[2] At the age of 11, Turner won a talent competition at a cinema in Peckham, South London, doing impressions of Shirley Temple and Jessie Matthews.
[3] She won a scholarship to the Sacred Heart convent in Victoria, London, but told her teachers of her intention to pursue a theatrical career, and left school.
[2][7] She also topped bills in New York City and the Las Vegas Valley,[4] and was romantically linked to Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, and Terry-Thomas.
[2] In its obituary, The Guardian claimed "she could sing a pop or operatic song with her four-and-a-half-octave soprano voice, do an almost eerily convincing impersonation of Bette Davis, and then switch to a stand-up comic routine.
[2] However, when the show subsequently opened in London,[3] she was sacked after two weeks for throwing empty wine bottles out of her dressing room window.
[3] In March 2001, the Sunday Mirror newspaper reported that she was living "among the winos, drug addicts and down-and-outs in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles... dressed in charity shop clothes and surrounded by her worldly possessions – with barely a penny to her name.
[4] On 16 December 2010, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme entitled Joan Turner: The Highs and Lows of the Wacky Warbler in which Lesley Garrett told the story of the operatic comedian, containing interviews with her friends, stage associates and family as well as excerpts from her musical and comedy routines.
[22] In June 1963 she married 37-year-old Leslie Edward Cocks, at St Marylebone register office,[23] who she lived with at Sanderstead in the Surrey hills.
[25] Her daughter Anne Page lived at the Manor House in Waddington in 1970,[26][27] attending the sixth form of Christ's Hospital Girls' High School, gaining English A-level in 1971.