Stage career
After 1990s roles in Broadway productions of Indiscretions and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which she earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress), Turner moved to London in 2000 to star in a stage version of The Graduate. The BBC reported that initially mediocre ticket sales for The Graduate "went through the roof when it was announced that Turner, then aged 45, would appear naked on stage". While her performance as the seductive Mrs. Robinson was popular with audiences, with sustained high box office for the duration of Turner's run, she received mixed reviews from critics. The play transferred to Broadway in 2002 to similar critical reaction.
In 2005, Turner beat a score of other contenders (including Jessica Lange, Frances McDormand, and Bette Midler) for the role of Martha in a 2005 Broadway revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Longacre Theatre. Albee later explained to the New York Times that when Turner read for the part with her eventual co-star Bill Irwin, he heard "an echo of the 'revelation' that he had felt years ago when the parts were read by [Uta] Hagen and Arthur Hill." He added that Turner had "a look of voluptuousness, a woman of appetites, yes ... but a look of having suffered, as well."
Ben Brantley praised Turner at length, writing:
As the man-eating Martha, Ms. Turner, a movie star whose previous theater work has been variable, finally secures her berth as a first-rate, depth-probing stage actress ... [A]t 50, this actress can look ravishing and ravaged, by turns. In the second act, she is as predatorily sexy as she was in the movie Body Heat. But in the third and last act, she looks old, bereft, stripped of all erotic flourish. I didn't think I would ever be able to see Virginia Woolf again without thinking of Ms. Hagen [Uta Hagen]. But watching Ms. Turner in that last act, fully clothed but more naked than she ever was in The Graduate, I didn't see the specter of Ms. Hagen. All I saw was Ms. Turner. No, let's be fair. All I saw was Martha.
As Martha, Turner received her second Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play, losing to Cherry Jones. The production was transferred to London's Apollo Theatre in 2006. She starred in Sandra Ryan Heyward's one-woman show, Tallulah, which she toured across the U.S.
In August 2010, Turner portrayed the role of Sister Jamison Connelly in Matthew Lombardo's drama High at Hartford TheaterWorks. The production transferred to Broadway at the Booth Theatre where it opened in previews on March 25, 2011, officially on April 19, 2011, and an announced quick closing on April 24, 2011. However, in a rare move, the production was revived, still headed by Turner, to undertake a national tour which began in Boston in December 2012.
From August to October 28, 2012, Turner appeared in Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, a play about the legendary liberal Texas columnist Molly Ivins, at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. In December 2014 and January 2015, Turner performed the same show at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. She appeared again at Arena Stage in the title role of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, which opened in February 2014, and playing Joan Didion in the one-woman show The Year of Magical Thinking, based on Didion's memoir of the same name, in October and November 2016. In February 2019, Turner made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in the speaking role of The Duchess of Krakentorp in Donizetti's opera La fille du régiment.
