Oscar-nominated actress does not mince words about her days acting on NBC soap opera The Doctors in her new book, "Kathleen Turner on Acting: Conversations about Film, Television, and Theater," co-written with Dustin Morrow.In a long exchange with Morrow about her time on the soap Turner explained, "I was a regular on The Doctors. Which no longer exists, for which we can all be thankful. It was just a very run-of-the-mill soap opera. My character was so incredibly dumb that at a certain point I just couldn’t figure out how to justify the words that came out of her mouth, so I just asked the writers to make her a drunk."
Turner revealed the last straw for her with the soap.
"I'll tell you the breaking point for me on The Doctors," she wrote. "I remember this like it was yesterday. I was doing a scene where I was giving birth, after a four-month pregnancy of course, and I had researched the process and learned lamaze breathing and everything. After the first take the director, who was a man of course, came up and said, 'You're doing great, I can really feel what you're going through. But can you just be a little more . . . ummm . . . attractive?' 'Attractive.' While giving birth. That was it for me."
She did admit to learning something from her time on The Doctors.
"Having that experience on The Doctors helped me when I did move on to feature filmmaking, because I learned that on the day, on the moment when the shot was set, you had to be committed to your choices. There's no do-over if you don’t like what you did on a given shoot day on a film. You can’t just go reshoot something because you were unhappy with your performance, it would be prohibitively expensive."
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