Janine Turner Questions Walking Away from Hollywood

Janine Turner is reflecting on the choices she made in her life and career.

Turner, who starred as Maggie O’Connell on the CBS series Northern Exposure from 1990 to 1995, opened up in the Sept. 2 episode of I Choose Me with Jennie Garth about leaving Hollywood and scaling back her career after she welcomed her only child. Turner gave birth to her daughter, Juliette, in 1997 and raised her as a single mother.

“I had checked out of Hollywood twice in my life,” Turner, 62, explained. The first time, she said, was when she was a young actress, engaged to Alec Baldwin.

“I thought, ‘I can’t do any more bikini roles,’ ” she said. “I’m watching Alec get all these fabulous male roles, and I’m being sort of objectified.”

“I found the method acting coach, cut my hair, no fingernail polish, things of that nature, and really studied,” she said. Her agent dropped her. “I checked out of Hollywood at that point and booked Northern Exposure out of New York.”

“And the second time I kind of walked away for my daughter,” she explained. “CBS, they used to call me all the time, beg me to do a series and to move back to Los Angeles. But I’m like, ‘Well, I have my daughter now.’ ” She remembered being offered a role in Chicago on Broadway and meeting with star Ann Reinking. She turned it down because she didn’t know who would “take care” of her daughter.

“I made a lot of sacrifices for my daughter,” she said.

Turner and her daughter ultimately settled in Texas, where Turner was raised. The actress said she “never knew” she wanted to go back to Texas until Northern Exposure got a massive production order of 50 episodes. “I wanted a pickup truck, a horse, a ranch, and I wanted to move back home,” she said. “And I never knew that that was even lurking within me, but once I had sorta hit that pinnacle, it was what I wanted.” But leaving New York and L.A. meant her career would take a major hit.

“I’m thrilled I raised my daughter here in Texas,” she said. Though Turner added that life gives “checkpoints to reevaluate” your choices. Garth, 53, asked if, looking back, she would have made a different choice.

“Maybe. I don’t know,” Turner candidly admitted. “People ask that. ‘What would you do differently?’ When my daughter was born, I said, ‘Well, nothing, because everything led to her.’ ”

But now that she’s “grown,” Turner said, “I look back and go, you know, hmmm. Maybe I should have taken Chicago. Maybe I should have stayed in L.A. . . . And her father wasn’t there. He just walked. And so it became sort of an all-encompassing aspect for me. It was really all about her.”

She called her daughter a “wonderful young woman,” but added, “You sit back now, it’s kind of twiddling your thumbs saying, ‘Did I sacrifice too much maybe?’ ”

“When my daughter was a baby, she was the most important thing in the world to me,” Turner said. Still, she decided to join the show Strong Medicine in 2000. She only lasted “a couple of years,” she said, “because I could see that I wanted to spend those precious times with my daughter.”

“I was running around 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and I thought, ‘I’ll never get these years back,’ ” she said.

Ultimately, she said her daughter was “my joy and my gift” and she “wouldn’t want to change” those formative years. “I love her more than anything in the world.”

Turner has acted sporadically over the years, most notably as Katie McCoy in season three of Friday Night Lights. In 2023, she appeared in the movie Birthright Outlaw.

Turner and her Northern Exposure costar Rob Morrow host a new rewatch podcast of their hit series, titled Northern Disclosure. Turner received one Emmy nomination for her role on the show.