Geraldine Turner has two dogs, Pearl and Claude. Both are fully grown – and not much smaller than Shetland ponies – but they bound about like excited puppies when I arrive at her place at Moss Vale, in the NSW Southern Highlands. This could be because they think I am a relative: "It's your new aunty!" Turner shouts over the barking as she lets me in the gate. Or maybe they're just burning up excess energy. "They haven't been for their you-know-whatsies to the P-A-R-K," Turner says.
The four of us – two humans, two cavorting canines – make our way up the garden path to the house. In the kitchen, a large and welcoming room with windows on three sides and a chandelier overhead, the dogs collapse in a panting heap on the floor. I sit at the table, which is set for morning tea: floral-patterned cups and saucers, dainty little plates. Turner produces whipped cream and a dish of plum jam, pointing out that she made the jam herself and that it is really rather good. There is, however, some sad news on the culinary front. "I think I've fucked the scones," she says.
Turner is a grande dame of the Australian stage. Amply endowed with both star power and staying power, she has been a redoubtable figure in the national footlights for as long as most of us can remember. "The all-singing, all-dancing woman in the fabulous frocks," is how she once summed up her showbiz persona. "The buxom lead who's gonna lay 'em in the aisles … The girl with the great big voice and the red hair."
Musical theatre is Turner's natural milieu: she made her name with razzle-dazzle performances in shows like Chicago, Anything Goes, Call Me Madam and Guys and Dolls. Now, though, she is raising the tone of the proceedings. Adding some classical clout to the CV. More than a half-century after she began treading the boards, she is making her debut with Opera Australia.
The production is called Two Weddings, One Bride and Turner is keen to tell me about it, but for the moment her focus is on the scones. She is convinced she has made the dough too light: "Not enough flour." An enticing aroma is wafting from the Aga cooker nevertheless, and curiosity is getting the better of her. She has to find out what's happening in there. "I'm opening the oven," she says in a don't-try-to-stop-me tone. A moment later: "I think they're nearly done. They're looking all right!"
It isn't just Turner's singing voice that is big: she speaks as if projecting to the back stalls. This is true whether she is addressing the dogs ("Uh-uh-uh! No barking, Claudey-Claude-Claude!") or making one of the arresting statements that pepper her reminiscences. Things like: "I don't think I ever really loved my first husband." And: "Gough Whitlam once drank champagne out of my shoe."
She has a broad Australian accent, even after all these years hanging out with rounded-vowel theatrical types, and knows she is an excellent raconteur. "I can tell stories and be funny off the cuff," she says. "I have that talent, which a lot of actors don't."
Not all Turner's anecdotes are amusing, though. The sentence that makes me stop chewing my scone:
"My brother Noel, the one who killed the child …" She glances across the table. "Look at your face," she says.
"I know. I have a very interesting family."
IT ISN'T as if she is taking on the Ring Cycle. Inspired by a 19th-century opéra bouffe, Two Weddings, One Bride is essentially a French farce set to music. The score incorporates some of the greatest hits in the operetta tune-book – sprightly numbers by Jacques Offenbach, Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán and Johann Strauss.
"It's like a jukebox operetta," says Turner, who plays the take-charge wife of the governor of French colonial Morocco, a bumbling fool who has lost all the couple's money. The fun begins when they decide to restore the family fortune by securing rich husbands for their two daughters, identical twins they have never been able to tell apart.
The creator of the show, Australian conductor Robert Andrew Greene, wrote the wife's role with Turner in mind. "It's the one piece of casting I was allowed to make," Greene tells me. "I wanted someone who had great acting skills but also could sing. And I have always loved Geraldine's work."
At the time of my visit to Turner, she is still rehearsing the show (now playing at the Sydney Opera House). People tend to assume comedy is easier to carry off than drama, she says. They are wrong. "This piece has to effervesce like champagne. It has to be bubbly and light and fast and that is actually really difficult to do. To make it look as if it's easy – that's our challenge."
It is clear she is relishing every minute of the process. The only other time she tried this kind of thing – when she appeared in a production of La Belle Hélène by the then Victoria State Opera 30 years ago – the reviews were withering ("Opera descends to burlesque", sniffed The Age). But she has higher hopes for this show. "I think I'm singing really quite well," she says. Apart from that, she is enjoying being gainfully employed. Fewer big parts come her way these days, which she supposes isn't surprising. "I'm so fucking old. It's unbelievable."
Next month, Turner will be 67. Though still handsome – almond-shaped eyes, strong cheekbones – she is acutely aware that her bloom has faded: "I look in the mirror and go, 'Oh, my God.' " She imagines most women her age say the same thing, but she suspects the dismay is deeper for some than for others. "I think it's harder when you've been beautiful."
Cosmetic surgery is an option. But risky. "Those Hollywood actresses who have their faces pulled so tight they can't shut their eyes any more, or close their mouths – that is ghastly," she says. "They don't look younger, they just look weird." Anyway, what exactly is the point of battling to create an illusion of youthfulness? "Half of me thinks I've fought hard for every line on my face. Every line tells a story. That's who I am. This is what a woman of 66 looks like, and that's okay."
The other half of her thinks, bring on the knife. "If somebody offered me a free face-lift, I don't know if I'd turn it down."
TURNER grew up in Brisbane, the only daughter of a truck driver who believed it was a mistake for members of the working class to get ideas above their station. She says Leo, her father, was a kind man when he was sober. When drunk, he beat up her mother, Isabell. "Which was a family secret. Nobody ever talked about that."
Turner, who had four older brothers, says she was never hit herself. "My mother was abusive towards me, but not in that way. She would lock me in cupboards if I was naughty." Thwarted in her ambition to be a vaudeville star, Isabell pushed Turner towards a theatrical career with fanatical determination. Specifically, she wanted her daughter to become a ballet dancer. Turner had to practise, practise, practise. "I was never allowed to play," she says.
At the age of nine, she landed a small role in a production of The Sleeping Princess by the Borovansky Ballet, then Australia's premier dance company. But not long after that, she started changing shape in a way that ended any chance of a future in tulle and toe-shoes. "I grew tits," she says. "I didn't have the body of a ballerina."
She concentrated on singing instead, which rankled with Isabell. "That's because she was a singer," Turner explains. "It was a jealousy thing." Looking back, she believes her brothers held it against her that their mother gave her so much attention. But for Turner, the relationship with Isabell was crippling. "She was living through me and it stunted me somehow. I didn't feel free to develop. I had to be her girl, who did things her way." No matter how hard Turner tried, she seemed to fall short of expectations. "Nothing I ever did pleased her."
When Isabell died in 1982, Turner was 32 and living in Sydney, where she was the toast of the town. Her scintillating turn as Velma Kelly in the original Australian production of Chicago the previous year had established her as one of the shining stars of her generation. But she says she was still waiting for a word of praise from her mother. "At her funeral, a lot of people said to me, 'She was so proud of you.' I said, 'Was she?' "
For a while, Turner thought she might as well give up performing because she didn't have a reason to do it anymore. She had been under the impression the entire exercise was for Isabell's benefit. "But I soon worked out that it was my life," she says. "It's what I do."
Turner is always the first person at the theatre. "I just like getting there early," she says. "And I love walking out on empty stages. I stay there for a while and just soak it all up, thinking of all the people who have performed there before me, and all the audiences that have sat there." She has appeared in movies and assorted television shows – House Husbands, for instance, and Home and Away. "But when I'm filming, I always think, 'I can't wait to get back to the real thing.' The real thing for me is the theatre."
It seems to me that Turner's particular blend of glamour and grit is best suited to live performance. In the spotlight, she has a quality that doesn't necessarily show up on screen. "Presence," says her second husband, opera conductor Brian Castles-Onion. "When she's on stage, you only look at her."
Turner has stolen scenes in straight plays (Steel Magnolias, Present Laughter, The Forest) as well as in a long line of musicals (Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Cabaret). What she hasn't done is played the role she has always wanted most – that of Rose, the ultimate stage-mother, in Gypsy, the musical based on the memoirs of burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee.
"I think it's one that's very close to her heart because she understands it so well," says fellow musical-theatre doyenne, Nancye Hayes. Turner tells me she has been cast in no less than four productions of Gypsy, and all four have fallen through.
The most public of these disappointments was the cancellation of a 1992 production mounted by Sydney wheeler-dealer and sometime theatrical entrepreneur, Greg Jones, with whom she had just ended a 10-year relationship. It was reported at the time that when Jones pulled the plug on the show after a week of rehearsals, Turner trashed his office. Untrue, she says. "There were some papers on his desk and I threw them in the air."
Still, she looks back on the episode as the start of the most difficult decade of her life. From the age of 42 to 52, her career seemed to lose momentum and she developed debilitating stage fright.
During one hellish cabaret season in Sydney, she says, she feared she was losing her ability to sing. "Some nights I'd go for a note and nothing would come out. I'd want the earth to open and swallow me up. There was nothing wrong with my voice. It was me. It was inside my head."
What puzzled her was that a lot of people told her they had never appreciated her performances more. "I thought about it a great deal," she says. "I realised that up until that point, I'd been hiding a part of me behind a great voice. During that season, because my voice wasn't working the way it usually does, I had to bring more of me forward." She had presumed her popularity rested purely on her proficiency at singing, dancing and acting. She now saw that was not the case. "I thought, 'It's me they like.' It was a kind of epiphany."
Her voice and her confidence both came back, but Turner's attitude to performing has permanently changed. Her latest cabaret show, Turner's Turn – which she has performed in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, and will reprise at the Sutherland Entertainment Centre in southern Sydney on May 26 – is more than a collection of show tunes and backstage stories. She sets out to reveal herself, she says. "To allow people to see vulnerability, to see everything I am."
THOUGH her parents struggled financially, Turner attended one of the most expensive girls' schools in Brisbane, St Margaret's. The fees were paid by her oldest brother, Ralph, who had a managerial job on the wharves. She was grateful, she says, but also uncomfortable. "I always felt like I was the poor girl at the rich school." On forms, she started saying her father the truck driver was a "transport operator".
She later went to teachers' college, but spent only six weeks at the front of a classroom before signing a full-time contract with the Queensland Theatre Company. Ralph never forgave her for that, she says. From his point of view, everything he had spent on her education had been wasted.
When Turner was 20, another brother, Noel, was charged with murdering his three-year-old niece. The little girl – the daughter of his wife's sister – had been living under Noel's roof when he punched her in a drunken rage. "She took a few days to die," says Turner, uncharacteristically quietly. "She bled internally and he didn't take her to the hospital because he was afraid he'd get into trouble for belting her." She pauses. "Terrible. It's terrible even now, talking about it."
The charge was reduced to manslaughter, and the presiding judge at Noel's trial – the father of one of Turner's schoolfriends – sentenced him to four years' jail with hard labour. "He never really recovered from it," Turner says. "When he got out of prison, he was like a half-person." A few years later, when Noel failed to turn up to work, police broke into his house and found his body. "He'd drunk himself to death."
PEARL and Claude are groodles – crosses between golden retrievers and poodles. I realise once they and I have recovered our breath after their welcome that they are not quite as large as I first thought. "They think they're little," says Castles-Onion, who proposed to Turner a fortnight after meeting her in 1993. Both tell me they knew almost instantly that they were meant for each other. Turner was 43 when they married. Castles-Onion is cagey about his age, but previous stories have said he is a decade Turner's junior. When I email him to ask if this is correct, he suggests I go with "much" younger, "a lot" younger, or possibly "toy boy".
The two hoped to have a family but Turner says she was in the throes of early menopause by the time they got together. "Some women don't want children at all and that's perfectly valid," she says. "But I did. I never thought I wouldn't be a mother. It's just something you have to get used to, I guess. I mean, I'm fine now but when I was in my 40s, it was a sadness."
She still feels the occasional sharp pang of regret, particularly at those times of year when others are gathering their clans. "I go into a bit of a hole at Christmas," she admits. She and Castles-Onion usually spend the day with friends, but "now and again, people don't invite you. Some years I've just dug in the garden and we've had a few prawns, because you can't be bothered doing a big lunch for two of you." Mind you, she knows from her own childhood that having a large number around the table isn't a guarantee of a good time. "Our family Christmases were always hideous," she says. "There was always a fight of some kind."
Gardening is one of Turner's abiding pleasures. She grows 19th-century French roses and a profusion of other flowers that take her fancy. When she's at home at Moss Vale, her life has a peaceful rhythm to it: a cryptic crossword each morning, The Bold and the Beautiful in the afternoon. "I love bad television," she says. "Always have."
The other thing that has always attracted her is politics. Turner is a former federal president of the performers' union, Actors Equity (now part of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance), and in 2008 stood unsuccessfully for local government. A staunch left-winger ("I wouldn't vote for the Liberal Party as long as I could draw breath"), she doesn't rule out running for federal parliament in the future. At least she knows her age wouldn't count against her. "Look at Derryn Hinch. What's he? Seventy-three? I've got years yet!"
In the meantime, she has a very personal project on the go. "I have written a musical about my mother, called Drama Queen," she says.
Maxine Thomson, a friend of Turner since they trained as teachers together, firmly believes Isabell adored her daughter. "I know she had every clipping from every newspaper – everything that Geraldine had ever done," Thomson says. Turner tells me the love was mutual: "You love your mother no matter what they do to you."
Nonetheless, the play is dark. Isabell is presented with all her flaws. "I'm not out to get her," Turner says. "That's not the reason I'm telling the story. It's more to do with, you know, the rich tapestry of life."