She is one of Hollywood’s most celebrated actresses, the award-winning star of John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor and Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married – for which she received an Oscar nomination.

But now Kathleen Turner has turned on Hollywood with an angry attack on the eye-watering millions that studios spend on movies and A-list actors, which she describes as “immoral”. Funds should be redirected, Turner says, into improving the quality of scripts and performances, investing in writers and allowing actors rehearsal time rather than mere “read-throughs” before the shoot begins.

She told the Observer: “The hundreds of millions they spend on films now I find essentially immoral.”

Films such as Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End have reportedly been made for $300m, reaping huge financial rewards. Variety reports that Robert Downey Jr can expect more than $20m for a big movie, and that he even “picked up $10m for roughly 15 minutes of screen time in Spider-Man: Homecoming”.

While arguing that women and men should receive equal pay, “certainly when they carry the film or they’re a full co-star”, Turner criticises the astronomical fees paid to stars. “How much money does a person need?” she said. “You can only live in one house at a time. Perhaps they could designate that the studio pay a portion of the fee to an organisation or an educational institution.”

Turner with Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone (1984). Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

Turner made her name in 1981 in the steamy film noir classic Body Heat, with a femme fatale role that inspired comparisons with Lauren Bacall. Other films include Lawrence Kasdan’s Oscar-nominated The Accidental Tourist and Robert Zemeckis’s Romancing the Stone, for which she won a Golden Globe. Her acclaimed stage roles include Mrs Robinson in The Graduate.

She spoke to the Observer ahead of the publication of Kathleen Turner on Acting, a series of conversations with the film historian Professor Dustin Morrow about the craft of acting, with reminiscences from her 40-year career in film, television and theatre.

In the book, she criticises film producers and directors for not giving actors time to rehearse, arguing: “If we have time to work out our choices in rehearsal, where you don’t have to pay for location rentals or hundreds of crew members, they end up saving a lot of money when it comes time to shoot. They’ll just never get that.”

She told the Observer: “The films we rehearsed the longest on were with Larry Kasdan [Body Heat and Accidental Tourist] and Francis Coppola [Peggy Sue]. We rehearsed for up to four weeks before ever going in front of the camera. It immediately pays off. Not only do you have actors who anticipate, understand and watch each other, because they know each other so much better, but also the time you save. You know exactly where the camera’s going to be … Two or three takes and you move on…

“It gives you time to actually develop characters, instead of being forced to make a quick choice, which you might look back on in a week or so and say, ‘Damn it, I’m locked into that, so that I have to pursue the character this way now.’”

She recalled once asking a studio for rehearsal time: “They said, ‘Well, then you have to give us two weeks free.’ I took two weeks without pay.”

Recalling her struggle to persuade producers that she could play different roles, she is critical of the industry for typecasting actors rather than exploring their abilities: “They don’t think that there’s something else you might do. They only look at what they know you can do. This affects women much more than men. There’s a climate in American culture and most seriously in the Hollywood film-producing culture that women are somewhat interchangeable and are essentially used as props.”

Her advice to actors is to reject roles that typecast them: “You can always get another job. Go back to the restaurant. I’ve done it. After Body Heat, I went back to being a waitress for a while.”

Kathleen Turner on Acting is published on 18 September