Marie Claire (Australia) – January 2001

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Interview: Uma Thurman

By Nicky Barlow

She’s an acclaimed actress and the face of Lancome, but Uma Thurman is
returning to a role she knows well – that of mother. You’d expect a famed
beauty like Uma Thurman to stand out in a crowd. To be honest, any willowy, six-foot-plus blonde would. But the impossibly tall actress (heightened further by three-inch heels) looks like some Nordic giantess who’s stepped straight from the pages of Gulliver’s Travels. She’s almost head, shoulders and hips above the pack as she glides through the lobby of the plush hotel where she’s holding court. There’s no doubt about it – the Oscar- nominated actress, who last year became the face of cosmetics company Lancome for a reported $12 million and helped launch their fragrance Miracle, is an imposing woman. The star of films like Pulp Fiction, Gattaca and Dangerous Liaisons is excited about her collaboration with the cosmetics giant. “I’ve been acting since I was 16, so this is a change of pace,” she says.

“Part of the reason I did it is because I’ve been working with photographers for years, and that’s some- thing I’ve always enjoyed. It’s kind of fun. It’s a very nice way to make a living!” Inspecting Thurman at close quarters is enough to make any woman want to throw in the towel. Casually dressed in a deep blue twin-set with matching pants, her honey- blonde hair swept off her face in a haphazard ponytail, the 31-year-old doesn’t disappoint. As director Terry Gilliam once noted, “She looks like she’s floated down from the clouds.” Her skin is flawless, her wide-set eyes intense yet playful. But Thurman’s most stand-out quality is her gazelle-like stature. She even scratches herself
elegantly. “She gets up out of a chair and you want to applaud,” observed fellow actress Kate Beckinsale.

People have compared Thurman to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, or any other cool screen beauty with talent and charisma. Some say she has the exquisiteness of Audrey Hepburn, but actor Ethan Hawke, Thurman’s husband of three years, says, “She’s better than Hepburn. She’s a better actress.” After a nearly two-year career hiatus, which she spent looking after her and Hawke’s toddler daughter, Maya Ray, Thurman leapt back into acting, making two art-house films back to back. In one, the fact-based French drama Vatel, she plays Louis XIV’s mistress, who falls in love with a valet (played by Gerard Depardieu). Yet it is her role in the other movie, The Golden Bowl (a classic costume drama based on a Henry James novel), that crit- ics are claiming is Thurman’s finest performance to date. She plays the tor- tured Charlotte Slant, who falls “pathologically in love” with her son-in-law.

Initially, Thurman turned down the role, citing the constraints of motherhood. But months later, over a girlie lunch, her friend Natasha Richardson scolded her for passing it up – Thurman’s agent rang the next day to see if the role was still available. “The Golden Bowl was a real challenge,” she sighs. “I had Maya with me in my trailer for 10 weeks and I had to concentrate on the part. She was great, though. It wouldn’t be so easy now.” No, it would not. Heavily pregnant with her second child, Thurman is due to give birth in January. Production has already been postponed on her next project, Kill Bill, a film that will see Thurman reunited with Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino. Thurman readily admits that since Maya’s birth, in July 1998, her life has been in a con- stant state of upheaval. “I’ve been reeling,” she laughs, “trying to figure out how my life’s going to make sense again. I feel very hard- pressed to go to work unless I really feel it’s important to do that project. Being a parent is a full-time job. It’s not that I love acting any less; I’m just trying to squeeze it all together.

It’s not the same as it used to be. It’s definitely slowed me down, but that’s a good thing. I’m happier than I’ve ever been.” But life hasn’t always been so joyful. Her childhood was plagued with insecurities about her unconventional upbringing and her “bizarre” looks. “I think a lot of odd-looking women were weird-looking kids. I used to get very upset about it because my mother had been such a beauty. I used to take it very hard when people who knew my mother back in her heyday would come over and look at me and go, ‘Ohhh …”‘ Thurman grimaces dra- matically, then dissolves into laughter. “One of my mother’s friends very kindly tapped me on the shoulder when I was about 10 and said, ‘You know, you could get a nose job.’ “There’s always someone out there to
make you feel inadequate if you’re listening – and I’m always listening.” She gives a know- ing smile. “I’m always working on my confi- dence; I’m always battling my insecurities.” Born in Boston in 1970 and named, like her brothers Dechen, Ganden and Mipam, after a Hindu deity (“Uma” means “bestower of blessings”), Thurman grew up steeped in Buddhism. Her Swedish-born mother was a psychotherapist who had briefly married LSD guru Timothy Leary before she fell in love with and then married one of his students, Robert Thurman.

Robert was the first American ever to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk (though he renounced his vows to marry Thurman’s mother), and he’s still great friends with the Dalai Lama. The young Uma spent two years in India at the behest of her father and met many artists, writers and poets. Her parents taught her to be a free spirit, but secretly she craved a “normal name” and a middle-class American home life. “I know adolescence is painful for every- one, but mine was just plain weird,” she recalls. “There were non-stop changes of schools, no friends and only acting to hide behind.” At the age of 15, while in a school play, Thurman was discovered by agents who sug- gested she transfer to a serious acting school in New York. A driven teenager, Thurman took jobs washing dishes and modelling to support herself. In 1987, at 16, she made her movie debut as a thieving vamp in the low-budget thriller Kiss Daddy Goodnight.

She fared little better, quality-wise, with her second film, Johnny Be Good,
but finally struck lucky when she was cast as the gently mocking Venus in The
Adventures Of Baron Munchausen in 1988. “The minute that shell opened and she
stepped out, I sat up and said, ‘Who the tuck is that?”‘ said film-maker Joel Schumacher, who directed Thurman nearly 10 years later, as Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin. That same year, at age 18, she starred in Dangerous Liaisons as a corrupted virgin. “She has this Jayne Mansfield body and a horrify- ingly great brain,” co-star John Malkovich said at the time. Since then, Thurman has taken on roles that have been difficult to peg but garnered enormous critical acclaim, including Mad Dog And Glory, Gattaca and, most memorably, Pulp Fiction. Of all her roles, it was the character of Mia Wallace, a big-time gangster’s wife with china-doll hair and a chronic coke habit who over- dosed in spectacular style, that sticks incur minds – and earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1995.

It could have been easy for Thurman to chase the “It girl’ mantle by playing more conventional roles; instead, she opted to take on challenges that illuminated her sense of indepen- dence. If you look back on all the films she’s made throughout her career, they’re full of sur- prise moves. “You have to follow your own heart and taste,” she explains. “I wish my taste was what the world spun around, but it’s not. At least I was able to follow myself.” With the hits, there have been some big misses (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, The Avengers), but none of these faze Thurman in the slightest. “I’ve had a very lucky time; I’ve had a good ride. But I’m kicking into a new place now,” she says, with a shrug. To her surprise, Thurman soon discovered that taking up her much-cherished per- sonal role of mother has had a profound effect on the type of roles she has been offered pro- fessionally.

“I found that when I returned to work after I had Maya, people were sending me scripts with roles for women who’d had six children,” she recalls, pausing for effect. “I kid you not. I aged 15 years in nine months!” she squeals. “I was shocked.” Despite these stereotypes, Thurman says the upside to being a mother is that the paparazzi and gossipmongers leave her and her family alone. “You’re boring when you’re married with kids,” she laughs. “They want to photograph the guy staggering out, adjusting his tie at 2am – they want drugs, sex, the money shot. Me walking down the street with a stroller and no make-up is only newsworthy to the point that they say, ‘God, look at herl’ I’m not Madonna. I can’t imagine that Madonna could take her kids to Disneyland; that would be a piece of meat in a lion’s den.” The lack of intrusion has allowed Thurman to bring up her first child the way she wants, and hopefully this will be the case with her sec- ond. ‘I do my best to create a stable, secure universe for my daughter. I feel that childhood isa good thing, She will endeavour to keep her small. My mother wanted us to be indepen- dent and there were probably enormous ben- efits from that, so who knows? I’m sure my kids will be sitting in the shrink’s office com- plaining about how I did this wrong and that wrong.

Who’s good enough to be a parent? I certainly am not, so I struggle. But we pass a lot of normal time; I do everything with her.” Thurman hasn’t always been so free from media scrutiny. At 19, she married British actor Gary Oldman, but within a year, the union was over. Thurman rarely speaks of the pairing, although she once said, “Teenage weddings are in the category of things that don’t count.” “You try living with an angel,” was Oldman’s famous response when the news broke of their divorce. After that, she was linked with a procession of celebrities, including Robert De Niro and Mick Jagger –

“Basically everybody I ever had coffee with.” Ethan Hawke was obviously in a different class. Their affair began on the set of the sd-fl thriller Gattaca. in a recent interview, Thurman stated, “I remember saying to myself, Why can’t you just have fun with this guy? He’s sexy; just enjoy that.’ And then, sneaky devil, he totally made me fall in love with him.” For awhile, the pair succeeded in keeping their romance a secret until, in 1998, Thurman was spotted leaving an antenatal clinic with Hawke. They were already engaged before the pregnancy, but she resisted marriage as she “didn’t want a shotgun wedding”. But eventually she agreed to marry Hawke. Their wedding, on May 1, 1998, was a modest affair at a Manhattan church.

Thurman was seven months pregnant and wore white. Their union was blessed by the Dalal Lama. Last year, they both turned 30 and revamped an older-style New York apartment, where they currently live. Aside from making a few films and developing fresh projects (“I’m looking for scripts, if you’ve got any”), Thurman most enjoys spending time at home with her growing brood. “Compared to the level of suffering that’s going on all the time, I’ve had one of the luckiest experiences available on the planet,” she contemplates. “It’s not for me to be feeling sad for myself.”