Turner Gives Her All for ‘The Graduate’

Let’s cut to the chase. A lot of women in their 40s will not undress in front of a mirror. Some stay married so they’ll never have to take their clothes off in front of another man. And then there is Kathleen Turner, who is making her West End debut as the middle-aged Mrs. Robinson--in the nude.

True, she is only naked for a minute and she is illuminated by a soft backlight, the stage equivalent of an airbrush, if there is one. She is in great shape and a stunning heir to the role seared into a generation’s memory by Anne Bancroft in the 1967 film of the same name, “The Graduate.”

But Turner is also 45 and risks comparisons with her sexy, twentysomething self in the film “Body Heat,” as well as with actress Nicole Kidman’s buff performance in “The Blue Room” last year, which was described as “pure theatrical Viagra.” How does Turner get up the nerve?

“It’s tough. It’s really tough,” Turner said in her dressing room at the Gielgud Theatre. After a preview, the director noted that Turner was “adding a beat” before dropping her towel. “I said, ‘No, I am not “adding a beat.” I am trying to make myself do it.’ ”

It is a day before the play officially opens, and Turner is fiddling with the Waterford crystal goblets she plans to put in her co-stars’ rooms along with a celebratory bottle of champagne.

Turner looks truly gorgeous in a black knit dress that offsets her blond waves and a face that is softer and more interesting than it was in her pug-nosed youth. She drops onto a white sofa, a vase of Peruvian lilies on the table beside her, and explains that the nudity was written into the script by Terry Anderson, who also directs the play.

“I thought, ‘My God, how shocking and what a wonderful impact.’ At the same time, I thought, ‘Well, we’ll see whether or not I’ll do that,’ ” Turner said. “Throughout the rehearsal, Terry said either we’ll get there or we won’t. If it’s appropriate, you’ll know it. The closer we got to the first audience, the more convinced I became that it was right.”

She lights a cigarette and exhales so that it seems her smoky voice is hanging in the air between us.

“Look, I am 45. I will never be in my 20s again, nor do I wish to be in many ways. Nor do I wish to undergo any body surgery. But I work out a lot, six days a week. And that really started because of my disease, rheumatoid arthritis. This is as close to curing myself as I can get. The nice result of that is that I’m in pretty good shape,” she said.

“So, part of me just said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good thing to do? To hell with these teenagers and their non-bodies,’ ” Turner said. “There is a definitive look for women, which is practically fleshless, and the world just isn’t like that and women aren’t like that, and I’m sick of pretending that it’s great. And so I thought I’d do my little bit for us.”

God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson.

Opening night reviews were mixed, although Turner’s performance was widely praised. Several critics questioned the point of putting “The Graduate” on stage after such a nearly perfect film. “It seems an extravagantly pointless affair,” wrote the Guardian’s Michael Billington. The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer was more impressed. He said Turner stole the show, playing the seduction scenes “with marvelous comic timing, and at best her Mrs. Robinson seems as sassy as [Lauren] Bacall and as funny as Mae West.”

Turner seduced preview audiences as well with her boldness and female form. A glance around the theater reveals that most of them are middle-aged too. Many of those who identified with Dustin Hoffman’s alienated college graduate in the film are paying more attention to Turner’s bored Mrs. Robinson when she delivers the killer line, “Do you want me to seduce you, Benjamin?”

“The idea of a seduction of a younger man is still very attractive to men, but now more than ever to women too,” Turner said.

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She should know. While Turner was Anderson’s first choice for Mrs. Robinson, she helped audition five young men to play the young Benjamin before selecting the good-looking and talented Matthew Rhys. Every night before they go on stage, she sticks her famous head in Rhys’ dressing room and asks if he is ready to be seduced.

“One of the changes in the last few years is the fact that more and more women my age or older are rejoicing in the fact that sex is for fun. They’re not worried about getting pregnant, which, whether you like it or not, is in the back of your mind for 30 years. Now you do it because you like it and it’s great,” Turner said.

“There is something very attractive about an older woman who is still very sexy. Frankly, I find younger men boring. They may be hot, but as soon as you start to talk to them. . . . This is why Mrs. Robinson says, ‘Conversation, why?’ I think the same would be true for men. I think older women are simply more interesting.”

Turner has often complained about the scarcity of roles for women in their 40s, although she has so much work that she may not find time to take “The Graduate” to Broadway. She has just completed the film “The Virgin Suicides,” directed by Sofia Coppola, in which she plays an older and rounder suburban mother. After “The Graduate” completes its West End run at the end of July, she will take “Tallulah!,” her one-woman play on the life of actress Tallulah Bankhead, on tour in the United States.

There is no contradiction, Turner insists. She is arriving at an age for good female stage roles, but film offers are few and far between. Especially for lead roles, which go to younger women.

“I love doing film. You can be so incredibly precise and exact when the camera is right in your face. When you blink, there is a sentence, a thought. It can be brilliantly exciting work. So yeah, I kind of mind not having the choices that I want, that excite me. But I don’t really know what to do about it,” Turner said. “The film industry is very much controlled by its marketing research, which is youth-oriented, where the market is for tickets, clothes, drinks, whatever might be promoted by a film, which is a lot of things.”

But meantime, she is happy to be on the West End stage, which inspired her to go into acting in the first place. The daughter of a U.S. diplomat, Turner arrived in London at age 13, when it was cheaper to go to a play than to a movie. She fell in love with theater and, throughout her teens, spent her allowance going to shows.

London taught Turner that acting was respectable, although her father didn’t agree. She discovered that “it’s a job, a profession. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I could earn a living at this.’ ”

Not a very good living, as it turns out. Even today, stage actors are not well-paid. Turner could earn more in a few days on a film than she does in a month in the West End. But she is the latest in a parade of Hollywood actors that includes Kidman, Kevin Spacey and Charlton Heston who have traded a cut in pay for West End cachet.

“There is, and always has been, a bit of awe about the English theater. We’ve always felt like upstart cousins, even on Broadway. Half the time, if a show comes from a successful run on the West End, it’s guaranteed to run on Broadway. We do have this kind of feeling that the English theater is somewhat superior, even if it is not actually true,” Turner said.

“Another aspect of it is the different audiences. There is a very different sense of humor here, a way of receiving information that is very different from New York and a lot of American audiences. It’s very interesting to explore, and that’s fun.”

And when it comes to Mrs. Robinson, “I think they’re more accepting of a sensual older woman probably than we are. It will be more of a shock in the States.”

Despite the U.S. obsession with youth, it is a surprising statement: The British stereotype, at least, is not one of overt sexuality.

“Well, in fact, the first time I took off some of my clothes in rehearsal, I was expecting just a little reaction, and I looked around and all of the men in rehearsal were studiously looking somewhere else,” Turner said. “I said, ‘All right guys, I really would appreciate just a wow.’ ”

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“There is a definitive look for women, which is practically fleshless, and the world justisn’t like that and women aren’t like that, and I’m sick of pretending that it’s great. And so I thought I’d do my little bit for us.”