Premiere – November 1994

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By Andy Webster

Uma Thurman’s career trajectory has a certain familiarity, with a twist: Stunning beauty arrives with a splash, then strives to avoid sexual objectification.

But instead of seeking refuge in more obvious entertainments, she has tended toward the more precincts of the art film. Uma Karuna Thurman (her name is that of the Hindu goddess of love) was born in Boston in 1970 and raised in Woodstock, New York, and Amherst, Massachusetts-the only daughter among three sons, who are also named after Hindu divinities. The family’s karmic are soon deduced: Uma’s father, Robert, is a professor of Asian religion [the nation's leading authority on Buddhism] and a former Buddhist monk; and her Swedish mother, the former Nena von Schlebrugge, is a former model now psychotherapist who was once married to Timothy Leary.

When the Thurman Clan wasn’t seeking on the subcontinent, Uma was attending Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, and then New York’s Professional Children’s School. Given her unorthodox upbringing, adolescent rebellion meant joining the cheerleading squad. Incomprehensibly, the actress has claimed that her burgeoning pulchritude did not garner her popularity in high school.

Someone must have noticed-she began modeling in her teens, and at 16 appeared in her first movie. Later, in Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, she emerged from an oyster as no less than Venus herself. But it was Thurman’s performance (and her much noted nude scene) as the convent-raised virgin prey of John Malkovich in Stephen Frear’s Dangerous Liaisons that launched a publicity onslaught that threatened to turn her, in her own words, into “cultural girlfriend of the week.”

She stopped acting for nine months and met and married Gary Oldman, a match that lasted two years. For the most part, Thurman has showed discriminating taste in directors (John McNaughton, Philip Kaufman, Gus Van Sant, Quentin Tarantino); she certainly appears to appreciate the company of mavericks. She is single and lives in New York City.