Ann Turkel is an American actress and former model, known for her collaborations with, and marriage to, actor Richard Harris.
Born into a Jewish middle-class family and raised in Manhattan, Turkel had, by age 16, studied with both Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse and Philip Burton at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.[1][a]
In the late 1960s, she was photographed for American Vogue. Patrick Lichfield captured images of her on location in the United Kingdom, the Bahamas, and Italy during the early 1970s, and included them in his 1981 book The Most Beautiful Women.[4]
After a brief appearance in the film Paper Lion (1968), her first major role was in the 1974 film, 99 and 44/100% Dead starring her future husband Richard Harris, and they acted together in The Cassandra Crossing (1976), Golden Rendezvous (1977) and Ravagers (1979).
She portrayed comic strip heroine Modesty Blaise in a 1982 TV pilot.
Her other movie roles included Portrait of a Hitman (1979), with Jack Palance, and Humanoids from the Deep (1980), Deep Space (1988) and The Fear (1995). She also played the role of modeling agent and immortal Kristen in "Chivalry", a season four episode of Highlander: The Series.
Turkel and Harris married in 1974 in Beverly Hills.[5] They were divorced in 1982. Despite their divorce, she and Harris remained good friends.[6][7]
Philip Burton helped to found the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, and served as its president and director.
In later years, Mr. Meisner acted occasionally and also won plaudits for directing a 1955 revival of William Saroyan's Time of Your Life, but he concentrated on teaching, as the director of the Neighborhood Playhouse school from 1936 until 1959 and from 1964 through the 1980's.
And though the marriage was a failure, the divorce is proving a big success for Richard Harris and Ann Turkel. She's joined him in London for the West End bow of his "Camelot" and proving that two can live as cheaply as one in the same Savoy Hotel suite.
He now cast off from his life those elements that were hard to handle. Marriage went first: He divorced his second wife, actress Ann Turkel, in 1981. They remain friendly, but their marriage had been no more successful than his first.