Evening Standard (UK), May 29, 2003

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The Bride of Tarantino

By Jan Janssen
Source: Evening Standard

When Uma Thurman walks up to greet me, she does so proudly, her sixfoot frame towering over the numerous publicists scurrying around her. Add to that a mane of blonde hair tumbling down her shoulders, and it’s easy to see why her luminous beauty is often compared to that of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

But she’s quick to brush off the compliment. “I still don’t feel completely at ease having lots of attention focused on myself,” she confides in her East Coast accent. “Although,” she laughs, “I am aware that’s something of a contradiction for me as an actor, whose profession invites people to focus on your appearance.”

Like it or not, she is now being dragged into the spotlight again with the forthcoming release of her latest film – Quentin Tarantino’s martial arts movie, Kill Bill.

Following the lukewarm reception of his last film, Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s reputation hangs on his latest project, which has taken a staggering nine years from conception to near-completion at a cost of more than $50 million.

The whole world wants to know what became of Tarantino, once the brightest star in the firmament but strangely muted since then. Anticipation was high at the Cannes film festival that there would, at the very least, be footage from the film and even an appearance by the director and his leading lady, Uma.

When they failed to show up, everyone began to ask the same question: was all well with Kill Bill? Miramax supremo Harvey Weinstein – who recently gave Tarantino a further $11 million to complete the film after seeing the rushes – insists there are no glitches, that the perfectionist director is still putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece and it is hoped the film will be ready for the Venice film festival later this summer.

Uma, thankfully, is not as reticent as she once was and is more accessible than Tarantino, which is how I managed to corner her well in advance of the media frenzy that will inevitably surround her role in Kill Bill. She plays The Bride, a Japanese-speaking assassin hell- bent on revenge after being left for dead at her wedding ceremony.

It’s a role one can’t imagine the likes of Dietrich or Garbo ever contemplating. “On a physical level, it was the toughest film experience I’ve ever had,” the 33-year-old says.

Not only did Uma have to spend five months in Beijing filming on a sound stage that Chairman Mao originally built, but she also embarked on a gruelling fitness programme to play her character, losing 50lb from her post-pregnancy frame in the process.

She has invested body and soul in the project, but then she and Tarantino have been firm friends ever since the director cast Uma as the gangster’s moll Mia Wallace in 1994′s Pulp Fiction.

“Quentin has always seen something in me that other directors haven’t necessarily appreciated,” Thurman explains. “Pulp Fiction was one of the best films I’ve ever done and now he’s given me this incredible role in Kill Bill.

“I’m not the kind of actress who’s easy to classify and I’ve wasted a lot of time not finding the right projects. So when you have a chance like Kill Bill, you work harder than ever because you know it might not come again.”

Thurman freely admits she’s now in the best shape of her life.

It’s a surprising confession from someone who was once so insecure with her appearance she referred to herself as a “hammerhead shark”.

But, as we chat, it is evident the self-consciousness which has paralysed her for years is finally on the wane. Happily married to actor-turned-author Ethan Hawke and devoted to their two children, Maya Ray, aged four, and one-year-old Levon, the Uma I meet today speaks with the confidence of a screen siren.

“These days, if a magazine describes me as a sexy woman, I can take it as a flattering compliment and it does not freak me out,” she tells me.

“I feel in tune with the world and I’m pretty oblivious of any image the media might choose to play up these days.”

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Uma Karuna Thurman (her name means “bestower of blessing” in Hindu) had an intellectual, if unconventional upbringing. Her father, a professor of religion, is a close friend of the Dalai Lama and was the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Her mother was a model.

Uma and her three brothers inherited their parents’ good looks, but the young Thurman grew up to resent her blue eyes, generous mouth and endless legs, her unhappiness stemming from the fact that she looked “very different from everyone else at school” because she was so tall.

“I spent a lot of my adolescence in a pretty confused state of mind. My physical appearance made me feel odd and awkward. So there were always these walls I put up and after a while you forget these walls are still there preventing you from being as open or as secure in your own self as you might want to be.”

Richard Gere, a family friend, recognised the teenager’s vulnerability and advised her against a career in the cutthroat world of showbusiness, but Uma ignored him.

Rather than enjoying the limelight, however, her distorted self- image began to spiral out of control.

“When all the sex-symbol hype started I didn’t know how to accept it,” she says. “I was shy about my body and the last thing someone who feels awkward needs is to have people writing about them as a sexual object.”

Misunderstood, Thurman backed away from her movie career. Instead, she hung out with fast-living actor Gary Oldman, whom she married in 1990, despite him being 12 years her senior, but the marriage ended after 18 months.

It was on the set of the film Gattaca in 1997 that Thurman met her current husband, Ethan. It’s clear she credits him with helping her get over the anxieties that plagued her in her early twenties.

“Before I met Ethan, I had learned to be more at ease with my own identity,” she says.

“But since we’ve been together, that process has continued and it’s wonderful to be with someone who is so understanding.

“I feel we have taken things to another state of being where we can explore life together more freely. Things are more relaxed between us now than they were when we started living together, even with two children to look after.”

The couple are determined not to play the Hollywood game, preferring to live in Manhattan where they lead a laidback, bohemian existence. “We love being at home with the kids and we try not to work at the same time because that would make things tough on our children.” Having children has proved a cathartic experience for Uma in more ways than one. It’s partly down to them, she says, that she is more disciplined in her attitude to work.

“For a long time I didn’t really take my work that seriously. Motherhood has actually made me far more determined to find good projects than I ever was before,” she says. “Now I’m more ambitious than ever because one day I want to be able to show my kids that I’ve made some interesting films.”