Gloria Rose "Barbara" Turner (July 14, 1936 – April 5, 2016) was an American screenwriter and actress. The actress Jennifer Jason Leigh is her daughter.
Early life
Gloria Rose 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.
Turner attended the 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.
Turner, Vic Morrow and Reza Badiyi were close friends and collaborators with the director Robert Altman, who later directed Leigh in Short Cuts (1993) and Kansas City (1996). Morrow directed his and Turner's 1965 screen adaptation of the Jean Genet play Deathwatch. In 1983, Turner co-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 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 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. In an interview with Jan Lisa Huttner, Turner states that "the company is the star of this movie" rather than just Campbell. It is an ensemble piece.
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. The film Hemingway & Gellhorn aired in 2012.
At the time of her death, Turner had written the script to the not-yet-released Candice Bergen-produced film titled Knock Wood: Charlie McCarthy Project, 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 Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen's famous and hugely popular wooden puppet. 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.
From 1968 to 1985, Turner and Iranian American television director Reza Badiyi were married, with whom she had a daughter, actress Mina Badie, also known as Mina Badiyi Chassler.
- 1987: Christopher Award, Eye on the Sparrow
- 1994: Humanitas Prize, 90 Minute Category, Out of Darkness (nominee)
- 2012: Primetime Emmy Award, Outstanding Miniseries or Movie, Hemingway & Gellhorn (nominee)
- 2013: WGA Awards, Long Form – Original, Hemingway & Gellhorn (nominee)