Hurt, a move that rocketed the unknown actress into a series of film roles: steamy sirens such as China Blue in Ken Russell’s cult film “Crimes of Passions,” and romantic comic heroines such as Joan Wilder and Peggy Sue in Coppola’s time-warp comedy, “Peggy Sue Got Married.” That role earned Turner her one and only Oscar nomination.

“Hollywood shows a bias against comedy,” she says dismissively. “At one level you’re there not because you’re better than anybody else but because of your uniqueness, so a lot of the comparisons are pretty empty.”

Although she earned notice for teaming up again with Douglas and DeVito in the black comedy “The War of the Roses,” it was her Tony-nominated role in “Cat” that propelled Turner back into the public eye.

“It’s all hindsight,” she says, sounding almost bored. “I don’t think you can really control your image or your roles. You do something because it was the best thing at the moment. I wanted to work with Ken Russell and because I did it after ‘Romancing’ it looked brilliant and risky. But I don’t think you can really plan. I just have more control over what I pick now. I mean after I did ‘Body Heat,’ I had to go back and waitress.”

As for her craft, she says it is pragmatic in the extreme. “I think the ‘method’ is nonsense,” she snorts. “I think it’s self-indulgent and I don’t believe it works.” Turner says she works only from the script.

“I don’t imagine myself as the character,” she says. “I just say, ‘What does this scene need to do?’ And you just work toward that without telegraphing everything that’s coming. I don’t think my characters are any less valuable to my audience because I haven’t suffered through my films.”

Just when you think Turner might be almost unbearably breezy about her success she turns serious.

“Let’s get this straight,” she says with the wriest of smiles. “I am funny. I am very funny. But every two years or so I do a really angry person--Joanna in ‘Crimes of Passion,’ Barbara Rose in ‘War of the Roses.’ It seems to be a kind of release. I think women have a lot of anger and with a lot of reason. We spend an awful lot of time not pleasing ourselves but being aware of other people’s needs and expectations. I think my mother was very angry when my father died. She kind of lost her career, too. I have that and every once in a while I get a wave of anger and I say, ‘Will somebody please get me a role that has something to do!’ ”

Some of that anger she channels into her regular volunteer work for Planned Parenthood. “I was raised with the tradition of public service,” she says. Turner has been a sponsor for several years and this spring she did some public service spots in the light of the recent Supreme Court decision about federally financed health care clinics.

When asked about Clarence Thomas, the conservative nominee, she quickly rankles. “Oh, how could he not have a position (on abortion),” she says heatedly. “And with this gag rule on the Supreme Court decision, our country has decided quite consciously that there is a dispensable part of our society--poor women.”

The waitress strolls by, but Turner waves her off and stubs out her cigarette. She has to be getting home to her husband and child. She mentions briefly her desire to have more children--”I always thought I would be great with a family”--and the current status of the $5-million lawsuit filed against her husband as one of the defendants in the Happy Land social club fire that occurred in New York last March.

“It was the worst year of our lives,” she says quietly. “I was opening on Broadway and my husband’s business was almost wrecked. But if you can get through that you can get through anything.”

Suddenly she leans forward. “Want to hear my new theory of marriage? My seventh anniversary is approaching in a few weeks and it’s great, we’re just doing great. It’s swell,” she says sort of swimming through her obvious happiness. “I never thought I would get married because I didn’t know what kind of man would put up with a woman who got more attention than he did, but Jay is great. Meeting the person you love is such luck, it’s scary to think you might not.”

She is urgent now, anxious to convey this suddenly discovered secret.

“So, I’m trying to figure this out, you know how does this (marriage) thing works. Being in love is an adrenaline high and you just physically can’t do it all the time. So you ease off and maybe the person starts to irritate you, but then they turn around and you see their hand on the table or maybe their leg in shorts or the back of their head and, ohhhh , there you start all over again, only the greatest thing is,” she says interrupting herself, “only the greatest thing is that you don’t have that fear that you’re doing it alone. So you get to do it over and over again.

“Falling in love safely?” she says, widening her eyes as if one of the modern-screen sex goddesses can’t quite believe she doesn’t have to keep seducing us all again and again and again. “Falling in love safely? What can beat that?”