Of all celebrity feuds, none have been odder than the one between Kathleen Turner and Nicholas Cage about whether or not he stole someone's chihuahua once.
It was a serious feud, too – after Kathleen Turner accused Nicolas Cage of stealing chihuahuas and drunk driving in her autobiography, Cage took her to the High Court for it.
But now it's all come juddering to an end, with Kathleen Turner making a public apology for the claims. Thanks heavens – now we can all stop thinking of Nicolas Cage as the man who stole a chihuahua and go back to thinking of him as the man who runs up hills dressed as a bear and punches girls square in the face. It's his comfort zone, if you will.
Nicolas Cage is a man not without his fair share of weird experiences – he's confronted naked intruders in his house, named his son after Superman and starred in films noteworthy only for the bits where he shouts "How'd it get burned? How'd it get burned? HOW'D IT GET BURNED? HOW'D IT GET BURNED?" – but if there's one thing he doesn't do, it's steal chihuahuas.
But tell that to Kathleen Turner. Now that Kathleen Turner has slowly started turning into a deep-voiced bulldog, she's found it harder and harder to get acting work. So, to keep herself busy, she recently wrote her autobiography Send Yourself Roses. Trouble is, Kathleen's memory doesn't seem to be what it was, and her memories of a youthful Nicolas Cage seem to be way off.
Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage worked together on Peggy Sue Got Married and – far from presenting an accurate depiction of the wide-eyed young actor who wanted nothing more than to one day make a movie that ended with him shouting "Wha! Wha! Not the bees! Not the bees! Arrrgh! My eyes! My eyes! Arrrgh! Arrrghurbhb!" – Turner's autobiography suggested that Nicolas Cage preferred to go around stealing dogs and driving drunk.
Outraged at these lies, Nicolas Cage sued Kathleen Turner for defamation and libel in February. It could have all got very messy, but now Kathleen Turner has relented and apologised, as the New York Times reports:
"Ms. Turner, 53, 'sincerely apologized' to Mr. Cage, 44, in a statement read by her lawyer on Friday in a London courtroom. Ms. Turner’s assertion, which led Mr. Cage to sue for libel, was made in Ms. Turner’s book Send Yourself Roses and was published in a London newspaper in February. Ms. Turner agreed to reimburse Mr. Cage for court costs and to make a donation to a charity benefiting victims of elder abuse. Ms. Turner’s British publisher will place an apology or correction in the book , and Associated Newspapers agreed to remove the article from its website and to publish an apology."
Although momentarily embarrassing for Kathleen Turner, this apology can only be a win-win for everyone in the long-term. Nicolas Cage gets his reputation back, sure, but this brouhaha has probably caused thousands more people to buy her autobiography, just to see what other batshit lies she makes up about famous people she knows.
However, one sad result of this lawsuit is that Kathleen Turner will no longer be making an audiobook of Send Yourself Roses. Not because of libel or anything, but because people have just worked out that her voice is now so deep that people involuntarily shit themselves whenever she speaks.
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