Talk – March 2001

Last Update:

Uma Unwinds

By Holly Millea

The sulty screen star talks about feet, food, and the unbearable comfort of home. This was her idea, this intimate act. Sitting in an oversize green faux leather recliner, Uma Thurman loosens the laces on her black boots and pulls off one, then the other. She strips off her socks, turning them inside out in the process, and drops them to the floor.

Her feet are long and narrow, with graceful arches and well-scrubbed heels. The toes are long too, short-nailed, and bulbous. The little piggy that went to market is much shorter than the little piggy that stayed home, which, Thurman says, is “a sign of retardation.” She’s being facetious, thumping the heads of reporters who think it’s a big news flash that she’s not just beautiful-she’s smart! “It’s so patronizing and condescending,” Thurman says, waving it off. “And rude!” She reconsiders: “I guess it’s less rude than a stick in the eye.”

The actress shimmies back into the chair, rolls up her faded jeans, and-
with an ooh!- submerges her feet in a basin full of steaming, soapy water.
Jeniette, the owner of Jeniette salon, near Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, brings her a cup of coffee fetched from across the street. Thurman’s pedicurist, Luba, begins cleansing, clipping, filing. Thur- man shakes the bottle of pink nail polish she picked from the dozens of shades on display: A Lot of Shekels. “What are shekels?” she wonders. “Sounds like a disease. We have to look it up in the dictionary” (sheekel she-kel n An Assyrian, Babylonian, and, later, Hebrew unit of weight and money) She untangles her dirty angel- blond hair from its haphazard pony- tail and combs her fingers through it.

Tilling her head back, Thurman exhales deeply and drifts off in the quiet while her feet are massaged. “Now wasn’t this a great idea?” she says in a sedated tone, her eyes still closed. “Doesn’t this feel good?” It was. It does. And thank God. “I must be a real pain to interview,” Thurman said earlier, over breakfast at her local haunt a few blocks away She was smiling. It was a complicated smile, equal parts apologetic and good luck, sucker! “You know, the truth is I feel sorry for you,” she continued. Then she laughed the kind of uneasy laugh that slips out at funerals. Why sorry? “I don’t know… I’m sure it’s just terrible.”

Doesn’t she see herself as interesting? ” Secretly I’m interesting, yeah,” she replied. While putting on her black coat, black cloche hat, and black sunglasses, she explained: “I suppose it’s just a bit of-this is so stupid-inscrutableness. I got a little inscrutable over the years. So I’m sympathetic to you. ” Early on I got the idea that life wasn’t a church that you go to-To Be Understood. So why even go in the door?” In other words, “Uma is holding a party that not everybody is invited to,” says her friend, director Quentin Tarantino. “That’s for sure. But with two art house movies opening and a Lancome fragrance contract signed-for a lot of shekels-Thurman is making a goodwill effort to be accessible. In the fact-based French drama Vatel she stars as Louis XJV’s mistress, who over the course of a three-day feast falls in love with a valet (Gerard Depardieu) whose talents in the kitchen and around the castle rival Martha Stewart’s. It was Thurman’s first project since she married actor Ethan Hawke, in May 1998, and gave birth to their daughter Maya two months later.

Thurman cinched herself into another corset for The Golden Bowl, a Merchant-Ivory production based on the Henry James novel. She initially passed on the project, but a close friend, actress Natasha Richardson, read the script and convinced her to take the part of Charlotte Stant, a woman in need of money and want of love who marries her best friend’s wealthy father and sleeps with her best friend’s husband. The novel is generally considered James’s most difficult work, one not to be taken lightly-or to the beach. “It was pretty intense playing a very emotionally disturbed character,” Thurman says, wiggling her toes, waiting for the paint to dry. “She’s arrogant and a bitch. Sort of crazy.
She behaves ethically incorrectly But I see her as sad.”

People compare Thurman to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich… anyone tall, blond, and seemingly mysterious. But that’s too easy On screen she’s more Carole Lombard-a good-time goddess who’s wise to the guise, like the naked Venus she embodied in her first big film, 1989′s The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. “The minute that shell opened and she stepped out, I sat up and said, ‘Who the fuck is that?”‘ re- members Joel Schumacher, who directed her eight years later as Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin. Thurman’s best career moves have been characters both comic and campily cool, in Dangerous Liaisons, Henry & June, Mad Dog and Glory, Beau- tiful Girls, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, Gattaca, and, of course, Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s 1994 classic, which garnered Thurman
an Oscar nomination. Of all the film’s characters, Mia, a big-time thug’s wife with a big-time coke habit, was Tarantino’s favorite on the page. “I knew her backward and forward, but I had no idea what she looked like,” he says. “Every actress from Isabella Rossellini to AIfre Woodard, Holly Hunter, and Meg Ryan read for the part.”

Tarantino knew Thurman was his girl when “I had dinner with another actress and felt like I was cheating on Uma.” With the aid of a black bobbed wig, Tarantino reinvented Thur- man as a character actress and put her on a dance floor with John Travolta, resurrected from the career-dead to play a hood hired to babysit Mia. (Her last babysitter had been thrown out a fourth-floor window for giving her-what else?-a foot massage.) The movie’s money shot comes when Mia overdoses and a hypodermic needle is plunged into her heart. “Uma was quite patient with us, lying there wearing a big fake chest with a needle already stuck in it,” remembers costar Eric Stoltz. “We started filming with the needle in her chest and then pulled the needle out. Then they ran the film backward to get the effect of us thrusting it into her chest. It was some sort of perverted fantasy,” he says, laughing: “Uma Thurman passed out at my knees wearing a prosthetic chest. I can check that one off my list.”

Tarantino told Thurman to open her eyes and sit straight up once the plunger was pushed. ‘And she told me a story,’ the di- rector recalls. “She said when she was on the set of Baron Munchhausen they had a panther they’d shot with too many tranquilizers. They had to bring it back, so they gave it a shot of adrenaline. The panther flew up and ran around in crazy circles, and everyone dove out of the way. That’s why [in Pulp Fiction] Uma wakes up and spins like a fucking top in the middle of all those people.”

Along with the hits there have been occasional misses: Jennifer Eight, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, The Avengers…. But Thurman doesn’t let them throw her. After all, it’s only a movie. Ralph Fiennes (himself a Rubik’s cube of complexities) had a portentous first day of shooting on The Avengers. “It hadn’t gone very well,” he says, “and Uma had been watching. Afterward she came to my dressing room and said, ‘It doesn’t matter.”‘ (Thurman was right. The movie was a bomb, but the two stars walked away without a career scratch.) “It’s all such a blur now,” Fiennes says, squeezed for a last thought, which he surely has. He laughs. “I do remember thinking she looked hot in that cat suit.” Thurman breaks into a big, warm smile when this is relayed to her.

“Ralph is such an angel,” she says. “He’s such a particular person that I find him deeply amusing. He’s so extraordinarily specific. And beautiful and intelligent and sensitive, and totally removed.” And not unlike Uma Thurman.
“When you think you have a handle on what it is that Uma is,” says her Golden Bowl costar Kate Beckinsale, “she’s something else. She has this goddess body, but she’s not just a goddess. She’s smart, but not just smart. She’s kind of goofy and naughty… and you can see it all kind of moving underneath the skin on her face.” Beckinsale sighs.

“She’s very inspiring. She gets up out of a chair and you want to applaud.”
Browsing through a small flea market in Union Square, Thurman scrapes the sky, six feet tall plus another three inches of heel. With her endless arms and legs, she appears at once elegantly imposing and twiggishly fragile. “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion,” wrote Sir Francis Bacon in 1625, prophetically dreaming of her. The straight, stately nose with slightly flared nostrils points toward full and perfectly drawn lips. But it’s the eyes that made her trip from teenage model to actress a Concorde flight. Winter-sky blue, they’re so wide- set you can focus on one or the other but never both at the same time. The effect is unsettling and gives her a psychological advantage. They take in a bigger picture of the people and goings-on around her. “Uma rarely walks away from someone without an opinion,” says Tarantino, who’s writing a script for her about a female assassin who seeks revenge against the man who done her wrong.

Indeed, you can almost hear her scribbling mental notes. Warns Ted Demme, who cast Thurman as the most beautiful girl in Beautiful Girls, “When you’re talking to her she looks right into your eyes, and if you look away you’re finished. Let your guard down around Uma and you’re in trouble.” The reality, according to Natasha Richard- son, is that “she has a hard time letting her
guard down. She can be intimidating, but that’s her self-defense system. Uma has real vulnerability” In more private moments, says Janeane Garofalo, Thurman’s costar in The Truth About Cats & Dogs, “she’s very funny, witty But she’s not overtly wearing a lampshade, so to speak, at the party” Like everyone else, Garofalo cites Thurman’s smarts. But how well would Thurman do on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? “Well.. she’s probably not pop-culturally intelligent,” Garofalo replies. “I don’t see her as a TV watcher or a pop-novel reader. For her it’s, like, Atlas Shrugged-one more time!”

(Though Thurman has never had her intel- ligence tested, she says she’s “sure it would be very low. IQ tests, I think, are based on factual information.”)
Thurman stops at a vendor’s booth filled with brightly painted Russian nesting dolls and picks up a blue-eyed blond. Her hands are “freakishly large,” Beckinsale says. “Mine are the exact same size, and I’ve never met a man with bigger hands than me!” Thurman pulls the doll apart, revealing an identical, smaller doll inside, which she also pulls apart, revealing another still smaller doll.. .until there are six dolls, like six se- crets, finally out in the open. “Maya would love these,” Thurman says in a tender voice. She hides the dolls safely back inside each other and buys them for her little girl.
“I was in heaven during my pregnancy,” Thurman rhapsodizes. After 28 hours of labor, Maya came into the world- and she was heaven on earth.” Thurman had con- ceived of having a child long before conceiving.

“I would have had a baby by myself, but I’m so glad I didn’t have to. You need more than one model of how you can act in the universe,” she says, relieved that her “every twitch and flinch and failure is not going to be Maya’s only model.” She hastens to add, “Ethan was raised by a single mother, and she did a great job. She’s pretty extraordinary. She wasn’t inspired by her work. She had an unhappy love affair. So she just sold all her possessions and joined the Peace Corps. She’s in Romania dealing with orphans and homeless people. She was unhappy taking Prozac in New York and now she’s very happy taking Prozac in Romania and doing something good.”

To truly understand Uma Thurman, “you have to see her as a mother,” Schumacher says. “I always felt that if I had a crisis of the head or heart I could rest my head on her shoulder. She has great compassion for how difficult it is to be a human being.” Director Roland Joffe remembers Thurman arriving on the set for a hunting scene in Vatel: “Uma came marching up to me, quite furious, and said, ‘Roland, I’m ashamed of you!’ I said, ‘Why?’ She pointed to a Nubian boy sitting in a cart with a gold collar around his neck and said, ‘What do you think is going on in his head?”‘ “Did you hear that?” Thurman asks. Her stomach is growling. She leads the way to the Blue Water Grill and takes a table near the bar. “I’m so happy to be here,” she says, counting the reasons why: “We get to sit and smoke and listen to Frank Sinatra. I love the red lamps. Red is my favorite color next to orange and green and yellow and silver and stone gray and dark blue.”

She wants the lobster, but it’s already shelled and “the fun is to do the torture, the Argentinian rumba, with it. I think I’m going to do the hors d’oeuvres dance.” She orders littleneck clams, sushi, and salad.
There’s a theory that everyone has an emotional age that’s fixed for life. Thurman determines hers to be nine. “I was an incredibly trusting, open, intuitive, sensi- tive nine-year-old. There was no block be- tween me and the universe.” She grew up, she says, in a “freaky household” amid the comings and goings of artists and writers and philosophers and poets. “I always wanted to be part of Americana. My parents were anti-Americana. They were so different I thought I had to work toward assimilating. I was very angry. I was always very angry. Thurman looks at the bread in her hand, as if wondering how it got there. “I don’t want to eat bread!” she says, tossing the half- eaten slice back in the basket and covering it with the bread cloth. “Why am I doing it?”

(Earlier Thurman admitted being trou- bled about her weight. “Ever since I had my baby I’ve had that body-dysmorphic disor- der,” she said. “I see myself as fat.” Rich- ardson worries about Thurman worrying about her weight. “Can you fucking believe it?” she asks. “Uma genuinely believes she’s fat. And she’s so thin! I don’t know where that comes from. But it’s totally genuine. And I think it hurts her.”) Thurman lights a cigarette. “I think that if you didn’t have to separate from your mother, you d never choose to do so. If you didn’t have to, to survive, you wouldn’t do it.”

Her favorite book as a child was Pippi Longstocking- “because she’s the strongest girl in the world. She sleeps with her feet on the pillow and her head under the blankets. She’s an orphan, very rich. And she lives in a house with a monkey and a horse. There are so few female heroes. She was the one for me.” Thurman smiles. “At the opening of one of the books she’s living alone, and she shouts up to her mother in heaven, ‘Don’t worry about me! I’ll come out on top!’ That always makes me want to cry.” Thur- man looks wistful and says again, “‘I’ll come out on top!”‘ ” She’s very Pippi Longstocking in many ways,” Richardson says. “In Uma there’s a little lost girl who’s put on very grown-up clothes to appear completely together, and as someone wonderfully sophisticated.”

But unlike Pippi, Thurman has a mother: Nena, a psychotherapist and former model (briefly married to Timothy Leary, whom she met through Salvador Dali). “My mother is quite an eccentric, interesting person,” Thurman says. “She’s Swedish and German and very much her own human being. My mother was very, um. . .uninterested in promoting anything but independence in us. Obviously-look at me, I’ve been working since I was 15 years old. So somebody had to have not held me back from that. But I became closer to my mother when I had my daughter.” Born in Boston on April 29, 1970, Uma Karuna Thurman was named after a Hindu goddess, so it’s a good thing she grew up to be tall and beautiful.

The odds were great that she would. Her father is also strikingly handsome, a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University He’s pals with Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama, and he runs Tibet House. But it’s not all peace and oneness. “My family, they have their ups and their downs,” says Uma, who has three brothers. “It’s a sort of dramatic family. There’s a lot of passion. We give each other hell, call each other on everything. It’s merciless. Nobody is blase about anybody else.” Thurman loved and felt loved in such a way that it pained her. “I realized very young that I wasn’t going to always live with my parents. And as soon as I figured that out it almost became unbearable to me-the comfort of home-be- cause I couldn’t have it forever. I could hardly enjoy it.

The thing that I valued most was that. And to know that it wasn’t going to last.. I took it really hard.” ‘Most of us want to cling to the familiar and the safe,” says Phil Joanou, who directed Thurman in 1992′s Final Analysis. “It’s sad that Uma had that realization at such a young age. But there’s something to be said for that. She’s very aware of the temporary nature of most things in life.” At 15 Thurman dropped out of prep school, “desperate to grow up,” and began to model in New York. Soon after, she began to act in films. She was dating Joanou in 1989 when he introduced her to Gary Oldman, whom he’d just cast in State of Grace. “It was lightning striking,” Joanou says, chuckling.

“You know when you’ve been eclipsed. Yes, I was chagrined. But I wasn’t devastated. It wasn’t like she left me for an asshole.” Sean Penn and Robin Wright also met making that film. “Sean and Robin, Gary and Uma-there were a lot of fireworks. It was a pretty exciting time.” Thurman was just 19 when she married Qidman, in 1990. By the time she turned 20 the marriage was over. Her feelings on the subject are summed up in a sentence: “Teenage weddings are in the category of things that don’t count.” Later she adds, “Even if it’s painful, ultimately you may find it was an inoculation against something else.

And you can, in hindsight, be grateful.” It was an early lesson well learned. “When you’re as bewitching as she is, the temptation to chase rogues is very intense,” says Anjelica Huston, who also stars in The Golden Bowl. “Her choice of Ethan is striking, because she’s gone for somebody who really likes to communicate.” Looking back on myself, I was involved with people who were kind of denying me for a long time. Uma seems to be exactly the opposite. She’s very young to have made that healthy a choice.” Going from Gary Oldman to Ethan Hawke (and squeezing a romance with Beautiful Girls costar Timothy Hutton in between), Thurman admits, is “yeah, shocking!” She first encountered Hawke at an ATM machine, and it was one of those rare instances when she walked away without an opinion. They met again at the opening of Pulp Fiction. But it
wasn’t until they worked together in Gattaca that he really registered. Hawke, the Gen X idol apparently allergic to bathing, was at the time not quite himself.

“He jokes that I got really conned, because when I met him he was clean-shaven every day. He’s so grungy!” Thurman exclaims. “I’ve tried so hard to clean him up. He cleans up so good. That’s what’s so frustrating. “I remember saying to myself, ‘Why can’t you just have fun with this young guy? He’s sexy; just enjoy that. Give yourself a break.’ And then, sneaky devil, he totally made me fall in love with him. Because he wasn’t overly nice to me right away. He didn’t kill it with kindness.” While Hawke played it cool, Thurman fell harder, faster. “He was probably in love with me first,” she figures. “But then when I fell in love with him, it was so shocking. I’m sure he was scared. It took him a while to catch up.” She smiles. “He’s like Raggedy Andy. He has a candy heart…. He has his flaws-he does. But he’s a deeply moral, soulful, and good person.

“I’d never worry about him with a leading lady. I’m not even worried about him
straying. I could torture the poor guy and drive him into some other situation. But he’s not the kind of person whose behavior would come unmotivated. If something happened in our relationship I’m sure it would be my fault. I’m 100 percent sure of it.” They became engaged, and then Thur- man discovered she was pregnant. At first she refused to marry him. “I didn’t want a shotgun wedding,” she explains. “Then there I was, seven months pregnant, and I realized I would have to go to the hospital and give birth to my baby, and I thought about who would be my next of kin. I realized that I wanted him to be my next of kin. So I de- manded to marry him.” Three weeks later she walked down the aisle of St. John the Divine. “Big as a house! And I wore white!” she exclaims. Then
she confesses, “I’m not a practicing religious person. I’m not anything.”

Hawke, however, has “a deeply religious side to him,” his wife says. “Ethan’s a closet Christian.” Ash Wednesday, his second novel, to be published by Knopf, is a spiri- tual love story. There are seven diamonds in Thurman’s wedding band, a lucky number. “Actually eight,” she reveals. “Because there’s one on the inside. Just for a secret.” She turns the band around and around on her finger, con- templating the revelation. “I kind of gave up on having secrets. I found there’s a whole price you pay doing this. You have to ac- cept that anything you say and do could very well become something you have to live with
publicly.” And besides, she says, “whatever’s true about me shouldn’t hurt me, so I try to let go.” Something easier said than done. What is the truth about Uma Thurman? “If you were to write one thing about Uma…” she says, thinking, thinking, thinking… “Can I say it off the record?”