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Articles Source / Date: Harper's Bazaar June 1995 Title / Page(s): "Uma!" by Thomas Beller pp 110 Suddenly Uma Thurman's gone from art-house actress to Hollywood A-list. Thomas Beller finds the woman behind the hype. There is love at first sight. Then there is Uma Thurman at first sight, which is not the same thing, but which seems to bear some resemblance. Director Terry Gilliam once described the experience of first laying eyes on her as follows: "There she was, 18 years old, about six foot tall, and with a name that means 'goddess of love' in Nepalese.... It was extraordinary, just too good to be true." I first lay eyes on Uma Thurman with the ocean behind her and a cell phone pressed close to her ear. We are meeting at the slick Santa Monica hotel Shutters, a big gray shingled thing with white East Hampton trim. Her legs are bent a little, as though to concentrate. She doesn't speak, just listens attentively. Is someone bawling her out, I wonder, or is she calling her answering machine? Uma's hair is exceptionally blonde, pulled into a sloppy ponytail. Her sunglasses have lenses the size of almonds. She's wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and a black skirt trimmed with lacy frills that come down to mid-thigh. Below that is an expanse of leg, two long stems, and green sneakers with no socks. Her ankles are bony, her knees knobby. She holds the phone gingerly, its little black antenna sticking out behind her. She looks like a high-tech angel. "Uma?" I venture cautiously. She looks up with insouciance, in no rush, as though she's been playing in the backyard and has just been called in for lunch. "Oh, right!" she says. "Hi, come over here." The cell phone folds and disappears. She leads me to a table crowded with people. An ashtray with a mob of crushed cigarettes sits in the middle. It seems to be one of those heavy Hollywood meetings when all hell is breaking loose on a movie. A tattered script lies on the table. Its title: The Truth About Cats and Dogs, an upside-down Cyrano de Bergerac story that is Uma's current project. When I arrive, everyone at the table looks unhappy except her. I take out my tape recorder, and the sight of it sends everyone else into panic. In a moment we are alone. I order a drink. "You're drinking gin in the middle of the day!" she says with mock disapproval. A half-empty iced tea sits before her. "Are you nervous?" I explain that an afternoon gin and tonic is not unusual. "Are you trying to get me to drink?" "Are you that suggestible?" "I always take credit for being deeply suggestible," she says. "I think it's a positive attribute. I've been told it's not good, but I'll argue for it." She is, of course, being disingenuous, for if Uma Thurman has proven anything in her brief acting career, it is that she is willful. She seems to have an instinct for strange and unlikely roles. She played Sissy Hankshaw in Gus Van Sant's eccentric Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and in Gilliam's Adventures of Baron Munchausen she materialized as a goddess naked on a huge scallop shell. In the midst of her current fame, she continues to accept un-Hollywood parts. After The Truth About Cats and Dogs finishes shooting, she may take the title role in Marlene, the life story of Marlene Dietrich, to be directed by Louis Malle. When we meet, Uma has just completed the Ted Demme - directed Beautiful Girls, a movie with a large ensemble cast that includes Timothy Hutton and Matt Dillon. And this summer she appears as a standoffish English nanny named Miss Beaumont in John Irvin's adaptation of H. E. Bates' novella A Month by the Lake. Here, too, her role is a supporting one, but then she is supporting Vanessa Redgrave. Irvin speaks of Miss Beaumont, who wears a thin strand of pearls and white gloves, with words that could apply to Uma as well: "The person she sees in the mirror is not the person everyone else sees. She likes taking risks and starting out on adventures." Uma's adventures in real life began early. She is the 25-year-old daughter of Robert Thurman, a theology professor at Columbia University who is an international authority on Buddhism and a host to the Dalai Lama when he visits this country. Thurman met Uma's mother, Nena von Schlebrugge - a top Scandinavian model in the '70s who went on to become a psychotherapist - while she was still married to her first husband, Timothy Leary. Not yet 19 years old, Uma was the subject of one of the more scrutinized nude scenes in recent memory, when in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) she lifted her nightgown over her head while John Malkovich's wolfish count sat beside her in bed, licking his chops. Though breasts are not exactly a scarce commodity in movies, those few seconds caused a stir because Uma somehow managed to combine desire with hesitation, perhaps even guilt, with desire winning out; she captured that moment when the butter hits the hot pan. But she reacted to her developing career as a sex object as though a fire had broken out, and promptly took a nine-month sabbatical from Hollywood. She went off to London and ran around. She married Gary Oldman. When she returned to moviemaking, she used a body double in her role in the unremarkable thriller Jennifer 8 and performed her brief nude scene in Mad Dog and Glory with great reluctance. "She hated the idea of being a sex symbol," says Steven A. Jones, who coproduced Mad Dog and Glory. "We cast her because of her strength - physical and emotional. When she auditioned, she literally threw De Niro out of the doorway. She's not someone who wants to trade on her looks. She's not like Sharon Stone." It is interesting how often Sharon Stone comes up in conversations about Uma. Stone is used as a kind of anti-Uma, an example of what Uma isn't. Uma's cantankerous mentor Harvey Weinstein, cochairman of Miramax Films, explains it as follows: "Sharon brings her sexiness to bear; she plays her parts that way. Uma's not that tan beautiful girl that Hollywood does so well. She's too intelligent. If she ever did one of those packaged sorts of movies, she would have that look on her face: 'What am I doing here?'" The film most responsible for Uma's notoriety is, of course, last year's Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction was a rising tide that lifted a lot of boats very high, including Uma's. "Uma was perfect," says Lawrence Bender, who produced the film. "There's something about her eyes, a directness. When she says, 'I want to dance, and I want to win,' it just feels right. John Travolta has no choice." For her performance as a mischievous gun moll, Uma received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. While Dianne Wiest took the prize with Bullets over Broadway, Uma mesmerized the audience in a creamy floor-length Prada gown. She seemed like a swan who had glided into the awards for a quick look around. "You're expected to hold yourself up as some kind of gladiator going into the Colosseum," she says of the experience. "I had the wrong bra on under my dress, so the bra kept riding up in the back. That's what I spent most of the time worrying about." True to her comments about suggestibility, Uma moves on to beer. A Dos Equis, poured into a fat glass. Her hand envelops it. She has hands like fireworks, spreading out with vast range and eye-catching delicacy. "I wasn't very attractive when I was young," says Uma. "When I was 15, I did some madely things, but my mother had been a really successful model, so I didn't think that was impressive. And besides, I wasn't pretty like a model. I was funnier looking. I didn't have a perfectly photographically benign face." Is a perfectly photographable face benign? "It is!" she says. "The nose is particularly small. It's a kind of petite homogeny, yet exquisite, There's very often not much character in the face. I always had a lot of character in my face." Uma was born in Massachusetts, but her mother is Swedish and German. Her father, she says, has "thrown off certain Western conventions." As a result, Uma's rebellious stage was inverted. "I went through a fiercely American phase. I was a cheerleader. I did everything I could just to f--- with them. When I brought pom-poms home, I smiled proudly, and my mother just looked like she was going to faint. Not that I was any good at it," she adds. "I only did it for one summer and could never remember the cheers, so I was like, 'Kick go, kick go, shake, shake.' That should be my autobiography: Kick Go Shake Shake." Strange facts keep tumbling out in Uma's conversation, weird bits of knowledge that suggest someone who is widely read: the name of the German lieutenant colonel who tried to assassinate Hitler (Van Stauffenberg), or the political and cultural contortions behind the Chinese occupation of Tibet, an issue Uma and her father are closely associated with through Tibet House, a New York City organization. She's worldly, and her worldliness extends to her sense of femininity. "At one point I realized I had taken as much from my mother as I could, but that I just didn't have the sensibility of a European woman. I very much had the American baggage of womanhood - there was an incredible amount of Christian guilt and neuroses that leaked into me." The notion of Uma as European as opposed to American is intriguing. "When I first started casting the Sissy Hankshaw part, I had in mind a freckled, blonde-haired sort of character," says Gus Van Sant. "Uma's looks made the character more exotic. She has a serene, European face, as opposed to my initial conception of the role, which was closer to a Geena Davis." Uma is philosophical about her looks, "All this focus on appearance is fine; it's the costume of life. But it's so temporal. All great beauties will become aged, and then they won't be great beauties anymore. All great muscle men will have breasts that sag and hair on their lower backs." I ask if she finds Arnold Schwarzenegger attractive. "I don't. I think he is an extraordinary creature; his relationship to himself is amazing. He's a creation, not a natural being. It's hours of effort and, I guess, drugs. It's like someone making themselves into their own work of art." We stagger out onto the beach, blinding sun in our eyes. The wind is up. I'm awkwardly holding my tape recorder in the air like a tired Statue of Liberty, and she relieves me of it and stuffs the small black thing between her breasts. We walk along next to the water, at first shying away from the waves and finally giving up and getting our feet wet. Eventually, I take the tape recorder back. I hold it for a while, then she holds it. We walk along, passing our space-age baton back and forth, a low-key relay race. Uma gives a running commentary on what we see. A single black sneaker: "Where's the person?" A young blonde girl standing at the edge of the water, wind blowing her hair back. She's maybe five years old, and naked. "Oh, look!" says Uma, "She's wearing a heart around her neck I used to wear hearts." I glance sideways and catch her face in repose. Uma's natural expression seems a statement of two perfectly opposite ideas: Life is boring; life is fascinating. The two emotions flitter across her face like the shadows of fast-moving clouds. She carries herself with the air of a tomboy, which, as the only girl among four children, she says she was. She occupies her body with the unsteady and vaguely ominous grace of someone driving a fast car at half speed. We walk past a couple kissing madly. "Oooh," she says. "Doesn't that give you the chills?" Then she adds, "lt's kind of molesting to the public. There is a lot of aggression in exhibitionism." We walk past another solitary shoe, this one white. We walk for what seems like hours. When we turn around, it becomes apparent that the wind has been more or less behind us, and now our heads duck down as we fight our way back. The sun has begun to go down, and the day has taken on a golden hue. Eventually we get under the Santa Monica Pier, a huge wooden structure that juts about a hundred yards out into the ocean. It becomes quieter and calmer. "Under the boardwalk," says Uma. "At last." Fragments of wood are tossed onto the beach and then pulled back by the water, leaving one or two pieces behind with each wave. The pieces get bigger as we walk along. "lt's like coming onto the scene of a tree murder," she says. In spite of the crashing waves, it seems peaceful, almost spiritual. I broach the subject of her marriage with Gary Oldman, which lasted two years and whose breakup was hotly followed by the tabloids, but Uma is noncommittal. My notion of their relationship is haunted by one image: the two of them sitting at the Odeon in New York City, engaged in a game of double solitaire. They sit, flipping cards wordlessly. Uma met Timothy Hutton during the intensive 12-hour-a-day shooting schedule for Beautiful Girls. Their prolonged and very public embraces at a post-Oscar party and elsewhere were like statements of intent: We're a couple. Thus, when I bring up the subject of relationships, she is full of tentative optimism. "It never works until something works," she begins enigmatically. "And when it doesn't work, which is most of the time...." "Don't you find there is something kind of satisfying about feeling devastated periodically?" I ask. "Yeah!" she says. "Not that one would ever go out of one's way...." "Some people do," she says. "I've made choices that, when I look at them, I think I must have wanted to learn something about hurting to have made them." Then she turns to me and asks a long question: "Do you ever think you've forgotten how to be with someone else, that you have become so trained in your autonomy, that you have become so trained in your awareness of getting in and getting out, that you've lost your capacity for submersion into another person?" She pauses and looks out to the sea. The setting sun is catching the frothy waves. A gnarled piece of wood washes up, glistening an unbelievable bright red. She bends over it. It's a huge tangle, unrecognizable as any one part of a tree, a knotted mass of parts. "It's absolutely gorgeous," she says. "God, it's stunning. It looks like a heart, doesn't it?" Just then the setting sun dips a notch, and the underside of the pier is flooded with light. The huge wooden pillars, the thrashing waves - it's like a cathedral done in gold leaf. Uma's hair and face and skin become luminescent in the sunlight. Waves crash against her shins, and she stands with this gnarled glistening red thing cradled in her arms, concentrating as though deep in thought. "A heart washes up," she says.