FEATURE 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?’ “ 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. 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 school friends – 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 “NOTHINGIEVERDID PLEASEDHER.” “ANDILOVEWALKINGOUT ONEMPTYSTAGES.ISTAY THEREAWHILEANDJUST SOAKITALLUP…” 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, 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 42