Tracing Janine Turner’s acting beginnings means going through the most iconic series of the eighties: she debuted with a supporting role in Dallas when she was 17 years old and later had episodic characters in Vacations at Sea, Santa Barbara or Fantastic Car. Her ticket to becoming a star, however, came to her in 1990, a decade after meeting the Ewings, when she was offered the role of Maggie O’Connell in The Alaskan Doctor, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Emmy. Now that the series is back in the public eye after settling on the EnFamilia channel, where it can be seen every day from Monday to Friday at 10pm, and on the Filmin platform, Turner is delighted to be able to talk about the series set in the fictional town of Cicely.
At what point in your life were you when you landed the role of Maggie O’Connell?
In the early 1980s, she lived in Los Angeles and was engaged to Alec Baldwin. I saw that he got incredible roles and I was only offered roles as a girl in a bikini. I was always kidnapped and had to be rescued! Later I was in the General Hospital soap opera, where they hypnotized me and I only said: “I don’t know! Don’t know!”. I got tired of this kind of empty papers. I wanted to respect my career, to be able to focus on the smart aspects of the trade, to play strong women. So I settled in New York and worked for three years with a professor of method acting. I became selective about the jobs I accepted: the problem was that there were no strong women on television and in the cinema it was no longer the time of Katharine Hepburn. And when I had eight dollars in my account, was depressed, and had just broken up with my boyfriend at the time, the miracle happened: I got the call to Doctor in Alaska. I almost didn’t show up for the casting call because I was so depressed, but I gathered my strength and went and here we are.
Doctor in Alaska was a series designed for the summer and with a very short first season: it was difficult to think that it would be a success. How were the beginnings?
She was just delighted to have a job and to have a role that was everything she wanted: she could play a woman who flies her own plane, who kills a reindeer, who fixes everything. The scripts were always fascinating, interesting, intelligent and challenging. I loved every minute of playing Maggie. The team members also got along very well. Being isolated, we created our own Cicely near Seattle. It was fabulous. And, since it was a series designed for the summer, we were able to experiment. I remember Joshua and John at the first script reading saying they wanted a moose walking around town for the lead. No one saw it clearly. But, since it was a summer series, they could make it as quirky and clever as they wanted.
Not enough is said about how Maggie and Joel, the character played by Rob Morrow, had a romantic tension so inherited from classic cinema and screwball comedy.
They wanted those dialogues, that sense of humor. The text was enriching. I remember that the producers called me and advised me not to force the chemistry, not to work on it, because we already had it. “So forget about it and focus on the rest,” they told me. And it was fun. Rob and I had a competitive spirit that nurtured the characters, but most of all we had a lot of respect for each other and we understood each other because we both took our jobs seriously.
He left the series in the sixth season, shortly before its cancellation. Have you ever wondered what would have happened if Morrow had continued?
It was a very difficult time for me. I didn’t even know Rob was leaving the show and I found out quite by accident. It was hard: it was like a divorce. You can’t help but think what would have happened if he had stayed or if his departure had been different. But the thing is, it was a nifty series too after he left. Cicely was a place where the public wanted to be, to escape to, because it was a community that accepted difference. It was a profound work, it had a tender message and people felt good there.
The series are getting shorter and shorter. The idea of ??those series that accompanied you over time and that made you feel better seems to be disappearing. Do you think there have been successors?
There hasn’t been any series quite like Doctor in Alaska! Maybe I’m not biased but possibly the sentence is correct (laughs). In society everything goes too fast and the same thing happens on television: nowadays the scenes are fast, the story is not allowed to breathe, the viewer is part of the experience. I miss those days when the camera angles could stop on people and you could see the intricacies, what was happening, the emotions…
And how was life after Doctor in Alaska?
I spent five years working 18 hours a day for 10 months. In addition, I tried to put film shoots in the break between seasons like when I did Maximum risk. After so much intensity, it was good to take a break. I made movies of the week, of course, but I bought a ranch in Texas, my daughter was born in 1997 and she became the center of my life. Now that he’s older, I’ve written a play for Broadway and I’m at full throttle with my career.
I always wondered why she left Doctoras de Filadelfia…
The main reason was that we were shooting in an abandoned hospital and my daughter was with me on the set. She was two years old. I could have left her at home but she was a single mom and I wanted to take care of her myself. She worked from six in the morning to six in the evening and one day I realized that I didn’t want my daughter to grow up in that dirty old hospital.
Doctor in Alaska, by the way, was never shot in Alaska. Have you ever been there?
I never visited Alaska while we were making the series. When I finally went, it was October and I thought it was horrible that no moose crossed the road. I felt like I was at the end of the world. The world has become very closed: between 24-hour news cycles and social media, we live in a kind of claustrophobia. And when you get there, you have fresh air, open spaces and the feeling of being in the last frontier. It’s a wonderful feeling.
