Jennifer Jason Leigh Parents: Meet Vic Morrow, Barbara Turner

American actress Jennifer Jason Leigh is the daughter of  Vic Morrow and Barbara Turner.  Vic Morrow, her father, was an actor, and Barbara Turner, her mother, was a screenwriter.

Her parents divorced when she was two years old. Leigh’s parents were both Jewish; her father’s family was Russian, and her mother’s family was Austrian.

Victor Morrow appeared in films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955), King Creole (1958), God’s Little Acre (1958), Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), and The Bad News Bears (1976).

Jennifer Jason Leigh’s mother Barbara Turner co-wrote an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Cujo in 1983. Turner wrote an unproduced screenplay about Dorothy Parker’s friends Gerald and Sara Murphy.

Jennifer Jason Leigh was cast in the 1994 film Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle as a result of this work. Barbara Turner, 79, died on April 5, 2016, in Los Angeles of unspecified causes.

Her father Vic Morrow died in a helicopter accident in 1982 while filming The Twilight Zone. She described her father in an interview with The Guardian, noting he was a “very difficult” person.

She continued, “We were not close. It’s hard. I don’t really talk about my father publicly, because there are a lot of people that really love him very, very much his work as an actor. I don’t want to disabuse them of their admiration.”