The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
by Nathaniel R
We thought that a nice subversive way to end our 1981 retrospective party would be to focus on the year's most memorable beginning.
A lot of very famous actors began their big screen careers in 1981 including (but not limited to) Ben Affleck, Kim Basinger, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, Jeff Daniels, Holly Hunter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bill Nighy, Alfred Molina, Kenneth Branagh, Demi Moore, Sean Penn, and Meg Ryan. Some of those debuts were quite promising. Others gave no clear sign of a superstar to come, just the site of an unknown actor with the ink not yet dry on their SAG card. But the year's most exciting debut, hands down, belonged to Kathleen Turner. She was the only one of them to emerge fully formed right out of the gate; a movie star merely waiting at the bar for her filmography to arrive. Risking the ghosts of both Lana Turner (figuratively) and Barbara Stanwyck (literally) for your debut and coming out the other side without remotely suffering from the comparisons is an all time flex...
Return to Article