Kathleen Turner talks Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins, the late and legendary Texas political columnist, is being brought back to life by Kathleen Turner in Philadelphia Theatre Company's Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins - a world premiere that also manages to be a revival.

Ivins' Texas accent and brassy humor added style to her indictments of government shenanigans and malfeasance. No fan of "43," she wrote in Bushwhacked (2003) about how ordinary citizens' lives can be affected - negatively - by government decisions. Having already described in inflammatory terms George W. Bush's tenure as Texas governor in her 2000 book, Shrub, she wrote, "Public policy stamped MADE IN TEXAS is like Hungarian wine - it does not travel well. . . . The worst public policy created in Texas has gone national."

For years, her scathing commentaries caused readers to gasp and ask the question that would become the title of her first book (on the best-seller list for 29 weeks in 1991): Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?

Well, she's saying it again, using the unmistakable voice of film and stage actress Turner - husky, seductive, with its odd accent and inflection, and familiar to us from her steamy early movie hits, among them her stunning debut in Body Heat (1981) and voice work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), to her Tony-nominated performance in the 2005 revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The solo show is a biography, written by Margaret and Allison Engel - journalists, twin sisters, and Ivins fans - based on Ivins' own words. It provides glimpses of her relationships with her parents and her hard-drinking, hard-driving career as she moved from one newspaper to another - "The [N.Y.] Times hired me because they wanted to spice up their good gray image with some pungent prose and snappy patter, so I did what I do. And they did what they do: They fired my ass."

The story ends with her long, grueling fight for life against breast cancer, a fight she lost in 2007.

Kathleen Turner made her own career out of hotness, starting 30 years ago. And at 56, she's still hot, in a cougarish sort of way, as anybody can tell you who's seen even five seconds of the cable shocker series Californication, in which she plays the oversexed Sue Collini. Turner says it makes even her blush.

She turns up for a recent interview in jeans and a black sweater, her long blond hair swept back by barrettes. She's not as tall as you might expect, and far less imperious. This articulate, unpretentious, dressed-for-comfort woman is not the embodiment of her stage/screen presence - but the lush voice is unmistakable.

Long active in liberal and feminist causes, Turner actually knew Ivins through their involvement in People for the American Way, and she shares the writer's belief that "all your life, no matter what else you do, you have another job. You are a citizen." She laments the loss of civics in schools and the fact that so many people seem barely aware of their constitutional rights.

Turner's diplomat father was U.S. consul in London during her teenage years, the period when she discovered her love of acting. But her plans to study it in London were interrupted by her father's death when she was 17, and she returned to Missouri with her mother and attended a state university there. "I learned a lot," she says, "as one does when one's unhappy."

Like Ivins, Turner "loves making people laugh." But she insists she's "not channeling Molly, not mimicking - that's not acting, not interpreting." Still, she was happy to demonstrate briefly the broad Texas accent she's using in the show.

The Red Hot Patriot set features scene-changing projections on the upstage wall. And sometimes, with a technique she learned while touring in the solo show Tallulah, Turner will use audience members as if they were characters - talking to them, chiding them. But since it's all Ivins' writing, she notes, "it would be improper to improvise."

Turner acknowledges "the pain of playing her through three bad bouts of cancer" but notes the personal connection: "Some of it strikes me very, very hard, because I have rheumatoid arthritis . . . and in November I had my ninth operation in 12 years." She quotes Ivins as saying, "Cancer can kill you, but I'm sorry to say it doesn't make you a better person," adding drily, "All of which I find quite true."

Turner's 2008 memoir, Send Yourself Roses, touches on her personal life - her marriage, recently and amicably ended, her daughter, Rachel, now 22 - and explores her career's enormous range as well as her descent into alcoholism, largely a result of the constant pain of arthritis.

She tells me that the book's title refers to backstage flowers: "When you open a show, your dressing room looks like a funeral home - endless bouquets. Two weeks later, it's barren. So I have a standing order, and every week I give myself a dozen or two roses.

"That's why the title. Women spend a great deal of our lives caring for others - children, partners. I spent a lot of time doing that, and now I'm free."

Not that she doesn't have plenty to do. Once this Philadelphia run ends, she's making a film called The Perfect Family, about a Catholic family facing a boatload of contemporary problems - and with the archbishop coming for dinner. In fact, she laughs, this seems to be her year for Catholicism; after the movie, she'll star in a new Matthew Lombardo play called High (aiming for a New York opening next year) in which she plays a "recovering alcoholic foul-mouthed nun."

Commenting on this busyness - "unusual for a 56-year- old actress" - Turner says, "I always felt that as I got older, theater would be my career, and always I kept my theater [skills] up. A lot of actors in the film business become timid and fearful" about working live, but she feels "stage roles are so much more interesting."

Commenting further on the differences, she says she likes the precision, the detail of film acting: "When you choose to blink, it's a sentence," while onstage "that doesn't mean anything past the fourth row."

But, she continues, noting the expansiveness of live theater, "I love being set free onstage. Working on a film, they're always telling me, 'You're getting too big, Kathleen.' " But in Red Hot Patriot, playing Molly Ivins, "there's almost nothing I could do that would be over the top for her."