Barbara Turner was an American screenwriter, actress, and film producer whose work spanned stage, television, and film across several decades.

Born in New York on July 14, 1936, Turner was educated at the University of Texas at Austin, where she developed the foundations of a career that would eventually carry her across multiple disciplines within the entertainment industry. She worked in English throughout her professional life, and her range extended from performing before live audiences on stage to appearing in front of the camera in both film and television productions.

As an actress, Turner worked across three distinct performance contexts — stage, television, and film — demonstrating a versatility that was sustained over the course of her career. Alongside her work as a performer, she also pursued screenwriting, bringing a writer's perspective to her understanding of dramatic material. That dual engagement with the craft of storytelling, both as someone who constructs narratives and as someone who inhabits them, gave her a distinctive position within the American entertainment landscape. She additionally worked as a film producer, rounding out a professional identity that resisted easy categorization under any single role.

Turner lived and worked as a citizen of the United States throughout her life, and her career placed her in the company of the industries centered in Los Angeles, the city where she died on April 5, 2016. Her trajectory — from New York origins and a Texas education to a sustained presence in American film and television — traced a path familiar to many of her generation, though her simultaneous commitment to performing, writing, and producing set the terms of her engagement with that world on her own conditions.

The recurring preoccupations of Turner's career were those of the storyteller working in multiple registers: the written word as script, the spoken word as performance, and the organizational labor of production that brings both together on screen. Her contributions touched each of the principal modes through which American dramatic entertainment reaches its audience — the stage, the television set, and the cinema — and her work as a screenwriter stands as the thread connecting those varied engagements with the craft of telling stories in the English language.