New York Daily News – April 2001

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Uma Thurman’s ‘Charmed Life’

By Lewis Beale

Uma Thurman had been running errands all day, and as she breezed into the historic Beekman Arms Hotel in Rhinebeck, N.Y., slightly late for her next appointment, the willowy actress looked like anything but a movie star.

The 6-foot-tall Thurman was dressed Catskills casual in jeans, a midriff-baring top and ankle-length coat. Her shoulder-length blond hair was a bit unkempt, and her fine-boned face was flushed from all the racing around she’d been doing. She was dragging around one of those colorful cloth handbags, and it looked as if it held half the contents of her house.

But unlike the studied, downscale look affected by so many Hollywood types, Thurman’s informal style is the real deal. It defines her as just another 31-year-old mother. (Thurman and her actor husband, Ethan Hawke, who live in nearby Woodstock, have a 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Maya.)

asual is as casual does. Seeing Thurman in her real-life role as a budding soccer mom puts into context her portrayal of “The Golden Bowl’s” Charlotte Stant, a character she describes as “fabulously destructive.”

In the movie, which is based on the Henry James novel and takes place in Italy and England in the early years of the 20th century, Stant weds a wealthy older man, American tycoon Adam Verver (Nick Nolte), primarily so she can be closer to her lover (Jeremy Northam) who happens to be Verver’s son-in-law.

“She’s both extremely narcissistic, yet strong and slightly unstable,” said Thurman of Stant. “It’s a very hard part. It took a while to figure out if I had an angle on it. She’s sort of an anti-hero in a dramatic sense.”

Stant is that, and more. She is a borderline hysteric who pursues her romance with sexual abandon, behaving badly to get what she wants. A liberated woman in a society with little tolerance for such creatures, she is victimized by Victorian mores, yet she holds some rather contemporary attitudes.

“She’s a very progressive character,” said Thurman, who picked at her plate of fried calamari, laughed easily and smoked Marlboro Lights during our late-afternoon interview. “She has no shame sexually. She has no negative judgment over her actions, not in the sense of the sexual shame you see in female characters. And that’s what makes her kind of modern.”

Thurman admitted she didn’t want to make the film at first, because she saw the Stant character as “pathetically tragic.” But director James Ivory convinced her that even though Stant is eventually forced to abandon her lover and move to America with her husband, “The Golden Bowl” does have a happy ending.

“I was so confused [after hearing that], I felt I didn’t know how to play the part,” said Thurman. “But I came around to the feeling that this was one of the strongest challenges I’d had as an actress. It wasn’t until I was actually in the middle of one of the end scenes with Nick Nolte – when he comes to comfort [Stant] – that it occurred to me that it would get better for her.”

This is also how Thurman views her acting career, on the upswing after the debacle of 1998′s “The Avengers.” The making of that movie, which she describes as “debilitating,” was one of the few setbacks in what has generally been a charmed life.

Her family bloodline hasn’t hurt. Thurman’s maternal grandparents were a German baron (jailed by the Nazis for refusing to betray his Jewish business partners) and a Swedish beauty who was the model for a nude statue that still stands in the port city of Trelleborg. Her mother, Nena, is a former Eileen Ford model turned psychotherapist who was once married to LSD guru Timothy Leary. Uma’s father, Bob, who teaches Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia, is an ordained Buddhist monk and friend of the Dalai Lama, who co-founded Tibet House with his buddy Richard Gere.

Given all this overachieving, it’s no surprise that Uma (the name means “the middle way” in Tibetan) became a success herself. But she also couldn’t wait to get out of the house.

“I was an escapee of childhood. I always wanted to grow up,” said the actress, who dropped out of high school and moved to New York at age 16. “I had an education of my own [in New York], which was quite unique. There are not that many people that had that type of later-childhood development like I did. I wish I hadn’t been so eager to get old, to go. I can’t quite understand it now, because now that I have a child, all I want her to do is enjoy her youth to the fullest.”

Although Thurman worked briefly as a model, she always wanted to be an actress. She grew up admiring Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton, and as a gawky teen who felt uncomfortable with her looks, retreated inside her high-school drama club, where theater “gave me a sensation of strength in the world that I didn’t have access to in any other venue.”

But it gave her more than that. Thurman’s life was so steeped in Buddhism and academia, she was looking for a way out – a way to express herself that didn’t ape her elders.

“My work was always a counterpoint to academia,” she said. “My search through emotionalism was a counterreaction to academic/intellectual/philosophical journeys through the world. It was a dive into something else. It was always a thing that could be mine, rather than the thing that could be far better said by my father.”

She was a success almost immediately. Thurman was 17 1/2 when she made her eye-popping, Venus-like appearance in “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” 18 when she played the virginal Cecile in “Dangerous Liaisons” and 24 when she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress as gangster’s wife Mia Wallace in “Pulp Fiction.”

Since then, she seems to have been treading water with her career. After a ditsy comic performance as a clueless model in 1996′s “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” Thurman played the villainous Poison Ivy in the critically trashed “Batman and Robin,” then segued to a thankless part as a frosty love interest in the sci-fi film “Gattaca.”

But it was on “Gattaca” that Thurman began her romance with future husband Hawke (she was briefly married to actor Gary Oldman). She was attracted to Hawke, she said, because “he’s infinitely resourceful. He can do anything. He has a will and a positive energy in him that is fearless. He doesn’t approach anything with aggravation and negativity.”

Meanwhile, “The Avengers” almost stopped Thurman’s career in its tracks. She dropped out of the business for a while, had her baby, and licked her wounds. The experience wasn’t all negative. Thurman feels the project was doomed from the beginning, and doesn’t think she could have done anything to fix it. But she also saw the disaster as “an incentive to get back to my roots as an actress, to get back to drama, working with a certain type of director. A more actor-centered director and more emotionally story-based material.”

Hence “The Golden Bowl.” And “Kill Bill,” a film about a prostitute who gets revenge on her pimp that she may do for Quentin Tarantino — if he ever finishes the screenplay. “He’s been two weeks away from being done for nine months now,” said Thurman, laughing.

There’s also “Hysterical Blindness,” a film she begins shooting next month in New Jersey for HBO, co-starring with Gena Rowlands and Juliette Lewis. Thurman describes the project, which she developed herself, as “a dramatic comedy about a mother, daughter and a couple of Jersey girls who want their lives to change, and they basically hit bars and look for guys.”

That subject matter seems a long way from Thurman’s life today, which revolves around work and family. As with any mother, having a child has turned Thurman’s life around. She’s torn between career and motherhood, and has learned how tireless she needs to be to be good at both. But she’s also learned something about the power of love.

“Before I had my child, I thought I knew the boundaries of myself, that I understood the limits of my heart,” she said. “It’s extraordinary to have all those limits thrown out, to realize your love is inexhaustible. It’s very profound, the vulnerability of loving a child.”

No longer the sexy but naive teenager who spent hours walking the streets of New York trying to learn survival skills, Thurman wears her maturity well. She has become more sure of herself and feels the best is yet to come.

“It’s the nature of humanity that sometimes dissatisfaction is what keeps us going forward,” she said. “I feel more excited about the work I’m going to do in the next five years, the range I feel within myself. The right things are uncomplicated. I feel very at peace with my relationship to work. I know that I love it.”

Thurman paused, picked at some squid and chuckled to herself. “Someone once said to me, ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood,’” she said. “I’ve just gotten happier my whole life. I’m almost quite happy now.”