Style.com – 2004

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Uma Cum Laude

By Robert Haskell/edited for Style.com

It was the year of living dangerously, onscreen and off. Still dressed to kill, Uma Thurman talks about love, fashion and dismemberment.

Though she has played a comic-book villain, a genetic superhuman, a Greek goddess, a slick über spy and a killing machine, Uma Thurman has only ever been a reluctant participant in her own mythmaking. Interviews bemuse and exhaust her, and she is prone to sarcasm—of the playful variety—when it comes to the topics long beloved of Uma chroniclers: Quentin Tarantino, saving Tibet, fashion. “Of course I’m terribly invested in fashion,” she says waggishly over lunch on the Upper East Side, offering a prolonged, vaguely wicked giggle that is a signature. “I live and die for it.” Thurman has never been a Hollywood girls’ girl, drawn to the siren song of boutique openings and lunchtime Beverly Hills fashion shows. Though she is a fashion insider’s favorite, she does not spend her vacations eating off gold-trimmed Medusa plates on Lake Como, and she will not offer the obligatory eulogy to dearly departed Tom Ford at Gucci. “I wept tears of rosé champagne when he announced his departure,” she says, feigning a half swoon, “mixed with pride and excitement for him and—oh, yes—absolute, utter fashion devastation.”

Thurman doesn’t cry over spilled silk. Nor, having spent half her life starring in major motion pictures, does she step blindly into public ridicule. She says she was perfectly aware that on the morning after Oscar night, her Christian Lacroix evening gown—a billowing Tyrolean affair, with a blue satin sash that evoked a famous canto from The Sound of Music—would be drop-kicked onto the worst-dressed list of every paper, news show and Internet site in America. (“The victim of an exploding kimono,” one critic wrote. “Like a nun in a cossack factory,” grumbled another.)

“I knew it beforehand,” says Thurman. “The dress didn’t do that thing that people are in the mood for, which is what most people had. You see, we’ve gotten so savvy with stylists that it’s like a kind of warfare of defensive dressing out there. Everyone looked the same—everyone had it down to such a perfect tee in their spaghetti-strapped, sequined or chiffon, body-hugging, gym-hour-promoting things. You get bored. That’s when you have to say, I will be worst-dressed!”

Very few movie stars can afford to be so cavalier before a television audience of 42.5 million. But the fact is that Thurman, 34, with her Pre-Raphaelite profile and intelligent, wide-set eyes, has gorgeousness to spare. James Ivory, who directed her in The Golden Bowl, has been unable to contain himself on the subject of her pulchritude; Joel Schumacher, for whom she played Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin, has called her “a legendary beauty along the lines of Garbo or Dietrich.” And David Carradine, who plays Bill in the Kill Bill movies, says, “The thing about Uma is that she’s more beautiful than most of the beautiful chicks out there—big nose and gargantuan feet, but it all somehow works.” Whether Thurman wears a superbly simple lavender gown, as she did at the Academy Awards in 1995—all but making Prada a household name—or the bright-yellow jumpsuit in which she slashed her way through Kill Bill: Vol. 1 last year, her allure cannot be dampened by something so worldly as an outfit.

“I’m glad it was me they panned,” she says. “I think I deserve it, and I can take it. I need a good panning every so often or I wouldn’t really recognize my life.”

Or perhaps Thurman, whose complicated private life has been not only recognized but wrenchingly exposed this year, was offering her public a red-carpet red herring. Her gossamer armor proved surprisingly effective, at least in one respect: It deflected the glare from the failure of her marriage to Ethan Hawke—who, according to tabloid reports, took up with 22-year-old Canadian model Jen Perzow on a Montreal film set last summer—and off Thurman’s new romance with the high-flying hotelier Andre Balasz, 12 years her senior (a man for whom the word “suave,” used without irony, seems appropriate).

Thurman spent her childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts; Woodstock, New York; and India. Her father, as everyone knows, is Robert Thurman, the renowned professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University and the former husband of Houston oil heiress Christophe de Menil, and her mother is a Swedish psychotherapist and former Vogue model once married to the LSD guru Timothy Leary. In 1988 Thurman emerged as an especially beguiling ingenue in Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons. (Judging from the Internet, the apparition of her milk-white teenage breasts still haunts cinephile legend.) As Venus perched on the half-shell in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, then as June Miller in Henry & June—the first film ever to receive an NC-17 rating—she announced herself as one of the great sex symbols of the 1990s.

“I was a little bit sad as a teenager, a moody, intense girl,” she says. “So being a sex symbol was a great thing—something I’ll still happily throw over myself like a jacket if it suits the moment. If you’re a woman, it’s so easy to be a sex symbol—as a tone or a color. But whenever anybody expects you to do a certain thing, it immediately loses its excitement.”

This may explain why, in 1994, Thurman tucked her famous blond tresses under a black bobbed wig for what has become her most unforgettable performance, as the hip-swiveling, drolly dangerous Mia Wallace, wife of a Los Angeles drug kingpin, in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Tarantino is not a filmmaker with a palpable libido, and so his choice of Thurman as a muse seemed to hasten her transformation from hot to cool. In 1997′s Gattaca—where she met Hawke—she purveyed a cold, noir-ish corporate perfection. And for Kill Bill: Vol. 1, in which the longest single take is the opening shot of Thurman’s bloody, battered face, the actress honed her body into a hard fighting machine. “My character wasn’t using her sexuality for one moment, which is itself interesting,” says Thurman. “I always thought the Bond villainesses were great female icons in a way, with their forward sexuality and their deviousness. But, of course, they all had to be killed.”

On the set of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino and Thurman got to talking about how many more great roles for women could be found in genre cinema, and in Hong Kong fight movies in particular. “I had this idea of a wedding chapel massacre,” says Thurman, “and he invented the nemesis of Bill. Seven years later, I asked him if he still had those old pages. He got so struck with excitement that he went home and wrote it.” Kill Bill: Vol. 2, premiering April 16, resumes just after Thurman’s character, known only as the Bride, has delivered an acrobatic act of mass murder on her way to decapitating O-Ren Ishii, the hired-assassin-turned-Tokyo-gang-leader played by Lucy Liu. Three names remain on the Bride’s “to-kill” list, but Thurman, who hasn’t seen the film yet, believes that the second installment will provide a context for the almost baroque violence of the first.

“Moral lassitude aside,” she says, laughing, “to me it’s all just an elaborate creative whimsy. The gore is so silly, really. It’s so outlandish. As we were making it, it was really at the moment when it crossed the line into absurdity that we got it.

“I haven’t seen The Passion of the Christ yet,” adds Thurman, whom her therapist once called “psycho-semitic,” referring to the Jewishness that comes from having scores of Jewish friends. “But [Gibson et al] are taking their blood very seriously there. They’re killing Christ”—as opposed to, say, a Pasadena housewife with a pistol in her cereal box. “Quentin’s not a moralist,” she adds, “and he’s freed himself from that traditional blanket distinction where there’s a good guy and a bad guy and each must behave according to his role. I think it’s exciting to see something that’s morally unpredictable, and in this twisted way you can feel the humanity somewhere inside a caricature-ish kind of storytelling.”

Though audiences will be able to watch Thurman dispatch a one-eyed Daryl Hannah this month, her toughest battle—against the tabloids—is still ahead. There’s a memorable moment at the end of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 in which the Bride stands on a narrow banister high above a scene of carnage, where she has just deployed her samurai sword against 88 Yakuza fighters. “Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives, take them with you!” she shouts, panting, her face caked with blood. “However, leave the limbs you lost. They belong to me now.”

Thurman has a way of hoarding the wreckage in her own life, too. “My feeling, simply, was that I didn’t want my kids, when they grow up, to see a lot of dismembered body parts of their family life in public,” she says. (By contrast, Hawke’s reported infidelity forced him into uncommon Hollywood candor: He says that he’s lost 15 pounds, that it’s the saddest period of his life, that many creative men have “suffered from infidelity.”) “I’m very capable of talking about my feelings,” says Thurman, “but why should a stranger care how I feel about Ethan?”

Depending on whom you talk to, either Thurman left her husband after he cheated, or Hawke’s was a revenge affair following Thurman’s betrayal. Thurman and Tarantino were rumored to have been an item on the set of Kill Bill—an inference made after the director reportedly described their relationship as “in every way like a marriage.” “He meant that it was a huge ordeal and a giant journey,” says Thurman. “The press does this with certain women. Whenever I shake anyone’s hand, they get ideas.” In any case, Hawke has said that two very separate, very busy careers took their toll. Friends of both parties say the marriage was in dire straits before Hawke went to Canada. Thurman clings to her privacy. “I will deny nothing,” she says. “I will defend nothing.” As a public figure, she tends to disappear, rev up her Hollywood engine, then disappear again—to New York and to her daughter and son, Maya and Levon. Since her separation, Thurman has put herself back in the spotlight, probably not unconsciously. Of her jetset romance with Balasz, she says she is not only very happy but very grateful: “God, what can I say? He’s a wonderful person, and I feel really lucky to have met him.”

These days, Thurman is also hard at work. She works for fun, she says, acknowledging how much her life has changed since filming Kill Bill: “I think I felt the depth of my own strength in the process. If I’d seen what lay ahead of me, I’m not sure I could have handled it.” She has just finished filming Be Cool, a sequel to the 1995 hit Get Shorty, based on Elmore Leonard’s novel about the misadventures of a mobster-turned-Hollywood-wheeler-dealer, played by John Travolta. Later this year she begins work on Accidental Husband, a script she discovered and is coproducing, about a woman who learns, on the eve of her wedding, that she’s already married. The back-and-forth between New York and Los Angeles has never been harder, especially now that Hawke has moved into a hotel. “Maya is in kindergarten,” she says. “They’ve been in L.A. with me during Be Cool, but it’s tricky. You have to weigh the situation.”

Oscar dress debacles and high-profile divorces are not the only taxes attached to being an old hand in Hollywood. Thurman’s with-a-bang return to the public eye has brought with it another movie-star rite of passage: For the first time, rumors are swirling about how she’s given her nose to the surgeon’s knife. “I wonder if that’s the case with a lot of people myself, but I think as you get older your bone structure really emerges,” she says. “Want to look really, really closely?” She opens her eyes wide, takes her interviewer’s hand and presses his fingers into her cheeks, nose and chin. “See? Full range of motion. Real bones. I’m not just telling you—I’m letting you investigate.”

In a fiercely guarded life, her famous face offers a safe terrain for investigation. And as for Hawke, Thurman is happy, in the end, to cloak the sordid details in philosophy. “What I will say is that I’ll always be learning about love,” she says. “I don’t think you ever do stop loving a person. I think you can hate them a little.” She laughs. “But I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them.”

“Uma Cum Laude,” by Robert Haskell, has been edited for Style.com. The complete version appears in the May 2004 issue of W.