Actress Kathleen Turner describes Donald Trump’s ‘gross’ secret handshake for women

The veteran actress Kathleen Turner has revealed details about Donald Trump’s “gross” handshake technique in an interview in which she also criticised the sexism in Hollywood that made her a “sexual target” at the beginning of her career.

Speaking to New York magazine, Turner described how Trump greeted her. “He goes to shake your hand and, with his index finger, kind of rubs the inside of your wrist,” she said. “He’s trying to do some kind of seductive intimacy move. You pull your hand away and go yuck.”

She also disclosed how she became the subject of prurient interest from some of Hollywood’s best-known actors in the early 1980s, after her career-making performance in the 1981 erotic neo-noir Body Heat.

“After that, I was a sexual target. I understood later, from Michael Douglas, that there was a competition between him and Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty about who would get me first. None of them did, by the by … There was an unspoken assumption that women were property to be claimed.”

Describing herself as “f***ing angry”, Turner also condemned difficult and disruptive behaviour by male actors, which she claimed they got away with because of sexist double standards in the industry.

She said Burt Reynolds was “terrible” on the set of the 1988 comedy Switching Channels: “He said something about not taking second place to a woman. His behaviour was shocking. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t someone’s equal. I left the room sobbing.”

Nicolas Cage was “very difficult” to work with on the Francis Ford Coppola film Peggy Sue Got Married, Turner said, adding that an unnamed male actor bit her during a stage production.