Martha, the miserable faculty wife of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, should be the last person you’d ask for life advice. But here it comes from Kathleen Turner, who’s spent the past year as Martha, on Broadway and now in London. Turner has just sold Take the Lead, Lady, a memoir structured around her life-lessons learned. (Agent Karen Gantz Zahler says the deal was in the “six figures.”) On the phone from the West End, Turner offered details: “I’ve overcome so much. Rheumatoid arthritis almost stopped me a while back.” How did she deal with the pain? “Exercise and some surgery. And we finally have wonderful medications. A few years ago the pain got so bad that I drank too much to kill it. I didn’t realize I was drinking too much until I got far into it.” She adds that her own story, even at its booziest, is hardly Martha’s. “Poor woman—in 1962, a woman of such intelligence, energy, and ambition didn’t have a way of fulfilling herself. Thank God I’ve had a much more fruitful life.”

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