Barbara Turner (screenwriter)

Early life

Turner was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Pearl Pauline (née Zises) and Alexander Turner. Her father was an Austrian Jewish immigrant, and her mother was born in New York, to Austrian Jewish parents. Her parents were both from Austrian Jewish families (her father was an immigrant, as were her maternal grandparents).

Turner attended University of Texas at Austin, where she studied acting. After a year of college, Turner moved back to New York, studying at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop and then with acting coach Paul Mann, where she met fellow actor, Vic Morrow.

Career

Turner moved to Los Angeles after Morrow was cast in the 1955 film, Blackboard Jungle. During the 1950s and 1960s, Turner acted in many film and television productions, some of which included Playhouse 90, Mike Hammer, Ben Casey and The Breaking Point. Turner said that she began writing to fund her work as an actor. She and Morrow wrote a TV movie called Willie Loved Everybody that turned into a musical that they tried pitching with Elmer Bernstein, but were not successful in selling the concept and the two ended up separating and getting a divorce in 1964.

During the early 1960s, Turner met and became friends with director Robert Altman, first meeting while working on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and then on his 1964 TV show, Nightmare in Chicago. During filming of Nightmare in Chicago, Turner met her second husband, producer and prolific director, Reza Badiyi, who encouraged her to write an adaptation of a Mira Michal short story from The New Yorker called "At Lake Laguna", which she brought to Altman to possibly make, but that fell apart right before production was scheduled to begin. Altman thought of Turner when he read John Haase's book, Me and the Arch Kook Petulia. Turner wrote the original adaptation, which became the Richard Lester film, Petulia.

Turner, Vic Morrow and Reza Badiyi were close friends and collaborators with the director Robert Altman, who many years later directed Leigh in two movies, Short Cuts (1993) and Kansas City (1996). In 1966, Morrow directed his and Turner's screen adaptation of the Jean Genet play Deathwatch.

In 1973, she wrote the screenplay for the TV movie The Affair, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. Her teleplay for the TV movie Freedom (1981), was based on her daughter Carrie's experiences in the 1970s as a teen runaway, played by real-life family friend Mare Winningham.

In 1992, Turner wrote an adaption of the Stephen King novel, Cujo, under the name Lauren Currier.

Turner wrote an unproduced screenplay about two friends of Dorothy Parker named Gerald and Sara Murphy. This work led to her daughter, Leigh, being cast in the 1994 Robert Altman produced film, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.

In 1995, she teamed up with daughter Jennifer Jason Leigh to write and produce the screenplay for Georgia, a film depicting the troubled relationship between two singing sisters played by Leigh and Mare Winningham, who both won praise and several awards for their performances.

The idea reportedly came from Leigh, who was on location shooting the 1991 film Rush, and pitched the idea of two sisters who have varying degrees of skill as singer-songwriters. Turner created the script from that idea. It was financed by the French film production company, Ciby 2000, and Turner's daughter, Morrow, served as a technical consultant. Turner spent three years doing research, using the Seattle music scene as source and inspiration material.

In 2000, Turner’s screenplay adaption of the book Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith for the Jackson Pollock biopic Pollock, also written by Susan Emswiller, became a successful film which won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Marcia Gay Harden and a Best Actor nomination for Ed Harris. She then collaborated with actress Neve Campbell on a screenplay named The Company (2003), about the inner workings of the Joffrey Ballet, which was directed by Robert Altman.

In the fall of 2007, Turner appeared in a cameo role in the family drama-comedy Margot at the Wedding, with daughter Jennifer. She was also credited as a script consultant on the film.

In June 2010, it was announced that Turner and Jerry Stahl had written a screenplay for an HBO film about Ernest Hemingway and his relationship with Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway & Gellhorn; the film aired in 2012. James Gandolfini was executive producer of the film, which was directed by Philip Kaufman.

At the time of her death, Turner had written the script to the not yet released Candice Bergen-produced film called, Knock Wood: Charlie McCarthy Project, which is a movie based on Bergen's 1983 memoir of the same name. The story, produced by James Francis Trezza and Pam Widener (who Turner worked with on Pollack), unfolds from the perspective of Edgar Bergen's famous and hugely popular wooden puppet, Charlie McCarthy.

Other long-time adaptations that were not produced but had been active in Hollywood were scripts based on Jane Smiley’s book, Barn Blind, Michael Frayn's Headlong, and Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels. Additional screenplays based on original work included Beautiful View, Once Again for Zelda, and Under Heaven.

Personal life

Turner was married twice. From 1957-64 Turner was married to actor and frequent collaborator, Vic Morrow, with whom she had two daughters, Carrie Ann Morrow and actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. Turner and Morrow separated when Leigh was two years old.

From 1968-85 Turner was married to Iranian television director Reza Badiyi, with whom she had a daughter, the actress Mina Badie, also known as Mina Badiyi Chassler.

Barbara Turner died on April 5, 2016 in Los Angeles, aged 79, from undisclosed causes.

Screenwriter

Actor

Awards