Trump has a 'gross' handshake, says Kathleen Turner: 'he’s trying to be seductive'

Donald Trump has a "gross" handshake, according to Kathleen Turner. In a colourful new interview, the Golden Globe-winning actress has claimed the US President has a particularly unusual way of shaking hands.

"He goes to shake your hand and with his index finger kind of rubs the inside of your wrist," said Turner, 64. "He’s trying to do some kind of seductive intimacy move. You pull your hand away and go yuck."

Speaking to New York Magazine's culture site Vulture, Turner also spoke about the pain of rheumatoid arthritis, a condition she has lived with since 1992, when she was still in her Thirties.

"I’m too busy coping with disease to think much outside the day-to-day," she said. "It’s can I hold a pen? Can I stand up? Can I climb those stairs?"

In one of several eyebrow-raising claims, the Romancing the Stone star says Dame Eileen Atkins would deliberately sit on her arthritic wrist to cause her pain, after the two actresses fell out during an 1995 Broadway production of Indiscretions – a claim Atkins's representatives have denied.

Turner also criticised Elizabeth Taylor ("a bad voice, badly used... I don’t think she was very skilled"), said she "didn’t feel very welcomed by the cast" of Friends, and admitted she once slapped an unnamed co-star who bit her.

She also alleged that she was left in tears by Burt Reynolds while making the 1988 comedy Switching Channels. "Working with Burt Reynolds was terrible," she says. 

"The first day Burt came in he made me cry. He said something about not taking second place to a woman.

"His behavior was shocking. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t someone’s equal. I left the room sobbing... But as for the performance, I was able to put the negativity aside. I’m not convinced Burt was."

Kathleen Turner: 'Did Weinstein try anything? I’d have killed him'

Turner, who recently toured the UK with her cabaret show Finding My Voice, said she became "a sexual target" after her breakthrough role in 1982's Body Heat – and repeats the claim she made last year, in an interview with the Telegraph, that Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty were in "competition" to see who could seduce her first.

"There was an unspoken assumption that women were property to be claimed," she told Vulture.