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Articles Source / Date: Cosmopolitan November 1993 Title / Page(s): "Sensual, Mysterious Uma Thurman" by Ellen Stern pp 238-239+ When you've played Venus and a virgin, the cello-playing prey of a murderer and bed-hopping wife of Henry Miller, what's the big deal in acting a bisexual cowgirl born with excessively large thumbs? Absolutely none, says actress Uma Thurman. "It's a job." As is this lunch, at a chic Tuscan restaurant in New York's Greenwich Village. But before she tackles the task, Thurman orders spaghetti. "Do you have any that is not freshly made?" she asks a baffled young waiter. He smiles, wanting to be sure he understands. She explains that fresh pasta is actually less digestible than the dry packaged stuff. Ah. The pasta, he assures her, is packaged. Good. She will have it. With a fresh tomato sauce. But it must be real sauce and not diced tomatoes. Done. Just like a superstar. Which Uma Thurman is, almost. She gets good, and increasingly top, billing. She gets to the big boys (Robert De Niro, John Malkovich, Andy Garcia, Bill Murray). One of these days, she may even get a blockbuster movie. Meanwhile, she is in even Cowgirls Get the Blues, opening this month. Directed by Gus Van Sant, who did Drugstore Cowboy and Gus, Van Private Idaho, the film stars Thurman as a model named Sissy Hankshaw born with colossal thumbs-thumbs that on anyone else would be a deformity but that Sissy plies like Picasso his brush, DiMaggio his bat. Wide-eyed and open to adventure, she hitches her way to the Rubber Rose Ranch out West. There she encounters the head ranch woman, Bonanza Jellybean, played by Rain Phoenix, sister of River Phoenix. Seemingly ill-suited, Sissy Hankshaw and Bonanza Jellybean nevertheless fall in love--which means, in a movie of this sort, that they have some cuddling-by-the-campfire to do. Inscrutably, Thurman calls her character "sort or presexual," but that doesn't keep Sissy from leaping into the saddle with this gap-toothed cowgirl. Not that this is the first time Thurman has gone in for same-gender sex on-screen. Uma followers will remember that three years ago she played the bisexual wife of male writer Henry Miller and lover of female writer Anais Nin in Henry & June, and that when asked by People magazine about her private life, she snarled, "What? Do you think I'm a lesbian?" Okay. But how did she handle such love scenes? Were they difficult for her? "I don't have any moral judgments." she says. "If that's what the character does, is interested in, that's part of the deal." She falls silent as she allows the enchanted young waiter to grate fresh Parmesan upon her spaghetti. then continues. "The physical barrier is always awkward to cross. It's one of the most difficult things, even with a man. Who wants to touch someone you don't want to touch you? It's especially difficult if you don't like the person and you don't want that person's hand on you." (She will not name the person or persons she means.) "Bisexuality isn't tough. You just do the job." (According to Rain Phoenix. however, the job was eased somewhat by "a few shots of Jack Daniel's--to warm the cockles. We tried to make it fun and giggly. because it wasn't as if we had to take each other's clothes off. It wasn't hard-core or anything.") Thurman is twenty-three. and an April baby--but no fool. When she was eighteen, John Malkovich, who had just seduced her in Dangerous Liaisons, called her "a very haunted girl. much too bright for her age. She has this Jayne Mansfield body and a horrifyingly great brain." Presumably, then, she knows what she means when she says or sissy Hankshaw, "She's not a reactive, interactive, average human being like you and me but has a very Zen perspective, reflecting Tom Robbins's multicultural worldview." Why Thurman chose to hitch a ride on this particular vehicle. based on a particularly offbeat novel by Robbins, may not be so surprising, given the alternatives. Uma Thurman is, for some, an acquired taste. She's a siren but not a sexpot; a goddess, not a Madonna. As for her art, that, too, is special. "She's a great actress, but she isn't comedic." director Brian De Palma said a few years ago, after declining to cast her opposite Tom Hanks in Bonfire of the Vanities. "She didn't have the comic timing--you either have it or you don't. Tom's a natural comedian, and he wasn't able to play off her." If she's not besieged by the juiciest offers, it's probably wise of her to blame it on the material. "Most films these days are men's stories," she complains. "Women are for add-on romance. That's very hard." The observant, nomadic Sissy, of course, is another story. Thurman understands her; she has itchy thumbs herself. Born in Boston and nurtured in Cambridge, where her further was a graduate student at Harvard, she developed her own multicultural worldview as a child living in Amherst, Woodstock, and India--twice.. While she maintains vivid memories of India and "a deep, romantic feeling for New England--where the seasons are melodious. the way they go together" and where she, like Sissy, occasionally hitchhiked)--New York has become her home. Her parents and three brothers also live there. Her father, Robert Thurman, is chairman of the religion department at Columbia University. Her Swedish-born mother, Nena, now a psychotherapist, was once a model. And Thurman was once an ugly duckling. She discovered this one day in kindergarten when a classmate said he didn't like her nose. "I had to go to a mirror and look at it," she remembers. "I couldn't picture myself in my own head. I had no image beyond a stick figure." She pauses. "I wasn't a mean person as a kid, or dumb." she says wistfully, "and something has to be said to justify excluding you." Gawky and unpopular, she was further cursed by a funny-sounding name although, ironically, "Uma" means "bestower of blessings" in Hindi). So she changed it every now and then, from Kelly to Linda to Karen. Not that it helped. She read, rode her bike. played with one doll and the dollhouse her mother built for her, and tagged along with her brothers when they'd permit it. In the fourth-grade Christmas production at the Embassy School, in India, she was given the role or a ghost, with ten lines to speak. Thurman found her future when she was captivated by the sound of applause. She was happy on horses--identified with them, "long, thin-legged, graceful in an awkward. lumbering way. They seemed so noble, so liberated and strong." She ponders, then opens a pack of Marlboros. (What? Our Lady of the Digestible Pasta smokes?) "Penis envy was nothing I ever understood," she suddenly says, "except that boys could do things we couldn't. They were liberated and strong." It is interesting, therefore, that she chose to portray the phallic-fingered Sissy Hankshaw. And, when you consider Tom Robbins's description of the character in his novel, almost inevitable: "Many things had changed in Sissy Hankshaw's world, including her own physical image. Suddenly. in the seventeenth year of a life that had begun with a doctor's double take and a nurse's gasp, she had become lovely. A perfect compromise finally had been worked out between her predominantly angular features--high cheekbones, classically fine nose. fragile chin, peaceful blue eyes--and her decidedly round mouth--a full pouty mouth," the author wrote in 1976, as if he had Thurman in mind. With beauty came her own liberation and strength. Beauty transported her from solitude to modeling and New York's Professional Children's School. Beauty gave her small roles in small films--such as Kiss Daddy Goodnight (when she was seventeen) and Johnny Be Good--and then bigger roles, such as Botticelli's Venus in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Beauty delivered her but then became a nuisance. "It's so surface," she grumbles of Hollywood's obsession with the external, "and so idiotic." The emphasis on her exterior came with Dangerous Liaisons in 1988. Greeted with a roar of approval for her sensual, bare-breasted performance as Cecile, the fifteen-year-old virgin seduced by John Malkovich, as the reptilian Vicomte de Valmont, an outraged Thurman fled to England. "I turned work down," she says with a pout and a puff. "Literally took my foot out of the pool." She was offended by "the sleazy aspect" and, apparently, by being considered "the new flavor-of-the-month girl. The worst thing is getting something for nothing. Whether hype or that the movie makes a lot or money, you're cheating. You have to do what makes you honor yourself. I was nineteen, a growing actress: I had just done this film with great people. I was interested in building a body of work, not in being some media idea of `young womanhood.' It made me sick. It was like empty calories. a whole lot of cotton candy. and I just didn't want to eat it." Nor does she want to eat her spaghetti, which she dismisses with a graceful wave of her normal-thumbed hand. "I went through a dry period," she continues. "I wasn't on the top of anyone's list. I was out of the picture for a while." (What did she do in England during that time? Don't ask.) Then, in 1992, Final Analysis presented her as Diana, the enigmatic patient of Richard Gere and kid sister of Kim Basinger. It wasn't a big part, and it wasn't a big hit, but Thurman was back in the big time. Last year's Jennifer 8, in which she played Helena, a cello-playing blind witness pursued by a serial killer, was a box-office disappointment, as was this year's Mad Dog and Glory. As Glory, an "indentured servant" owned by Bill Murray and given as a gift to Robert De Niro, Thurman looked weary and wary; she feels she played the part "with every ounce of confusion, indignation, stress, duress, and upset at Glory's situation. She was a very unhappy person. She looked rattled, with dark shadows under her eyes. But I didn't play her like a sniveling rape victim. I didn't like the story, but abuses happen." So do marriages, and Thurman's happened quickly. After three years together, she and English actor Gary (Dracula) Oldman wed in September 1991 but split a year later, amid rumors about Oldman's heavy drinking. Their divorce became final this past April and so, seemingly, did any discussion of it. "I love him very much," she says now, and that's all she will say. And what will she say of De Niro, with whom she has been seen on the town and in the tabloids? Not much. Is she truly his "squeeze," as she has been labeled in print more than once? "We're pals," she claims, without a blink. "We go to dinner, have a chat." She also denies liaisons with former costars Gere (who nevertheless shares an affinity for Buddhism and the Dalai Lama with her father), Malkovich (who is "generous, kind," and definitely not the rat he has been called by others), or anyone else. Thurman, too, is called generous and kind--as well as "very wise and very, very focused"--by costar Rain Phoenix. "She's a great lady. I really looked up to her," says the twenty-one-year-old, who watched in awe as her mentor spent two hours every morning having prosthetic thumbs applied. When the cowgirls let their hair down at night, they hung out in Thurman's Redmond, Oregon, condo "drinking tea, beer, or wine; smoking; and just talking about childhood, family, the cold, whatever." But what intrigued Phoenix even more was that she and Thurman were both healthy eaters. (At that point, Thurman was doing macrobiotics.) So much for tofu and brown rice. These days she makes her own non-macrobiotic egg rolls. She also invents her own superstitions. When she used to ride, she'd have to hit the fence with her crop ten times--and remember to do it ten different times. Her current, quite serious belief is that she cannot go back, once she has left a place, to get something, and has therefore abandoned any number of books, bags, and cellular phones. And so she looks ahead. She plays no instrument, dances no dance, lifts no weights. But she is learning to ski and snowboard, thinking about studying marine archaeology, and trying to sell her New York apartment and buy another, and about to start shooting Pulp Fiction, a new film written and directed by Quentin (Reservoir Dogs) Tarantino. Her role as a mobster's wife, we hear, is sexy and comedic--which will surprise a lot of people, including Brian De Palma. Lunch is done, and she is off, down the street, drifting away, a pedestrian goddess wandering west. Although, contrarily, she likes to describe herself as a "tall, sandy blonde, with sort of blue eyes, skinny in places, fat in others. An average gal," she's anything but. A head turns as she passes, and Uma Thurman bestows a splendid smile. She has been recognized, and recognition is, of course, what it's all about. No matter what she says, no matter what she suffers, she is clearly pleased ... even if it is for her body, and not for her body of work.