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Articles Source / Date: Cosmopolitan August 1995 Title / Page(s): "Uma Thurman: every man's numero uno" by Garry Jenkins pp 156 When John Malkovich met Uma Thurman, he said he saw "the body of Jayne Mansfield and a horrifyingly great brain." Quentin Tarantino called her "a twenty-three-year-old with the soul of a forty-year-old woman." But it was Gary Oldman, her ex-husband, who came up with the most poetic description. He thought she was a real-life version of the character she played in one of her earliest movies, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He likened her to Venus, the Goddess of Love. After they split, he explained away the rift by shrugging his shoulders and saying, "You try living with an angel!" Call me superficial, but when Thurman's heavenly body first wafts its way into the hotel room where I am about to talk to her, my initial impressions are pretty much in the same vein as Oldman's. She might be bereft of any obvious makeup and look like she's been sleeping in the ill-fitting, fawn-colored ribbed jumper and flared trousers she is swathed in, but she is frankly as close to heaven as I've seen on this earth. John, Quentin, Gary, and I are not, of course, the only pathetic males to have fallen under Uma Thurman's siren spell. I can also count Robert De Niro and Richard Gere as soul mates in this particular case. And after her star turn as the wife-sitting-assignment-from-hell in Pulp Fiction, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the Uma Appreciation Society started getting fan mail from the farthest reaches of the Milky Way. Did the Machiavellian marketeers behind Tarantino's killer comedy know exactly what they were doing when they plonked her fabulous features on the main poster for Pulp Fiction or what? Sure, most of us would have gone to the movie if it had been John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, or Harvey Keitel on the boards. But the image of a horizontal Uma, wearing a jet black wig and an is-that-a-Kalashnikov-in-your-pocket-or-are-you-just-pleased-to-see-me look was, I can tell you, absolutely irresistible. As she sits talking about career and Hollywood--running long, manicured fingers through her ash-blonde hair, crossing and uncrossing endless legs, and unself-consciously firing up a succession of king-size cigarettes--her every word comes as a breath of eccentric, breezily bullfree fresh air. She reminds me of the sexiest screen woman of them all, another combination of looks and laser-sharpness who only needed to whistle to make a man weep: Lauren Bacall. To begin with, Uma doesn't accept that she has an image of any kind: "Image to me is Cher, Madonna, even other actresses like Julia Roberts. They have a much stronger media presence. I don't have that." And she is adamant that there is no way she's ever going to become a piece of movie decoration. "There are actresses who are very, very famous and very, very well paid, who basically make fashion movies. Their job is to wear Alaia dresses. I haven't been attracted to that," she says scaldingly. Given such strong convictions, it should come as no surprise that Uma's career has not been totally blissful. She admits to there being times when directors have wanted to concentrate on her looks and little else. "It's hard sometimes if you think a character should look a certain way and you're being pushed to do it differently. I've had fights over that," she says. "That's why it's so important that you work with good people," she adds. It took her a while to get to the good people. After leaving home for Manhattan at fifteen, Uma followed her mother into modeling but loathed the work with a passion. "I found it a very uninteresting way to spend time. Modeling is basically 'Buy more stuff! Don't you want some more stuff? It will make you look ten years younger and men will like you!'" she says, drawing heavily on another king-size, almost spitting the words out. "If I'd wanted to be a salesperson, I would have got a job selling." Thurman had known she wanted to act since "before age was important," she says. After an inauspicious start in a movie called Kiss Daddy Good Night and an equally go-no-where performance in Johnny Be Good, she got her first big break at the age of eighteen when she was cast as Venus in Terry Gilliam's Monty Python spectacular The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Indeed, Gilliam was one of the first to fall for Uma. "She looks as though she floated down from the clouds," he said. Englishman Stephen Frears shared this view and quickly fitted her out in charm-enhancing corsetry in his sexy screen version of Dangerous Liaisons. Playing a young virgin initiated into the darker arts by a rampant John Malkovich, Thurman, even though a novice, shone as bright as Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer. After that, Hollywood--and most of the rest of the world--was besotted. She followed Liaisons with another arty film, this time Philip Kaufman's saucy Henry and June, about the sexual escapades of novelist Henry Miller. Uma played his wife, with whom the woman writer Anais Nin had an affair. Then there was a weepie called Where the Heart Is; also the silly thriller Final Analysis with Richard Gere and Kim Basinger; a dire TV version of Robin Hood, in which Thurman played Maid Marian to Patrick Bergin's Sherwood Forester; Jennifer 8 with Andy Garcia, in which she portrayed a terrorized blind girl; Mad Dog and Glory, a quirky comedy-drama in which Uma took the role of a barmaid presented to Robert De Niro as a "gift" by hoodlum Bill Murray. And just prior to Pulp Fiction came Gus Van Sant's movie version of the Tom Robbins cult novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, in which Uma played a lass with a pair of unfeasibly large thumbs and a gift for hitchhiking that transported her into a lesbian love affair. De Niro and Gere were among the costars Thurman supposedly developed "close friendships" with. But as she passed through the eye of her stormy early career, it was another actor who held center stage: one Gary Oldman, a man of considerable charm. Uma and the South Londoner were wed in September 1990 after a dizzying romance. But only one year later, from the moment the fast-burning Brit was arrested for drunk driving after partying the night away with close friend Kiefer Sutherland, the marital bonds began to buckle. When the couple's divorce was finally announced, a friend of Oldman's admitted that "Gary will always be crazy. It takes a special kind of woman to put up with him." Uma just wasn't that kind. When I first mention Oldman to her, Uma's eyes drift off into space--or somewhere. I tell her that I was due to visit her and Gary on the Welsh set of the movie they were making about Dylan Thomas, but the day before I got there the couple had disappeared, Oldman allegedly in a state of near nervous collapse, never to return. "That was..." she says, her voice trailing off. She arches an eyebrow and shrugs her shoulders as the sentence hangs there. She never finishes it. Although Thurman describes the breakup as the most difficult period of her life, her family was there to see her through it. Uma's mother is clearly a huge influence. "She's a great woman. In the fifties, she was a successful model. She left Sweden for America, where she became an independent woman. She got her degree when she was in her early forties," Uma says. The mother's skills as a psychotherapist unquestionably helped the daughter graduate from the university of life, but according to Uma, "she never tried to brainwash me or anything like that. We didn't lie on the couch." After the divorce, Thurman did what her father's pal the Dalai Lama would have counseled: She wandered off into the wilderness and just breathed the air. "I didn't feel light for a while. The girlish laughter had gone. But now things are getting better," she says, smiling serenely. "Freedom is the key to that." For all the hard times she went through with Oldman, however, reminders of her time with him fail to break the present serenity of mood. She says he is still a friend and is complimentary about his work. Her carefully chosen words, though, give another clue to the roller-coaster ride she'd been on: "He's a fine actor. Anything he plays, he'll play with ridiculous, manic professionalism and excellence." As a recovering divorcee, Uma relished her freedom. "I spent most of my time traveling. I was totally independent--just getting up and leaving everybody behind and flying off from one day to the next without stopping," she says. India held a particular fascination for her--a fascination she still retains. "It's so real. But I'm not horrified by reality," she says. "There are people with their noses falling off from leprosy. But I don't scream and then go running off to Bloomingdale's." Thurman also went through a period of trying to distance herself from the film business--mainly, she admits, because life with Oldman and the pressures of having too much too soon had almost driven her insane. "I'd taken on a lot of high-stress roles, and that exacted a toll. I started very young, and I've always been independent and tried to do everything myself," she says coolly. "I was naive in my own way. I didn't get it--I was taking on too much all the time. I reached a point where I realized all that and it was difficult. "The film business can turn you into an infant. You become addicted to the telephone and talking to your agent all the time. It takes a lot of courage to break free from that, and it was a slow process for me, but I'm there now," she explains. Her last outing, in Pulp Fiction--which surely had to be the hippest, highest-profile movie of 1994--most certainly sped up that process. Uma's inventive performance as mad Mia, the moll with a Molotov-cocktail temperament and a terrible habit of sticking her nose where it shouldn't be, landed her a first Oscar nomination. It also placed her name on every casting agent's Give-Her-What-ever-She-Wants list. And so this month, we will have the pleasure of seeing Uma Thurman interpose herself between Vanessa Red-grave and Edward Fox while vacationing in Italy in A Month by the Lake, a pre-World War II lyrical comedy. This to be followed by Beautiful Girls, about a tenth-year high-school reunion, also starring Matt Dillon and Timothy Hutton (with whom Uma has been linked romantically in recent months). Also upcoming on the Thurman agenda: The Truth About Cats and Dogs, which is a comedy with overtones of Cyrano, and a film version of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. Ask Uma Thurman what lies ahead after all that and she will once more slip into space: "I like working when I'm working, but I could live without it. Work is one thing, and then there's the other thing--real life. That's the thing I'm working hardest at right now." As she stabs the remnants of another king-size into an ashtray, picks her sublime superstructure out of the chair, and prepares to ascend to Olympus or wherever it is she comes from, she shares one last philosophic tidbit: "I think it's more honest to think that you don't know what lies ahead. I'm free--that's enough right now," she says, offering a handshake and unloosing a Venusian smile.