The Daily Telegraph – October 2000

Last Update:

High Priestess

By Allison Pearson

Uma Thurman embodies the old-time screen goddess: the glamour, the inscrutability, the luminosity. But as Alison Pearson discovers in this candid interview, she does not live the life of a screen icon – more that of a mother balancing child, a husband called Ethan Hawke and the rigours of fame

WHO would want to meet a movie goddess? So bad for morale and even worse on the purse. In the weeks running up to my interview with Uma Thurman, I fret constantly over what to wear, finally settling on something dark, woollen and so understated it costs just under a quarter of my annual salary. It seems a price well worth paying. Thurman has a way of making other women feel small; perhaps because they are small in relation to an actress who is a few blonde hairs shy of six foot. Females I know who admire Sigourney Weaver, want to be best friends with Meg Ryan and treat Gwyneth Paltrow with pleasurable condescension respond to Thurman’s name with a helpless shrug. ‘What can you do?’ sighs one pretty producer. ‘Even her tits are her own.’ Worse still, a mutual friend has told me that Thurman is ‘so nice’ and – this really is intolerable – ‘incredibly intelligent’.

So, it’s full Armani armour, then, to engage with the paragon. In a desperate, post-modern gesture I even have my toenails painted in Rouge Noir – the bloody, bludgeoned shade of Chanel varnish that Thurman turned into a runaway bestseller when she wore it as the coke-snorting vamp Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction. When I tell the pedicurist who I am going to interview, she lets out a little yelp and says, ‘OmiThurmanUmaGod’ – which isn’t far wrong when you think about it. Entire Eastern religions have been founded on faces less serene and inscrutable than hers.

On the morning of the interview, I have my hair done at a Manhattan salon where the stylist discloses with gum-chewing authority that Thurman has just become the new face of Lancôme cosmetics, purely for the cash (£5 million, apparently). Her husband, the actor Ethan Hawke, is earning less these days, working as an indie director and in art films – his Hamlet has just been well received. As for Thurman, she is barely working at all because she refuses to leave her two-year-old daughter, Maya Ray. It seems the Lancôme people wanted Thurman to be photographed in a desert, but she stipulated she would only travel an hour-and-a-half outside New York City. ‘That doesn’t get you to a lot of desert,’ admits the stylist, ‘but I hear they improvised. Anyway, she’d look fantastic in New Jersey in the rain, right?’ Correct.

Outside, it is supposed to be September, but the fall has temporarily been put on hold by a flukey, hysterical heat. Within seconds, my chic black wool number has become a sauna towel. Interviewing the high priestess of cool while sweating is not an option. I sprint into a department store where I buy another dress and an ambitious pair of high heels. On the cab journey down to the West Village, it occurs to me that the new shoes will put me just about on a level with Thurman’s famous breasts. This is too glum a thought to dwell on, so I try to lose myself in the actress’s biography.

Why is Uma Thurman a star? It’s a useful question because the more you ponder her career, the slighter her claim to fame. It’s not that she’s bad – frequently she’s the opposite – it’s just that you’d be hard put to remember more than three or four of her films; and there are some she herself would prefer to forget.

After a couple of dodgy early efforts, including Kiss Daddy Goodnight – a thriller so noirish, it appeared to be lit by a match – in 1988, the 17-year-old Thurman took the small but globally welcomed role of Cecile de Volanges in Dangerous Liaisons, pulling off her nightshift and yielding her virginity to John Malkovich with as much reluctance as someone picking up their lottery cheque. How could she follow that? By playing Venus in Terry Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron Munchausen, standing naked on one leg in a giant shell, Botticcelli made flesh.

After such a launch, a mainstream Hollywood career should have been plain sailing; instead Thurman set out in a kayak down minor tributaries. She was compelling as the blind girl in the thriller Jennifer Eight, which sank without trace. As Henry Miller’s bisexual wife in Henry and June, she exuded twitchy Thirties suavity, but the movie collapsed under the weight of critical scorn. When she finally took a big leading role it was in the bitty hippie-flick Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and even Thurman, as a hitchhiker with phallus-sized thumbs, could not persuade punters to stop.

At any point, Thurman could have done the Michelle Pfeiffer thing and picked herself an endearing heartwarmer that wouldn’t frighten your aunt, but her guiding principle appeared to be contrariness. ‘Sometimes I look for something I’d never do,’ she explained; well, sort of. It was Pulp Fiction that made her into cult fact. Quentin Tarantino gave Thurman a role that was shockingly up to date – a drug-taking mobster’s wife with a bob of Chinese lacquer. Mia Wallace was three parts Cleopatra to two parts asp. She made ordering a five-dollar shake look like an act of unspeakable sophistication.

Who can forget the scene in the restaurant where Mia, wearing a crisp white shirt, her mouth a bilberry moue, kicks off a pair of gold flatties and insists John Travolta’s Vincent partner her in a twist contest. It was the movie’s best moment – and one of the most memorable in modern cinema: Thurman the sinuous Siamese to Travolta’s bleary buffalo. Mia reminds you why there is really no need for her to be a speaking actress – she blinds you like a silent star. Thurman rightly got an Oscar nomination; more importantly, she had managed to inflame one half of the population while not freezing out the other. Men wanted to take her white shirt off, women wanted to put it on.

Since then, her choices have veered between the small and worthwhile – Gattaca, Mad Dog and Glory, Beautiful Girls (which she lit up like the moon over snow), The Truth About Cats and Dogs – to multi-million-dollar disasters. Batman & Robin, in which Thurman glowed greenly as Poison Ivy, has become a byword in the industry for failure, not to mention The Avengers. And, believe me, no one wants to mention

The Avengers. If Thurman, poured into Emma Peel’s black leather catsuit, couldn’t save it, it deserved to die. Her latest film, the one I have come to New York to talk about – Merchant Ivory’s adaptation of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl – is unlikely to have them storming the multiplexes, although Thurman gives a wonderful, blazing performance as Charlotte Stant, a noble, clever, but impecunious woman driven to harm when her Italian lover marries her heiress friend. Oh, the relief. For once, an interview where I won’t have to lie about liking the movie.

‘Uma rang to say so sorry, she’s running 20 minutes late,’ says the manager of the cafe. It’s a mellow European kind of place – lots of dark wood, paintings, smoky jazz music – and entirely empty. Thurman, it turns out, is a regular here with Hawke and Maya. ‘We get a lot of big names,’ the manager says, ‘and their attitude is like, “Look at me, but don’t talk to me.” Uma’s the exact opposite of that. She really wants to participate – well, as much as she can.’

I didn’t notice her come in, but suddenly here she is, holding out her hand. She is unfeasibly tall – you can see why director James Ivory calls her the Beautiful Giraffe – and she has the remote-yet-amused look of that lovely animal as it munches above the tree canopy – something to do with the air up there, maybe. She is wearing a grey sleeveless vest, navy chinos, open-toed, flat sandals (probably high fashion, but with a distinct dash of Christian Union) and a pink-and-white patterned kerchief tied round her head that hides all her hair. She is wearing no make-up whatsoever. Oh great. The reporter looks like Zsa Zsa Gabor and the movie goddess looks like Huckleberry Finn. I guess if you look like Uma Thurman you are under no pressure to look like Uma Thurman. The good news is that sitting down we are roughly the same height.

Thurman is full of apologies. This is her daughter’s first day at nursery. ‘I nearly cried this morning because I couldn’t get a cab to take her to school. And I’m standing on the street and no cab will stop. I was really, really fragile and then I walked in and the teacher said, “Aren’t you supposed to bring her to the later session?” And I just had to hold myself together. They didn’t know me at this school. If I burst into tears right now they’re gonna think, “Oh my goodness, we’ve got a real high-maintenance one here.” ‘ Actually, they’re going to think, OmiThurmanUmaGod, but it’s one of the movie goddess’s nice qualities that she talks about herself as though she were a mortal.

Having seen her in pictures, I was expecting something ethereal, perhaps a little flaky, so I am unprepared for the pungent conversationalist who comes straight at me with a droll riff on George W Bush: ‘Now he has a very remarkable distinction. Should he be elected president of the United States, he will have the least impressive record of any head of state in all of our history. Oh, he’s failed in many many areas.’ She lights up a Marlboro Light and exhales a little scorn. ‘His first reaction to a question about the death penalty was to burst out laughing. Sooooo disgusting.’

You can’t really see George W and Uma hitting it off, to be honest: he is fond of The Very Hungry Caterpillar; she’s a Jane Austen fan. Hillary Clinton is more Thurman’s cup of camomile, although she’s worried about her prospects: ‘She’s judged differently because she’s a woman. People should be listening to her, not scrutinising what she’s wearing, her make-up, her hair – I mean, it’s absurd. With women they zero in on a tone of voice, whether she sounds nice or too strident. That’s the favourite word. Strident! The candidate they picked to replace Guiliani is uniquely unqualified in comparison to her, but they count on the misogyny. They could pick any old pillock.’

The movie goddess sounds, well, a little strident, but I like it. It makes a change from all those careful careerist platitudes. It would be tactless to point out that the actress herself – through no fault of her own – is part of the problem for women. One reason Mrs Clinton constantly gets it in the thickish calves is because Uma Thurman has legs that stretch to Seattle. In The Truth About Cats and Dogs, where Thurman gamely played a dumb blonde (right body, much too clever face), her dumpy housemate points to her picture in a magazine. ‘I know her,’ she says to a male colleague. ‘No you don’t,’ he replies. ‘Women like that don’t really exist.’

James Ivory says he never seriously considered anyone except Thurman for the part of Charlotte in The Golden Bowl. Charlotte is one of those spirited women with a well-stocked mind who, because she had no money, was condemned by society to be a hanger-on, a governess or a mistress. Her liraless Prince marries her heiress best friend and, heartbroken, she takes the heiress’s father as a husband: the resulting foursome plays like the most agitated, passionate string quartet you ever heard. As elegant and polite as its leading lady, The Golden Bowl has a powerful undertow of sex and violence.

‘Yeah, sex and madness and morals and incompatibility between sex and morality,’ agrees Thurman cheerfully. ‘Charlotte is clever and proud, but with this demented Scarlett O’Hara side. She’s so polished on the surface – just like the golden bowl – but also deeply damaged and deluded. I mean she really believes that this man loves her and it’s only circumstances keeping them apart. But he just used her love, snorted it up.’ Did she get to the bottom of Charlotte? ‘I’d have to be honest and say that as I finished I really wished I could do it again. I could easily probably have improved it.’ In fact, it’s one of her best, most grown-up roles; Kate Beckinsale plays the Uma-ish ingenue and Thurman – a grand old lady of 30 now – takes the Meryl Streepish part. Like Streep, she is a thoroughbred, able to show the nerves quivering beneath the skin. Thurman flushes with pleasure at the comparison: she may run her talents down, but she’s serious about how she uses them.

Charlotte has already inspired strong reactions. One woman interviewer hated the character so much, she practically punched Thurman. ‘I said, well, have you never compromised a friendship because of love or passion? And she just said, no.’ She laughs a light, whinnying laugh. ‘She was one judgmental girl.’

So has Uma Thurman ever been dumped? ‘Have I ever been dumped?’ she echoes dubiously. ‘Um, I was sort of dumped. Probably been dumped a couple of times, actually. But I’ve been with one person now for such a long time that I’ve finally reached a pleasant amnesia about my previous awful encounters.’

But she remembered enough to draw on to play Charlotte? ‘Oh, sure, I recognised the hurt pride, the disappointment, the shock. The disentanglement of two people is usually much more brutal than “dumping” unfortunately. So, yes, I’ve had my share of emotional – what would you call them? – wrangles. But I’m not sorry for any of them, I think those things are very deepening and teach you so much.’

I raise a sceptical eyebrow at this Zen acceptance of pain and she laughs: ‘It takes a little while to get to that philosophical position of course.’

One of those useful miserable experiences came courtesy of Gary ‘If I wasn’t an actor I’d probably be a criminal’ Oldman, whom Thurman married when she was 20. The union of New Cross housing estate (him) and New World intelligentsia (her) lasted 18 months. ‘You try being married to an angel,’ complained Oldman to which Thurman might (though never would) reply, you try being married to a demon. The pair apparently have a pact not to speak about their time together, but some of Thurman’s spikier reflections are clearly from the heart. ‘When I was a teenager, damaged people fascinated me. I thought they were the deep ones – and I thought I was more interesting if I saw myself as damaged and difficult. I don’t know why.’ She shakes her head in disbelief. ‘You know, I really wanted to wear glasses. I envied glasses, I envied braces, I envied flaws, all those things that looked like challenges. And the relationships I was attracted to – God! – tall, dark, damaged and handsome. Later on, you get sensible – hey, how about picking somebody who really likes me or someone who I might really like, not just be enthralled by?’

Is she grateful she didn’t have a baby in her first marriage? She neatly sidesteps that one. ‘I couldn’t have had a baby before I did – I had a child when I was ready to have a child. Obviously, I’m glad I didn’t have one when I wasn’t ready – we’re talking degrees of catastrophe, really.’

Thurman is, by all accounts, a dedicated and loving mother. In the first year of Maya’s life, she and Hawke had no help at all – unheard of in starry orbits where babies have to phone Mummy’s secretary to fix a breakfast meeting. The actress gave some implausibly upbeat interviews, saying how sexy motherhood was, but I think a lot of that was Thurman trying to protect her image. Eye-witness accounts recall the movie goddess around this time with unwashed hair and big thick glasses – the telltale signs of the new mother who has no time for luxuries such as showers and contact lenses.

When Maya was just a few months old, Thurman went back to work in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown and enthused in print about how marvellous it was being able to combine career and motherhood. But James Ivory says she told him having a baby on set was awful. It was one reason she kept turning down The Golden Bowl. (She looks gorgeous in the Allen movie, but her mind does seem to be on other things, like the next feed probably.) Spiteful gossip columns have recently hinted at strains in the Thurman-Hawke marriage, but friends report no more than the normal wear and tear of new parenthood. ‘I would say that they struggled,’ says one man. ‘There were definitely some hard times for them, but they have come out the other side. They are actually incredibly gentle and solicitous with each other.’ Thurman is a little more open now about the difficulties. ‘I’m really glad we didn’t have anyone live in for a year, but it was very, very tough.’ It’s a vulnerable time for relationships, she thinks. ‘Isn’t it something like 50 per cent of all divorces happen in the first year of the first child? If you’re unsure about what you’ve done and who you’re with, you really won’t make it.’

I mention her new Lancôme contract and ask whether it was a way of buying time with her daughter. She nods quickly. Has she been tempted to give up work altogether? ‘Yeah, I’ve thought about it a lot. I haven’t worked since last November and I may work this November.’ I get the impression that the ideal acting assignment for the movie goddess right now would be a cameo appearance in a Hawke-family production in their own kitchen.

Thurman and Hawke got together on the set of Gattaca. They played flawed specimens – as if – in a perfect genetically engineered world. ‘If there’s anything wrong with you, I can’t see it from where I’m standing,’ said Ethan, gazing adoringly at the future Mrs Hawke (they married on May 1, 1998, in a Buddhist-Episcopalian ceremony). In one lovely scene at a piano recital, her character takes his hand. Had they held hands in real life? She laughs. ‘Not much before. We’d met a number of times, but we hadn’t fallen in love yet. It was quite shocking to me to fall in love. I was completely not beyond having an affair – I thought that was a great idea. But falling in love? I didn’t see it coming at all. I thought this is fun, and then bam!’

Known in tabloid shorthand as Heart-throb Hunk Hawke, Ethan is clearly a deeply unfrivolous young man. They are, Thurman admits, quite alike. Both hit the big screen early. ‘Ethan did a movie when he was 12 – so it’s amazing he turned out well.’ The couple live a bookish, anti-Hollywood life, dividing their time between New York – where Thurman (when in Huck Finn garb) can move around mainly unremarked – and a country house in upstate New York.

I am having such a good time talking to the goddess that by mistake I find myself congratulating her on not being at all like an actress. Er, what I mean to say is, you don’t give off those vibes of deep paranoia.

The blue eyes narrow slightly. ‘Oh, I suffer with paranoia. I try to combat it, although in this business paranoia’s often very legitimate. I like to think of my paranoia as accurate sensory instinct.’ She is teasing me, then suddenly changes tone: ‘This is an incredibly mentally corrosive business. It’s extremely hard not to succumb to your lesser self. Your low self.’

Hooray! The paragon has a lesser self. What does it look like? She’s not saying, but a producer later fills in the details: ‘Although Uma’s pretty down-to-earth there are aspects of fame she clearly relishes. She’s quite accustomed to the deference, the not having to stand in line, the ease of the highly elevated status. She likes the limos, the luxuries and she’s a very shrewd businesswoman.’ Is that all? What about enemies? ‘Let’s just say I wouldn’t leave her alone in a room with Gwyneth Paltrow.’

I put it to Thurman that her wonky career path suggests a certain ambivalence about success and she readily agrees. ‘I think that’s why I like to move laterally. I’m very comfortable sliding from side to side. I’ve been blessed to be able to do that. In movies, usually you either grab the mantle or you get out.’ In general, Hollywood extends much less licence to actresses than to actors; two flops and you’re out is the rule, but it doesn’t seem to apply to Uma Thurman. How can she walk away from the wreckage of The Avengers without a scratch? She says she thinks it’s OK as long as they don’t pin the failure on your performance. ‘I’ve never had that. Not that I haven’t been bad, but I’ve never been the coathanger of the blame.’ It’s a shrewd answer. Has she noticed any ill effects? ‘I don’t know if you can even imagine, Allison, how that manifests itself – it’s sooo cold, that nasty little Hollywood thermometer.’

And she’s felt the chill? ‘Oh, many many times.’ So even the high priestess of cool gets frozen out occasionally. Are there movies she looks back and cringes at? ‘I’ve made a point of not cringing anymore. When I saw The Avengers I was slightly relieved, to be honest. Does it have a story? No. Could it have had a story? Yes. Does the plot make any sense? No. But it’s not really much worse of a film than a lot of movies that make a hundred million dollars. It just didn’t appeal.’

Such plain-speaking is rare among stars; they all think this stuff, but none of them will say it – an established male might, but never a female in mid-career. I can’t make up my mind whether Uma Thurman started out fearless or whether becoming Uma Thurman gave her the confidence to lose the fear. Her background holds some clues. Her father, Robert Thurman, is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University, which is almost as cool as it sounds. Hailing from a moneyed Wasp background, he dropped out of Harvard and travelled to Tibet, where, in 1965, he became the first American to be ordained by the Dalai Lama as a Buddhist monk.

Returning to the States, he met the Swedish-born Nena von Schlebrugge, a model turned psychologist who was previously attached to LSD guru Timothy Leary. She married Thurman and they had four children: three boys and a girl whom they christened Uma Karuna (the first name means Middle Way). At the age of 16, Nena had been spotted in the school playground by photographer Norman Parkinson and swept off to become a Vogue cover-girl. When they come to film ‘The Uma Thurman Story’, though, I insist they begin with the statue of her grandmother, a baroness, which still stands in the Swedish port of Trelleborg. The statue is very tall, very beautiful and entirely naked.

With genes like these, a fully clad suburban life was never on the cards. ‘They’re very interesting people, my parents,’ muses Thurman. ‘We were taught to question everything, especially facts. You learned to defend your opinions.’ I’d noticed. Raised in Amherst and later Woodstock, two conservative East Coast college towns, she remembers always feeling ‘a bit weird. My father wasn’t a doctor, we didn’t drive a station wagon. And I think most children want their families to be just like everyone else’s, only a little better.’ The unfeasibly tall girl got teased – for her name, her religion (‘they said I would go to hell’), her clothes and her face. The one place she didn’t mind getting attention was in school plays, because that was for being someone else.

Thurman tends to play up her youthful hideousness. I think she genuinely felt like a gawky kid, but it also does the movie star no harm to defuse jealousy by making you laugh at her. ‘My features were too big and I had these kind of far-apart eyes which looked like I had two fish swimming in my ears. I was severely odd looking.’ She speaks now with the confidence of the screen siren, although I have to report she still has some of that oddity. On the day we meet, without her mascara, she has an almost aquatic look – it’s a haunting, creaturely face that could belong to a merman or a novice nun. What makes it remarkable is its tranquillity – an absorbent calm that can soak up 10 million fantasies and still look unravished. (Isn’t that what we want from our goddesses: innocence and experience, virgin and voluptuary?) ‘Uma is not conventionally beautiful,’ admits James Ivory. ‘But it’s an amazing face to work with. One moment, she can look like Marlene Dietrich, the next like Bette Davis.’ It’s true. Shimmering in a Prada column at a premiere, she is one of the few living actresses who can embody the flashlit glamour of the past.

Thurman was very aware of her mother’s beauty. Everyone talked about it when she was growing up. ‘I admired my mother, not because she was beautiful,’ she says, ‘but because she’s an incredible character. Painfully direct and honest.’ Still, it must have been hard to find herself looking more like her father. The young Thurmans were treated like mini adults by their gentle parents (a colleague of Robert Thurman describes him as ‘spookily saintly’). Uma, for her part, was desperate to grow up. ‘I didn’t like the powerlessness of being a child. So I was very precocious in that way.’ You can say that again. At the age of 15, she announced she was leaving school and went to live in New York where, using her mother’s contacts, she began working as a model. In an indecently short time, she got a break in movies and then came Dangerous Liaisons. Overnight, Uma Thurman became that crude cartoon we call sex symbol. She was 18 and in shock.

‘Sex turned out to be the currency of the world I was in, but I got into it when I was was pretty much pre-sexual. I’d had sexual experiences – isolated ones – but I still had tremendous crushes, fantasised about Prince Charming. When I came to New York, I wasn’t a woman, I was a kid with stockings on. It’s a terrifying period for any young girl. I dread the time my daughter is that age because there are a lot of men who prey on you.’ She startles me when she says that after her 21st birthday, men started to leave her alone for the first time. Why? ‘You’re just not helpless any more, so there’s a whole section of men that don’t take a shot because you’re too much trouble.’

A girl young enough to still have crushes had become the crush of the whole world. ‘Dangerous Liaisons is about more than my tits,’ snapped the new star irritably, but who was listening? Within a year, she was topping Playboy’s One Night Stands of the Decade. Hardly an accolade to take home to the Buddhist brainboxes in Woodstock.

When I ask Thurman what she had to react against in such a tolerant, laid-back upbringing, she shoots back: ‘Oh, intelligence. Don’t go to college. Go become an actress in Hollywood. Think about it, Allison.’ And then you could always go and marry Gary Oldman – how inviting all that darkness must have seemed to the enlightened young woman.

Dangerous Liaisons had made her hot, but Thurman just wanted a cooling-off period.

‘I curled up in a hole for a long time. I consistently turned things down that were by-products of that sex thing. I wasn’t able or interested in fulfilling that.’ She jabs her cigarette out. But it’s stuck, hasn’t it? All those slavering covers of lads’ magazines. ‘It’s just FODDER.’ She pronounces fodder with wintry contempt. It’s funny to think of this elegant, thoughtful woman being on anyone’s Hot Babes list: she is more Ellen Terry than Pamela Anderson.

So, the movie goddess has lived up to her advance billing. Nice? Evidently. Intelligent. Yes, dammit. And generous with her time – the promised hour has ticked over two and I know that around the corner a certain toddler is drumming her heels. She has been friendly, eager to help out, but there is still a sense of something kept deep in reserve. ‘I think what might be taken for superciliousness in her is a kind of quietness,’ one friend has suggested.

I suddenly ask Thurman if she’s shy and she blushes, which makes her look about nine years old. ‘Actually, very much so. Maybe that’s why people think I’m mysterious. Because I retreat. I don’t throw it out there. I would rather throw it out there more. I envy that kind of personality – the bravado. That’s what being on screen let’s you do.’

Like in Pulp Fiction? ‘Ah!’ she exclaims with delight. ‘That was the first time I really found it and it was thrilling. It was fun. Just to let loose like that, it was something I’d never done.’ Even if Tarantino doesn’t call again, let’s pray someone else offers her the chance to break out.

I think this is a tricky time for the career of Uma Thurman. Hollywood looks differently on an actress after she has become a mother. No surprise that the enduring sex kittens have remained childless – and often children – themselves. Thurman has always seemed more grown-up than those around her, as if she was privy to secrets which gave her a wisdom beyond her years. Like all enduring screen icons, she has held something back and audiences have craned forward to try to reach it. Her face now feels indispensable, like one on a medal or a vase in a tomb, but I wonder how long we will see it. As we leave the cafe, she admits she is thinking seriously about another baby. I know women face some difficult choices these days, but who would want to make hers: mummy or screen goddess? Uma means the Middle Way. I hope she finds it.