Janine Turner plays women who have already made up their minds, and she is at her best when a script gives her someone to argue with. In Cicely that was most weeks; on a mountain beside Sylvester Stallone it was rarer.
Fi1m perspective
Maggie O'Connell flies a small plane for a living and does not see why anyone should find that remarkable. When Rob Morrow's Joel Fleischman complains about the town, the weather or her, she tells him exactly what she thinks of him and gets on with her day. That is the Janine Turner performance in one habit: a woman who was not waiting to be asked, played straight, without any wink to the audience about how modern this is meant to be. Across six seasons of Northern Exposure (1990-95) it gave Morrow's exasperated doctor someone worth disagreeing with, and the disagreements were the best thing in the programme.
She had to go looking for the part. She was modelling in New York in her mid-teens and acting from 1980, with guest work on Dallas and a stint on General Hospital, and grew tired of being cast as the girl in peril. Around 1986 she went back to New York to train at the Actors Studio. "She's smarter and stronger than all the men she meets," she said of Maggie, and you can hear in that the relief of an actor who had spent a decade playing the opposite.
The films came in the series' hiatuses and around its edges. There was a small supporting part in Steel Magnolias (1989) before Cicely, and Cliffhanger (1993) during it, with Turner as Jessie Deighan opposite Stallone in Renny Harlin's mountain thriller. We said at the time that she and Michael Rooker bring a useful directness to parts that could disappear against the scenery, and that is the pattern of her feature work: she keeps herself visible in films built around a male star and a set piece, without ever being handed anything as good as a Maggie argument to play. Later she turned up for Robert Altman in Dr. T & the Women (2000), in Friday Night Lights (2008-09) as Katie McCoy, and opposite Anthony Hopkins in Solace (2015), none of which we have reviewed and none of which changed the general view of her as a television actress who visits the cinema.
We do not think that view is unfair, but it undersells what the television work is. Going back to Cicely, we were surprised by how much of the pleasure is hers: watching Maggie lose an argument to Joel and refuse, flatly, to concede it, we laughed out loud, and it was the refusal that did it, not the line. Her limits show when the writers will not let a feeling finish. The romantic back-and-forth of the later seasons asks her to be uncertain for months at a time, and uncertainty is not what she is for.
If you want to see what she does, start in Cicely and stay a while. The mountain can wait.
Biography
Janine Turner (born Janine Loraine Gauntt) is an American actress. She played Maggie O'Connell in the television series Northern Exposure (1990–1995), receiving a Primetime Emmy nomination and three consecutive Golden Globe nominations. She appeared as Jessie Deighan in the film Cliffhanger (1993).
Turner has also had roles in the series Strong Medicine (2000–2002) and Friday Night Lights (2006), and in films including Steel Magnolias (1989), Monkey Shines (1988) and Dr. T & the Women (2000). In 2008 she published the book Holding Her Head High.
