Kathleen Turner is in many ways the prototype. Sharon Stone, Linda Fiorentino and other sassy, brainy bombshells owe a debt to the husky-voiced actress who infused the Hollywood female sex symbol with a level of smarts and attitude that had gone missing in the decades preceeding Turner's rise to fame.

Turner, who was born on June 19, 1954, in Springfield, Missouri, experienced an itinerant childhood with her mother and U.S. ambassador father, whose postings included Canada, Cuba, England and Venezuela. After her father's death in 1973, her mother relocated the family back to Springfield. Having developed a passion for acting during weekly visits to London's theaters, she studied voice and then drama at Southwest Missouri State University and then the University of Maryland respectively.

After graduation, Turner moved to New York and appeared in commercials and theater before heading to Hollywood, where she was spotted by the casting agent for Body Heat (1981), the steamy neo-noir in which she played sexy, scheming femme fatale Matty opposite William Hurt. The role made her an overnight sensation, and she went on to star in the comedy The Man with Two Brains (1983) opposite Steve Martin, and Crimes of Passion (1984), as a sportswear designer living a double life as a prostitute.

Turner then reached true stardom in the romantic comedy hit Romancing the Stone (1984), playing an unadventurous romance writer who gets caught up in a swashbuckling escapade worthy of the genre she writes. The film marked the start of a blessed collaboration between Turner and Michael Douglas, who would co-star in the sequel, The Jewel of the Nile (1985), and the darkly-comedic divorce film The War of the Roses (1989) –- notably, all three were directed by Danny DeVito. She then reunited with Lawrence Kasdan, director of Body Heat, and William Hurt, in The Accidental Tourist (1988), a hit drama about loss, love and redemption based on Ann Tyler's novel.

For the remainder of the late 80s and early 90s, Turner would appear in varied films. She starred with Jack Nicholson in Prizzi's Honor (1989), a black comedy that posed the pair as hired killers in love. And she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar® for Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Her trademark husky voice also breathed life into the curvaceous and animated Jessica Rabbit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), and she was the titular mad momma in John Waters' Serial Mom (1994).

As the 1990s drew to a close, Kathleen Turner has handled herself admirably in uneven films, including The Real Blond (1997), and children's films like A Simple Wish (1997). She played matriarch in first-time director Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999). As Turner enters her 50s, she might well discover that there's truth to the oft-voiced criticism that Hollywood doesn't know what to do with "older" women. Whatever lies ahead for Kathleen Turner, she has left an indelible mark on the movies, reshaping as she did our image and esteem of the Hollywood vixen.

Credit: amctv.com