Actor sheds light on US president’s infamous greeting, and says she was a sexual target in Hollywood

The veteran actor Kathleen Turner has revealed details about Donald Trump’s “gross” handshake technique in an interview in which she also criticised the sexism in Hollywood that made her a “sexual target” at the beginning of her career.

Speaking to New York magazine, Turner described how Trump greeted her. “He goes to shake your hand and, with his index finger, kind of rubs the inside of your wrist,” she said. “He’s trying to do some kind of seductive intimacy move. You pull your hand away and go yuck.”

She also disclosed how she became the subject of prurient interest from some of Hollywood’s best-known actors in the early 80s, after her career-making performance in the 1981 erotic neo-noir Body Heat.

“After that, I was a sexual target. I understood later, from Michael Douglas, that there was a competition between him and Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty about who would get me first. None of them did, by the by … There was an unspoken assumption that women were property to be claimed.”

Describing herself as “fucking angry”, Turner also condemned difficult and disruptive behaviour by male actors, which she claimed they got away with because of sexist double standards in the industry.

Kathleen Turner: ‘Decades after Body Heat I am still referred to as a sexual icon’ Read more

She said Burt Reynolds was “terrible” on the set of the 1988 comedy Switching Channels: “He said something about not taking second place to a woman. His behaviour was shocking. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t someone’s equal. I left the room sobbing.”

Nicolas Cage was “very difficult” to work with on the Francis Ford Coppola film Peggy Sue Got Married, Turner said, adding that an unnamed male actor bit her during a stage production.

She criticised the indulgence shown towards Robert Downey Jr during his 1990s substance abuse troubles, comparing the treatment he received with hers when she was struggling with rheumatoid arthritis during the same period.

“Someone like him could show up on set and be drunk or misbehave in some way, but he would still get hired because producers figured they could control that kind of behaviour,” she said. “But if you say, ‘I have a mysterious illness and I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk tomorrow’ – you’re not getting hired.”

As for her reputation for being difficult, Turner said: “The ‘difficult’ thing was pure gender crap. If a man comes on set and says, ‘Here’s how I see this being done’, people go, ‘He’s decisive.’ If a woman does it, they say, ‘Oh, fuck. There she goes.’”