Still, feisty, fearless and fun

Some 20 years later, Kathleen Turner, star of Romancing The Stone, Prizzi's Honour and Serial Mom, was still turning heads at the age of 48 as she stripped off as Mrs Robinson in the West End production of The Graduate.

Now, at 53, she is still feisty, fearless and fun. Her looks may have faded with age and her figure has filled out, but for a woman who has had no cosmetic surgery and a 15-year battle with the crippling disease rheumatoid arthritis (along with a spell when her drinking was out of control), she doesn't look half bad.

Turner arrives in the lobby of a top London hotel looking not like a movie star at all, wearing black jeans and sweater and racing green cowboy boots.

The woman who echoed the glamour of Old Hollywood could probably get away without being recognised now, were it not for her deep, gravelly, almost masculine voice, which resounds as she recounts amusing tales of her life on and off screen.

Indeed, she reminds me a lot of Lauren Bacall, both in attitude and voice, and when I tell her this she reveals that the two actresses sometimes meet up in New York, where they both live.

"We have a game. When we meet I say, 'Good evening Miss Bacall'. She says, 'Good evening Miss Turner'," imitates Turner in a deep drawl. Then in a much lower tone she growls: "'How are you, Miss Bacall?' 'I'm really well, Miss Turner'. We see how low we can go," laughs the actress.

We're here to discuss her autobiography, Send Yourself Roses. In it she is searingly honest about everything, not least her leading men.

She fell for Michael Douglas while filming Romancing The Stone and says they may well have had a fling had his then wife Diandra not turned up on the set.

"I'm glad nothing happened because ultimately Michael and I would have been at total loggerheads. He's mellowed since then and Catherine (Zeta-Jones) has such a strong personality herself that she could handle him, but I thought he was misogynistic. He didn't consider women as really equal."

She recalls William Hurt, her co-star in the 1981 film Body Heat, as a heavy drinker and womaniser who took recreational drugs, although says that later on he "settled down".

Burt Reynolds was "just nasty" and Steve Martin wasn't a bundle of laughs off camera.

Turner was one of the few women who could get things changed in a movie if she wanted. Unhappy with the script for The Jewel Of The Nile, the sequel to Romancing The Stone, she persuaded Douglas to bring in the original writer to change it.

"I am a very stubborn woman so it's not easy to dissuade me if I think I'm right. Maybe sometimes it's easier for others to give in," she laughs.

She doesn't know if her stubborn streak earned her a reputation for being difficult, but she doesn't much care if it did.

"As I'm a woman, they would probably call it difficult. If I were a man, they would probably call it decisive."

She divorced her husband, property developer Jay Weiss last year, after 22 years of marriage, but they remain great friends. They have a 20-year-old daughter, Rachel.

"We are still extremely close. We still have Christmas and other holidays together. When we were together we were both getting unhappy. We were looking at our future very differently. My desire is to have a bigger world, to travel more. He doesn't want to travel and doesn't like change. But we have lunch almost every week."

Turner has lived on her own for several years and is starting to miss having someone around, she admits.

"I loved coming home to my peaceful, ordered house for a while, not having to worry about other people's meals, watching what I wanted on TV. But lately I've found that I'm feeling a bit different. No-one knows where I am or if I'm all right right now, which is the kind of communication you have in a marriage."

She has been dating, but worries that the men tend to be younger than she is. You get the feeling she'll keep them on their toes, though.

"Most men of my age either want trophy wives, which I'm too old now to be, thank you, or they are settled in their own relationships."

Turner had a peripatetic childhood, but knew early on she wanted to be an actress. Her father was a diplomat and the family lived for a time in Canada, Cuba, Venezuela and London. When he died suddenly when Turner was 17, her mother moved the family back to their grandparents' home in Springfield, Missouri.

After taking a theatre studies course she set off for New York and worked as a waitress until she clinched her first film role in Body Heat.

While it made her a star, she didn't experience the level of attention that young stars do today, she says.

"It was very different then. I'd always been determined to keep my private life, private. For years you never saw any pictures of my child or my home. Today, it would drive me crazy."

In her early movies, the actress performed many of her own stunts. She notched up seven stitches when she caught her arm on a sharp piece of metal on a plane in Romancing The Stone and smashed her nose tripping over a cable during a scene in the 1991 movie VI Warshawski.

From having such an active life, it was a cruel twist of fate when, after filming Serial Mom in the early 90s, her body started to shut down. She felt like she had flu all the time, her joints swelled and her bones ached.

After numerous tests, and still only in her late-30s, she was finally diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. At the time she was put on a cocktail of drugs, including steroids, which only succeeded in making her balloon, but did little for the pain, she says.

Meanwhile, gossip columnists were having a field day running stories about how the sexy star had let herself go and rumours were rife that she was hitting the bottle big-time.

In fact, Turner was in agony as her feet swelled to the extent that her skin split, her joints seized up and the drugs made her angry and depressed - which led to her drinking excessive amounts of vodka to dull the pain.

Matters came to a head when she collapsed publicly in the bathroom of a restaurant and had to be escorted out. After a spell in rehab, she went to AA meetings for around six months and now, she says, drinks in moderation.

While her arthritis is in remission, to date she has had seven operations on her joints and she knows there will be more.

"I always try to have an operation in October so I can be back on stage by January," she says.

As well as acting - most recently as Martha in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? in New York and London - and directing, she teaches at New York University.

"The course is called practical acting - shut up and do it," she announces. "That's my philosophy in life."

Send Yourself Roses, By Kathleen Turner and Gloria Feldt, is published by Headline, priced £18.99.