Tina Turner acted rarely and never quietly. She had one part built for her, Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and she played it the way she sang, from the front and at full voice.
Fi1m perspective
Aunty Entity stands on a balcony above a town made of scrap and rope, asks her people who runs Bartertown, and they roar the answer back at her. It is the best moment of swagger in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and it is barely acting at all. It is a singer working a crowd, and Turner knows to the half-second how long to hold the silence before the answer comes. That is what she brought to films: a lifetime of being looked at, and the habit of behaving as though it were the natural order of things.
The screen career is short and makes no pretence otherwise. She had been a star for the best part of two decades before Ken Russell put her in Tommy (1975) as the Acid Queen, a drug-addicted sex worker in a rock opera, and the part is a musical number rather than a role: the sort of thing she did every night on tour, with a camera pointed at it. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) gave her a guest appearance. Then came the solo career, and in the middle of it George Miller and George Ogilvie handed her the one part that was written with her in mind. After that there is a brief turn as the Mayor in Last Action Hero (1993), and that is more or less the lot. She had no acting training; she came in from music, and the parts she was offered stayed close to it.
She is not a subtle actor and Aunty Entity does not need one. She purrs, then she barks, and she carries herself through Bartertown like someone who has spent the best part of thirty years walking on to stages, which is the right way to run a town and one a great many trained actors never find. She said at the time that she wanted physical parts: "I want physical parts. I want to drive the machines, to do the fighting. I want to be physical." Miller gave her the town instead, and the walk turned out to be enough. We enjoyed her more than the film around her: once the story wandered off into the desert we sat waiting for a cut back to the balcony, and it was a long time coming.
Maurice Jarre had a full orchestra and a choir for that film and could not do across the whole of it what she does in one song over the closing credits. That is the measure of her. Most singers who go into films leave a shelf of parts they should not have taken. Turner left two that nobody else could have played, and a cameo, and Bartertown is still hers.
Biography
Tina Turner (1939–2023) was an American singer and actress. Her film appearances included the role of The Acid Queen in Tommy (1975) and a cameo in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978).
She played Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), opposite Mel Gibson, and The Mayor in Last Action Hero (1993). For the former performance she received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Motion Picture. She contributed songs to the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome soundtrack.
