Barbara Turner

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Barbara Turner is a screenwriter and former actress (born in July 14, 1936 in New York).

She is the mother of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. She was married to the late actor Vic Morrow – with whom she had two daughters, Leigh and movie producer Carrie Ann Morrow – from 1957 to 1964, and to Iranian television director Reza Badiyi – with whom she had another daughter, actress Mina Badie, from 1968 to 1985. Both Vic Morrow and Reza Badiyi were close friends of the director Robert Altman, who later directed Jennifer Jason Leigh in two movies, Short Cuts (1993) and Kansas City (1996). Barbara performed a cameo role in the family drama-comedy Margot at the Wedding with daughter Jennifer, released in the fall of 2007.

Turner generally writes complex, emotionally charged human dramas which focus on character interaction and personal relationships. She acted in several minor roles in little-known film and television productions of the 1950s and 1960s before she began writing with then-husband Morrow. In 1966, Morrow directed their screen adaptation of the Jean Genet play Deathwatch. In 1973 she wrote the screenplay for the TV movie The Affair which starred Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. Praised as a sensitive depiction of a diasabled woman coming to grips with her first experience in a romance, it developed a cult following after it lapsed into the public domain.^{[citation needed]} Another telefilm script, 1981's Freedom, was based on her daughter Carrie's experiences as a teen runaway in the 1970s; the part of the daughter in the film was played by real-life family friend Mare Winningham.

Turner went on to receive much recognition for her work, including a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for her adaptation of Petulia (1968), an Emmy nomination for the 1977 television movie The War Between the Tates, and the Christopher Award for the 1987 television movie Eye on the Sparrow.

In 1995 she teamed up with daughter Jennifer Jason Leigh to produce Turner’s screenplay for Georgia, a film about the troubled relationship between two singing sisters (played by Leigh and Mare Winningham, who both won critical acclaim and several awards for their performances). Turner later served as a script consultant on The Anniversary Party (2001), a film that Leigh wrote, produced and directed with Alan Cumming.

In 2000, Turner’s screenplay for the Jackson Pollock biopic Pollock became a successful film which won an Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress for Marcia Gay Harden and a Best Actor nomination for Ed Harris. She then collaborated with actress Neve Campbell on a screenplay named The Company (2003), about the inner workings of Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, which was directed by her old friend Robert Altman.