The Sunday Times – October 2000

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The Ugly Duckling

By Garth Pierce
Source: The Sunday Times

Uma Thurman has spent much of her present trying to live down her past. She was the weird one, the girl with Buddhist parents and an exotic family history, the oddball at school. And even when she started acting, nothing changed. In a business that embraces the strange, she was regarded as stranger than most. There she was, being hailed as one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, riddled with insecurity and indecision.

Now she’s 30 and has settled, in low-profile style, into a life of marriage (with her second husband, the actor Ethan Hawke) motherhood (to her two-year-old daughter, Maya Ray) and a solid career. You know it’s solid because it can shrug off a turkey such as The Avengers. And the shift comes as something of a shock to her.

“I only started acting out of fearless ignorance and a side order of total stupidity,” she reflects. “I did a school play and some modelling, because I was tall, and based on that I tried to launch a whole career. It was crazy. I kept on wondering what on earth I was doing. But the parts kept on being offered, so I took them.”

Those parts included playing the naked goddess Venus in Terry Gilliam’s 1988 fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen when she was just 18. So it wasn’t surprising that it brought her instant fame, of sorts. Within the year, she was proving she could actually act with her portrayal of the virginal 18th-century convent girl, Cécile de Volanges, seduced by John Malkovich in Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons. There have been more than 20 films since, most unforgettably Pulp Fiction, in which she played a mobster’s wife, danced with John Travolta into film iconography and earned herself an Oscar nomination. She even emerged with distinction as Poison Ivy in Batman and Robin, three years ago.

But, as Thurman tells it now, the dissatisfaction bubbled dangerously beneath the surface. Behind her somewhat esoteric choice of films – which included twice playing bisexuals (Henry Miller’s wife in Henry and June and hippie hitchhiker Sissy Hankshaw in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), a blind girlfriend to Andy Garcia in the thriller Jennifer 8 and the indentured servant to Robert De Niro in Mad Dog and Glory – she was suffering.

“My attempt not to be cast in a Hollywood niche definitely started hurting,” she says. “It hit my ability to get good work. I never seemed an obvious choice for anything. Then there was my private life. I hated people knowing about it and would go to any lengths to keep it secret. I became neurotic.” Her neurosis on that score was not helped by an early marriage to Gary Oldman, who prefers to keep his private life sealed. “We met when I was 18 and he was 12 years older,” she says. “He was my first real love. I did not have enough experience to realise that relationships can be so dysfunctional.”

She was also disturbed by reports of an affair with Timothy Hutton, whom she met five years ago on Beautiful Girls, in which she played the stunning Andera, who arrives to stay with relatives in a small Massachusetts town. There was also Richard Gere. On Hutton, there is no comment, but on Gere, with whom she starred in the 1992 thriller Final Analysis, she’s very open. She has known him since the age of 13, when her professor father, Robert, partnered him in organising New York’s Tibet House, which promotes the Tibetan culture that is so close to Gere’s heart. “Richard was like a big brother to me,” she says. “He was the first person I told that I wanted to be an actress. He was absolutely horrified and said, ‘Why do you want to spoil your life?’”

Thurman is obviously in the mood for setting the record straight. She has done absolutely no talking since marriage and motherhood, and minimum filming, apart from a role in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. But she is now back in a classy full-blown costume drama, The Golden Bowl, based on the novel by Henry James. It is directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, both eager to restore a reputation built by such films as A Room With a View (1986), Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993), rather than repeating such recent disappointments as Jefferson in Paris, Surviving Picasso and A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries. Thurman’s confident presence helps deliver a powerful story, well told and well acted.

It is set in England and Italy between 1903 and 1909, focusing on two marriages entangled in a complex, almost incestuous relationship. Thurman plays Charlotte Stant, the lover of an impoverished Italian prince (Jeremy Northam) who is about to marry Maggie, the rich daughter (Kate Beckinsale) of an American tycoon and art collector, Adam Verver, played by Nick Nolte. By a twist of fate, Uma’s Charlotte then marries Nolte’s ageing Adam. The lives of the four of them – father, daughter and lovers – become entwined in one family.

But, bored by their lives of luxury, Charlotte and the prince resume their sexual relationship. They are discovered by Maggie, who then tries to manipulate the situation to save both her marriage and her father’s. “Charlotte is so cultivated and so full of life,” says Thurman. “But at the same time, she is so completely out of control. If she was a contemporary character, she would be on Prozac. Beneath the apparent calm, she is deeply flawed.”

She feels much the same about the old Uma, and points to her relationship with Hawke as her moment of change. “We first met at the New York opening of Pulp Fiction, when he was standing with our mutual agent,” she says. “I came up completely frazzled, because I have a zero threshold for public appearances. I said, ‘I gotta get outta here. I can’t take it any more. I am going.’

“He gave me a really stern look, as if to say, ‘Oh my God, there’s another one. Another crazy actress. I must stay away.’ Then we met again more than two years later, when we started filming Gattaca. We had time to get to know each other – slowly – and a relationship developed. Since that moment, these have been better times for me.”

Those better times seem to shine through. Thurman looks self-assured as we talk, wearing a red dress, with her blonde hair pinned back. Her only jewellery is a large, glitzy antique ring – “On loan,” she says. And with her healthy, unblemished skin and clear blue eyes, she is a genuine, if unconventional, beauty. But even today, there is obviously tension beneath the composure. “I am having a cigarette,” she announces, with an anxious smile of those red lips. “I have not smoked for three years, and this is a terrible fall from grace. Put it down to pressure.”

She had spent the morning with her daughter. “I do not work very much now,” she says. “Once you have a kid, you are busy for ever and never sleep. So I am going to try to be particular about the films I do and always take her with me. She is very butch and self-possessed, my daughter. But her upbringing will be totally different to mine. My parents were so eccentric. We were an odd family: bohemian and different. Part of me feels that I have missed out on childhood. When I compare notes with others, nobody had an upbringing quite like my own.”

That upbringing included two years in India at the behest of her father – still known to religious friends by his monk’s name, Tenzin, acquired after he had met the Dalai Lama, learnt Tibetan and was ordained on previous visits – and her psychotherapist mother, Nena, whose first husband was the 1960s LSD guru Timothy Leary. Uma (her name means “the middle way” in Tibetan) spent much of her childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor of religion, with one older brother, Ganden, and younger brothers Dechen and Mipam.

“I spent the first 14 years of my life convinced that my looks were hideous,” she says. “I know adolescence is painful for everyone, but mine was plain weird. There were nonstop changes of school, no friends and only acting to hide behind. No boy ever liked me. I had mad crushes on boys, which would last for months. Even today, when people tell me I am beautiful, I do not believe a word of it.”

She left boarding school to attend the Professional Children’s School in New York and, supported by parents who wished her to be independent, learnt to live alone at the age of 15. To pay her rent, she modelled. “It was initiation by fire,” she says. “It was dramatic and difficult. I lived in 12 apartments over three years, with serious apartment and landlord troubles. I also had plenty of drugs thrown at me, and plenty of men trying to pick me up on the street. But it made me figure it out all for myself, and the experience came in useful for what I really wanted to do with my life – act in films. I perfected being street-smart very quickly.”

Such attitude worked wonders at auditions. At 17, she was hired for the lead as a vamp who seduces then robs rich men in Kiss Daddy Goodnight; she also had a role in a teen comedy called Johnny Be Good, with the then very junior Robert Downey Jr. It kick-started her prospects as a future sex symbol, while she would walk around New York in casual clothes, with no make-up, trying to avoid the gaze of others.

“I have lived a strange life,” Thurman reflects now. “And I have been a strange woman. I know that to rely on the vagaries of success or failure in films is not a sensible way to live. But that is how life was up to the last few years. I feel as if I have come out of the madness and into the light.”