The Daily Express – October 2000

Mother, wife and actress Uma Thurman met with Sarah Gristwood at Cannes this year.

A young man climbs slowly out of his car, toddler in one hand, baby bottle in the other. The little beard lends him a touch of grungy individuality and there’s a trail of Chinese embroidery climbing up the leg of his cargo pants, but otherwise he could be any young father looking after his child for the day. It takes a moment to recognise Ethan Hawke – actor, writer, declaimer (in Dead Poets Society) of “Captain, my captain”. And husband of Uma Thurman; father of Maya Ray.

“Is there a Charlotte here?” he calls, and from inside Uma’s trailer comes an inarticulate welcoming cry. It’s the lunch break, and the cast and crew of The Golden Bowl have retreated to the disused stables of Burghley House, in Lincolnshire, one of the eleven stately homes of Britain where Henry James’ tales of noveau riche Americans and aristocratic Europeans is being filmed. Uma is playing Charlotte, a principal figure in a tale of two couples whose loves and lives become almost incestuously entwined.

On set, she had looked taller than ever in wasp-waisted Edwardian lilac, sweeping through Burghley’s art-filled galleries. During one scene, shot in the state dining room, her voice could be heard from a distance, rising high on a sobbing note, as she repeatedly upbraided the man who was backing off from their relationship. Charlotte is “pathologically in love” with an impoverished prince, who made a marriage of convenience with her husband’s wealthy daughter.

This may be the most challenging role of Uma Thurman’s career but, she seemed to be taking it calmly. Maya Ray helps: her life, she admitted as we sat for a few moments, now revolves around her daughter. “Everything is different. The architecture of my life has totally changed. There is nothing that has been unmolested – you don’t believe that about becoming a parent, but it’s true. I thought other things mattered before, but they didn’t.”

Uma on location for The Golden Bowl, working, involved, relaxed, is in contrast to the more ill-at-ease person who, later, after the film’s completion, was giving press interviews at Cannes.

In Cannes, Uma was smoking, something she and Ethan had quit when she became pregnant. “It’s Europe!” she explains ruefully. “I haven’t really smoked for three years so it’s a terrible fall from grace.” She doesn’t find the pressures of a big festival at all easy. In a formal interview, she sounds a faintly self-mocking note and her curious laugh – flat, on a single note – rings out a little too frequently. Her looks, too, mean that hers is a presence it can’t always be comfortable to be around. Gary Oldman compared her to the Venus de Milo – “And you try living with an angel,” he grumbled famously.

It’s two and a half years now that she and Ethan have been married. “I first met Ethan at the New York premiere of Pulp Fiction, for about three seconds. I came up to him frazzled, because I have zero threshold for public appearances, and I went, like” – she puts on a breathless gaspy voice – “‘I’ve just got to get out of here. OK? I’m going.’ He just stared at me, like, ‘Oh my God this crazy actress. Stay away.’

The relationship has flourished both personally and professionally. Ethan directed her recently, in an experimental project, while his own film of Hamlet opens here shortly. Two years ago their baby was born; this year both turn 30 this and for both of them it seems a good place to be. “Somewhere around 26 I started getting over old wounds and stumbling blocks,” she said recently. “The road started opening up for me.”

Earlier this year, she agreed to be the new “face” of Lancome. Is it something she’d have felt comfortable with in earlier days?

“I think that my attempt to not be in a Hollywood niche back then definitely hurt my castability. But over time it’s helped to make me feel very well rounded, and confident on a lot of different fronts.”

She is even more picky about films since Maya’s birth. “I try to be more selective about this sort of work, because you’re already working all the time at the parent part. Any woman who works finds it’s a problem to keep all the balls in the air. I guess once you have a kid you’re just busy forever.”

But she says it happily.

“When I set my mind to what I wanted to do, after my daughter was born, I knew that I wanted to do dramatic work. Just do things that would satisfy me personally. Play hard roles that I could fail in or succeed in. Challenge myself.” Enter Merchant Ivory, the team behind The Golden Bowl, and the people who made A Room With A View and The Remains Of The Day.

“Not a lot of people make dramas any more, with people who have real feelings that don’t tie up in a bow at the end.

“What I found interesting about Charlotte was that she’s so motivated, so much more of a cool customer than I could ever be. And yet at the same time she’s so out of control emotionally.

“She betrays everyone for this love. She hung her whole life on it, staked everything including her honour, and as long as she believes in it she feels clean in whatever she does. When it starts to disintegrate it’s like pulling a thread from a sweater. Practical and pragmatic as she is, it does escape her that love isn’t enough. Love is dysfunctional.” Uma Thurman is speaking here from the experience of “any love affair I’ve ever had”.

She distinguishes this from “a worked-on state like marriage”. And the marriage, to her, is clearly the better way. In playing Charlotte, Uma says that she drew on “my own long history of tears and hysteria”. But now, perhaps, that’s something she feel she can do safely. “It was really emotionally stirring to play Charlotte for three months. It took a while to get back into ordinary life. To get back home… But I have my daughter. Now, when I come back through the door, I’m always getting home in a way.”