Turner goes full-on drill sergeant for one scene as a dog-trainer, her forearms covered with scratches. Marley the irrepressible yellow labrador retriever knocks her to the ground and gives her a more vigorous humping than any co-star since William Hurt in Body Heat.<\/p>\n
A late-career chance to bare her claws again \u2026 Turner (right) and Toni Collette in The Estate. Photograph: Alyssa Moran\/Signature Entertainment<\/p>\n
Unrepentant vileness is well within Turner\u2019s wheelhouse and this bad-taste comedy gave her a late-career chance to bare her claws again. She is the cantankerous aunt whose family (including Toni Collette, Anna Faris and David Duchovny) clamber to get in her good graces \u2013 and her will.<\/p>\n
18. Monster House (2006)<\/p>\n
\u201cI mostly just groan and make all kinds of scary noises,\u201d said Turner of this animated horror-comedy, underselling her inimitable voice work. She plays a woman whose spirit fuses with a house after being buried in its basement. Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty) called the director, Gil Kenan, a \u201chack\u201d and the executive producer Steven Spielberg a \u201cmoron\u201d after his script was rewritten, though he later retracted the second insult.<\/p>\n
17. Naked in New York (1993)<\/p>\n
This is a Woody-Allen-esque theatre-land comedy strewn with star cameos: Tony Curtis, Whoopi Goldberg, Timothy Dalton and Turner, who appears as an acting legend miscast in the debut production by an up-and-coming playwright (Eric Stoltz). \u201cWhich are you, man or boy?\u201d she asks the young greenhorn, then interrupts before he can answer: \u201cDoesn\u2019t matter, I\u2019m partial to both.\u201d<\/p>\n
16. The Accidental Tourist (1988)A thankless role \u2026 William Hurt and Turner in The Accidental Tourist. Photograph: Pictorial Press\/Alamy<\/p>\n
Turner and William Hurt are reunited with the Body Heat director Lawrence Kasdan, but the result couldn\u2019t be more dissimilar. Adapted from Anne Tyler\u2019s novel, it stars Hurt as a travel writer grieving for his late son when he meets a ditsy dog trainer (Geena Davis<\/a>). Turner is his wife, seen in the first 10 minutes asking for a divorce before resurfacing later when she changes her mind. She does a decent job in the thankless role of a capricious scold impeding her ex\u2019s happiness.<\/p>\n 15. The Real Blonde (1997)<\/p>\n As the world\u2019s least encouraging agent, Turner impatiently clicks a pen between her teeth as a prospective client (Matthew Modine<\/a>) pours his heart out, then chomps on a sandwich during his swimsuit audition and blithely asks: \u201cDo you think you could play a rapist?\u201d As for losing her rag with him for turning down soap operas, Turner must have been playing that bit from the heart: her own career kicked off with 86 episodes of the daytime soap The Doctors.<\/p>\n 14. A Breed Apart (1984)<\/p>\n The Bee Gee Maurice Gibb scored this ridiculous eco-thriller starring Rutger Hauer as a mountaintop recluse \u2013 half Rambo, half Dr Dolittle. When he isn\u2019t shooting hunters, Hauer plays the tuba, sponges oil off gulls\u2019 wings and relaxes in the tub with his giant python (not a euphemism). His sanctuary is imperilled by the arrival of a mercenary (Powers Boothe) hired by a Mr-Burns-style mad millionaire (Donald Pleasence) to steal eggs from an eagle\u2019s nest. Meanwhile, Turner rents boats to tourists, but has the hots for Hauer (\u201cI think you need me\u201d) and permits him to suck her toes.<\/p>\n 13. Switching Channels (1988)<\/p>\n This update of the screwball masterpiece His Girl Friday relocates the action to a cable news channel. Burt Reynolds, a last-minute replacement for Michael Caine<\/a> in the Cary Grant role of editor, had daggers drawn with Turner, who took the Rosalind Russell part of his ex-wife and lead reporter. \u201cBurt was just nasty,\u201d she said, later naming him as the worst kisser of her career; he in turn called her \u201coverrated\u201d. Remarkably, the film is zippy and funny, Turner\u2019s comic mania never growing shrill.<\/p>\n \u2018I would let all the life drain out of me\u2019 \u2026 with James Woods in The Virgin Suicides. Photograph: TCD\/Prod.DB\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the saddest characters I ever had to play.\u201d That was Turner\u2019s verdict on Mrs Lisbon, whose daughters kill themselves. This woozy, gauzy picture was the directorial debut of Sofia Coppola, who had played Turner\u2019s kid sister in her father Francis\u2019s film Peggy Sue Got Married. Whenever Turner let any vitality seep into Mrs Lisbon, Coppola would tell her: \u201cKathleen, you\u2019re coming to life! Pull back.\u201d To get in character, she imagined a plug in her heel: \u201cI would pull the plug and let all the life drain out of me.\u201d<\/p>\n 11. VI Warshawski (1991)<\/p>\n As the gumshoe protagonist of Sara Paretsky\u2019s series of detective novels, Turner gives an assured, swaggering performance that deserved a far better movie and possibly even a franchise. The actor pushed hard for realism, insisting on a bruise after being socked in the face, and nixed the idea of a strapping gent swooping to her rescue: \u201cI didn\u2019t spend two goddamn hours building up this goddam heroine for a man to come along and say: \u2018Oh, let me!\u2019\u201d Script approval was hers, but not, alas, the final cut. \u201cWe filmed some wonderful material \u2013 much better than what made it into the final version,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n 10. Julia & Julia (1987)<\/p>\n Naff yet naggingly eerie, Turner\u2019s second consecutive time-slip movie (after Peggy Sue Got Married) suggests Sliding Doors in the style of Antonioni. She plays Julia, a travel agent who loses her husband (a wincingly Italian-accented Gabriel Byrne) on their wedding day and watches her life split into two parallel realities. Bizarro highlights include hooking up with and later killing a character (played by Sting) who buys a plane ticket from her (\u201cDo you know Dubrovnik? Neither do I!\u201d) and projects slides of her face on his bedroom wall. Shot on HD video by the Visconti-Fellini collaborator Giuseppe Rotunno, this is equal parts giallo, arthouse and Euro-pudding. But no matter how daft it gets, Turner never gives less than 100%.<\/p>\n 9. Romancing the Stone (1984)Ripping yarn \u2026 Michael Douglas and Turner in Romancing the Stone. Photograph: 20 Century Fox\/Sportsphoto\/Allstar<\/p>\n The thrills in this Indiana-Jones-esque ripping yarn look feeble now, but the evident affection between Turner (as the romance novelist Joan Wilder) and Michael Douglas (as her co-adventurer in South America) sparkles like the emerald at the end of their quest. The film critic Roger Ebert compared them to Allen and Diane Keaton in the way they \u201calways seem to be on the same wavelength in their comic dialogues\u201d. The film also made plain the extent of Turner\u2019s range: playing an ingenuous lonely-heart was a departure for an actor seen largely as a femme fatale. Avoid at all costs the 1985 rush-job sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, which Turner agreed to make only after the threat of a $25m lawsuit for breach of contract.<\/p>\n 8. Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)<\/p>\n Turner received her only Oscar nomination to date for playing 42-year-old Peggy Sue, who faints at her high-school reunion and gets the chance to be 17 again with all her adult knowledge intact. It\u2019s a richly sympathetic performance, but the production was sullied for her by her co-star Nicolas Cage and the reedy, strangulated voice he adopted to play her sweetheart: \u201cI cringe to think of it,\u201d she said, vowing never to work with him again. However, their paths crossed once more: in 2008, Cage successfully sued Turner for libel and she issued a public apology<\/a> to the actor after she claimed in her memoir, Send Yourself Roses, that he had been arrested for drunk-driving and stealing a chihuahua.<\/p>\n 7. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)<\/p>\n Back in the days before Pixar and DreamWorks, when A-list voice actors were the exception rather than the rule for animated movies, Turner performed so vividly as Jessica Rabbit (\u201cI\u2019m not bad, I\u2019m just drawn that way\u201d) that you could virtually see her on screen. Her casting riffed cleverly on her own vampy persona, while the character\u2019s \u201cheaving breasts\u201d, she said, \u201chad to be drawn after I recorded her lines so that the undulating motions would match the cadence of the sultry voice\u201d. And what a voice: over the years, it has been called \u201chusky\u201d, \u201ctobacco-cured\u201d and \u201cscotch-laden\u201d and described as a \u201ctomboy chortle\u201d with a \u201csmoked-honey texture\u201d.<\/p>\n 6. The War of the Roses (1989)At the top of their game \u2026 Turner and Douglas reunite in The War of the Roses. Photograph: Rex\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n