The 1975 role that Tina Turner initially rejected: “She’s more than a hooker”
At her very core, Tina Turner was a woman of principle and would not be turned by anyone or anything.
If anything, that tenacity could only have been learned through a lifetime of fighting to make it to the top. Let’s not forget, by the time that Turner had her biggest breakthrough hit with ‘Let’s Stay Together’ in 1983, followed by Private Dancer the next year, she was already in her mid-40s. By that point, her fame was well-earned, and she wanted to relish in it, not embarrass herself.
In this sense, being approached and asked if she wanted to play a prostitute turned drug dealer in a film was not the type of exchange she was seeking in order to trade her way to the top. But in some respects, if The Who come calling, no matter what the request is, you kind of have to listen. On that front, Turner had no good excuses to give.
And so, regardless of whether she really wanted to or not, Turner found herself playing The Acid Queen in Tommy: The Movie, the 1975 filmic imagining of the British rock band’s classic 1969 rock opera magnum opus. To be fair, it was a good knee up, or premonition, of the world she wanted to be surrounded by, with cast members including the band, Elton John, and Jack Nicholson.
But even still, this couldn’t soften the blow of playing a pretty murky character when she first heard about it. Turner explained: “They said, ‘There’s a part of a hooker,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I’m not taking that!’ and they said, ‘Well, she’s more than a hooker,’” as if that vivid description alone was meant to sway her to take on the rather undesirable status.
When the creatives explained that the character was “actually a mad woman”, though, Turner knew “that was it”.
She added: “Then the name came – Acid Woman. Perfect! A mad woman named Acid Woman sounded absolutely right.” So, the stage was set and the cameras were rolling, only for two giant hypodermic needles to appear as props while she was performing her song.
Then they were back to square one, with Turner somehow not realising until that very moment that the Acid Queen was fairly literal in terms of her love for drugs. It was a movie based on the work of a British band famed at the height of psychedelia: frankly, what else was she expecting? It may have been a little naive, to say the least.
The good thing was that despite her knee-jerk protestations, Turner still managed to get convinced to continue in the role, and finished the film with one of her first superstar credits. If it was a sign of things to come, she’d have probably much rathered remembering it in her illustrious company, as opposed to drug dealing.
It does beg the question of exactly what would have happened if Turner had refused to take on the role. She would have remained a sixties starlet cast under the shadow of Ike Turner, certainly, but would she have become the rock god of her future years? It’s hard to say. Maybe a hypodermic needle was the thing to thank for being the catalyst.
