| | | | |
|
 |
|
|
"...today's paper will no longer wrap tomorrow's fish."
Uma is her own Almighty, her own Pygmalion, and, let's not forget,
Frankenstein. Whichever, Uma happily regards herself as her own work of
art. Though if she is indisputably her own auteur, she may be the only
piece of very-late-twentieth-century art whose provenance is not under
dispute.
Her career trajectory has a certain familiarity, with a twist: Stunning beauty arrives with a splash, then strives to avoid sexual objectification. But instead of seeking refuge in more obvious entertainments, she has tended toward the more precincts of the art film. She has been compared to screen legends like Dietrich, Garbo, and Bacall. Like those sirens of Hollywood's Golden Era, Uma projects a Sphinx-like allure: it's not so much that she's beautiful (though she is) or that she's talented (though she is), but she shares with them a magnetic aura of self-possession, youthful sophistication, and intelligence. She has been called the "thinking man's sex symbol" and has appeared as Venus, a virgin, and a junkie, so that label can be taken any number of ways. She first made a splash as the bodice-ripping convent girl in Dangerous Liaisons, caused controversy in the NC-17 rated Henry & June, and gained international attention when John Travolta stabbed her in the heart with a hypodermic needle in Pulp Fiction. That role gained her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress in 1995 and launched her career into outer space. Uma Karuna Thurman (her name is that of the Hindu goddess of love, "Uma" translates into "bestower of blessings") was born in Boston in 1970 and raised in Woodstock, New York, at her father's bohemian retreat, and grew up on Amherst College campus in Amherst, Massachusetts-the only daughter among three sons: Dechen (Actor, director, born 1973), Ganden (born 1968), and Mipam (born 1978), who are also named after Hindu divinities. The family's karmic are soon deduced: Uma's father, Robert A.F. Thurman, is a professor of Asian religion (the nation's leading authority on Buddhism and named one of Time's 25 Most Influential Americans in 1997) and the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk (he has long since renounced his monastic life and is currently chairman of the religion department at Columbia University). Her Swedish mother, the former Nena von Schlebrugge, is a former model now psychotherapist who was once married to psychedelic guru Timothy Leary (also her godfather). Her maternal grandfather, Baron Karl von Schlebrugge, was jailed by Nazis in World War II for not betraying Jewish business partners. Her maternal grandmother, Brigit Holmquist, was a famous Swedish beauty who posed for a statue in Trelleborg. Finally, her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Farrar, was an actor. Her first schooling began in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she attended Wildwood Elementary (1975) and Amherst Regional Junior High School (1982).   Yearbook Photos (L to R) - Kindergarten & Grade 7 She went to the tiny boarding school Northfield Mount Herman, in Massachusetts. Uma's unconventional upbringing didn't exactly make fitting in with her peers easy; she has described herself as a gangly and awkward child who was mercilessly teased for her peculiar name (which she made a habit of changing regularly to more commonplace names like Kelly and Linda in an attempt to be accepted) and for being ugly and weird. Though she tried to join in all-American pursuits like cheerleading (her mother got the vapors over that one), Uma became increasingly drawn toward acting after receiving her first smattering of applause as a ghost in an elementary-school play. Determined to be an actress, she attended the Professional Children's School in Manhattan. At fifteen, she began to show signs of what her mother diagnoses as "the family restlessness" and left school to move to New York City and become an actress. Touching down in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, Uma supported herself by washing dishes.
Her next film was the crude teen comedy Johnny Be Good (1988) in which she took on the thankless and implausible task of playing Anthony Michael Hall's girlfriend. "People keep telling me that Johnny Be Good would be important for me, and I kept saying, 'It's not important,'" she recalls. But it was Thurman's performance (and her much noted nude scene) as the convent-raised virgin prey of John Malkovich in Stephen Frear's Dangerous Liaisons (1988) that launched a publicity onslaught that threatened to turn her, in her own words, into "cultural girlfriend of the week."
Aghast at the media frenzy ignited by her bodice-ripping performance, Uma fled to England and rejected a flood of offers. She stopped acting for nine months. She began to develop a reputation for playing erotically charged roles. During that period of time, she strived not to be typecasted as a "damsel in distress" or bimbo as most directors felt that was all she was worthy of being. That explains why she chose roles that were strong and that meant starring in low budget independent films. She was poised yet vigorous, and her transformation from virtouse ingenune to uninhibited teen is wickedly amusing; it tapped into the dichotomy that both her next two major films focused on, there is a woman so beautiful she is almost untouchable; unknowable certainly. Yet it transpires she is no goddess, but a woman more in need of intimacy than worship. This was the essence of her role in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989) (co-starring Eric Idle, Sarah Polley, Robin Williams), she emerged from an oyster as no less than Venus, adorned by Oliver Reed's Vulcan king, but all too ready for a dalliance with John Neville's Baron. Thurman's part was too brief here to get much beneath the surface - a waltz through the air and she was gone - but it distilled an impression of her as the most captivating of young actresses, the only one who might usefully follow von Sternberg's advice to Dietrich, "Don't just do something, stand there!" It wasn't long before the fair damsel was coaxed back into Hollywood's clutches. And some of her subsequent roles only extrapolated her relatively modest schoolgirl-turned-wench cover-rumpling in Dangerous Liaisons:
She gave the role a curious, abtruse hard-headedness and thick New York accent that contrasts bluntly with the effete sensuality shown by Nin. Not her fault that Kaufman's bathetic script and self-consicious visuals left her stranded in a fog of vaseline. Uma counterbalanced her steamy, uninhibited performance as June with roles in thoroughly innocuous mainstream fare like Final Analysis (where she was almost thrown away in the Hitchcokcian Final Analysis (1992). It centered on her relationship between her shrink (Richard Gere) and her sister (Kim Bassinger), but she seized her moments as the disturbed cunning schemer.), Jennifer 8 (1993) (co-starring Andy Garcia), and Mad Dog and Glory (1993) (co-starring Robert DeNiro and Bill Murray), films in which, more than anything, she decorated the scene with her eccentric beauty.
Her hit-and-miss parade continued with a performance in the period comedy A Month by the Lake (1995) (co-starring Vanessa Redgrave), where she said "I'd rather have a less flashy part in a piece that could be excellent. It's not about me being ahead of myself or me playing some ingenue--which is so boring, and I'm far too old for it." That film was her "last ingenue part ever. I enjoyed the hell out of it," she continues, "because I knew I was doing my last. I loved that movie so much. It was like I had perfected 'ingenue' for myself." She also starred in a much unknown film 4 Tales in 2 Cities (1995). Then she followed it up with a string of Generation X-ish comedies like Beautiful Girls (1996) (co-starring Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, and Rosie O'Donnell) and The Truth About Cats and Dogs (1996) (co-starring Janeane Garaffalo), In that movie, when Noelle tells Abby that she's "just the body," the bookstore cashier that replies "And what a body it is" is none other than Uma's brother Dechen! Wack. For the most part, Uma has showed discriminating taste in directors (John McNaughton, Philip Kaufman, Gus Van Sant, Tarantino); she certainly appears to appreciate the company of mavericks.
Since her Oscar nomination, movie roles have been coming in, especially the big studio types. Observe. See her in the sci-fi Gattaca in the fall of 1997 with Ethan Hawke; as Fantine, the factory worker-turned-hooker in the upcoming film version of Les Misérables, where Liam Neeson and Shine star Geoffrey Rush co-star; and as leather-clad Emma Peel in The Avengers, a big-screen adaptation of the British television series which starred Patrick Macnee. Ralph Fiennes plays dapper government agent John Steed, and Thurman would play his counterpart. Sean Connery also stars as the villan. Gattaca costar Ethan Hawke proclaimed that "Uma's best quality is her frightening intelligence." Through it all, she continues to do justice to the words stunning, gorgeous and ethereal, even in the severe gray suit she wears on Gattaca's Los Angeles set. But in her dressing room, her heels kicked off while microwaving a bowl of soup, Thurman manages to seem like one of the girls--albeit a striking, sharply intelligent, 5-foot-11 specimen of a woman. Obviously, Gattaca is a sci-fi flick, but it's also a murder mystery, right? "It's a murder mystery where no one gives a damn about the victim," explains Uma. "But his death disrupts others' lives. It's really about an impostor and whether my character should expose him. Does he have the spirit and will and good fortune to survive a paranoid society in which he is not who he says he is? It could have been a love story, but it's not." Uma describes her character as this: "I'm a fellow astronaut who is some rungs down from the man Ethan pretends to be. She's from a well-off family, but she didn't have the genetic ingredients right in her own concoction and is leftwith the high possibility of a heart condition. I see her as a 19th-century heroine. She lacks a genetic dowry, and that condemns her to spinsterhood--not unlike some women in Jane Austen's books. She's isolated and clearly haunted by her condition. One of the poetic differences between Ethan's character and mine is she believes she'll die at 60, and there's no hope beyond that. She feels condemned by it, and yet totally accepting of it. He's supposed to die much earlier, but he fights it with every bone in his body."
Now, as Fantine in Les Miserables released in May 1998, she plays another iconic role -- a poverty-stricken working class woman
forced into prostitution to support her beloved daughter. Dying from consumption, Fantine entrusts the care of her child Cosette to
Valjean, the man who nursed her through her illness and with whom she shares a tender, unspoken bond.
Why did she take this role? "Well, it's a great part," explains Uma. "And I've always wanted to work with Bille
August -- I've been sort of after him for a long time in my mind as one of the directors that I thought was really artistic and special. I
try to work with those kind of people, try to get them to hire me. He offered me this part and I felt that I had some insight into it. I
felt that [she] was a beautiful character, a beautiful person who had a legitimate, poignant, traumatic historical experience."
And how did she find working with Bille? "I think he's a great director," she says. "I think he's a very good director for
me. We had a short working time together because [Fantine] had to die.
But I really felt as it went on that we had some sort of understanding. I think he looks for the truth in performing. He's not
easily satisfied. He's not the most communicative person, which is
usually the sign of a good director, [one] that doesn't ever overspeak
or overstep. They leave things alone but provoke what they're looking for."
What was it about Fantine that she related to? "She is in a way a very progressive character," Uma explains. "This novel, when Victor
Hugo wrote it, was one of the first big indictments of the societal
treatment of women. What makes it interesting is she's not just a
victim [who] accepts her fate and gets whacked around and feels
Big risks? Great victories? Check these following examples... The woman who refused to be typecasted into roles that made Demi Moore and Sandra Bullock superstars is finally coming on her own. She uses her talents to garner roles only other $12.5 million actresses dream of. She is definitely one of Hollywood's hottest young stars.
As for her view on nudity, a recent interview with People had her say this: "Particularly in this country. I started out sort of healthily indifferent and artistic about [nudity]. Certainly not interested in sex-ploitation movies -- even if they looked like blockbusters. [Laughs] But artistically I had to look towards what was the right thing. So it's a real struggle. It's appropriate if the spirit of the entire film is the right spirit, [not if] you're doing a movie where you think it would be artistically good to do a scene nude but you feel that it would be exploited by the studio in an unpleasant manner and sold so that some guy will go "Heh heh! Let's go! She's nude in this one!" [Laughing] Gross! Who wants to be a part of that? I remember I was having this poignant moment, watching a Mel Gibson movie in some midtown theater and they started having a love scene. This was not even a hot steam thing, this was just your obligatory now-they-have-sex intro. And this row of guys right below me [shouted], "F*** her, Mel!" [Cracks up] I was truly flabbergasted. We all have these discussions about what's artistic and what's not, and here the bottom line is a bunch of goons in a theater screaming at the screen like at a football game. What do you do?" After that kind of experience she felt "turned off. [You think], 'Well it better be a real art movie. And it better have a real low budget.' It's artistic justification that you have to feel. [In] Les Miz there's a scene with the landlord which is suggestive. And I said to Bille, "I don't want to be coy and cheap about it." 'Cause just as much as that, I hate movies where you see someone who's supposed to be dying [or] has just been sexually assaulted and they're in a brand new pair of white panties and a really prissy little lacy bra. It's too coy and it becomes obnoxious. It becomes obviously about the actress, not about the piece. So there's always a balance -- that can't be found. [Laughs]"
Despite her attempts to guard her privacy, Uma's love life has been a prime public interest ever since her rise to fame in Dangerous Liaisons. She has been connected to everyone she is seen in public with. One could say that being in the tabloids is the price for being famous. I, on the other hand, say "Who gives a f---! Just make good movies dammit!" As for her new role as Emma Peel in The Avengers, her view on the "Emma Peeler" catsuit was hilarious: "I've had the latex experience with Poison Ivy. You can't put an actor through more unpleasantness than latex." How did she feel working on the movie and the topic of selling out? "I have very fond memories of The Avengers with one leap I became international from being a classical actress on the boards. My peers viewed me with a certain amout of disdain becaise I'd gone common, commercial. But now that's being done all over the place. Emma Peel never did me any harm. In fact she has deon me nothing but good. Yeah, wait till it bombs sez Da Player Haterz! At 28, Uma is embarking on an entirely new role: after working steadily since her late teens, she was pregnant with her first child, Maya Ray (born in July 8, 1998), and quietly married the baby's father, actor Ethan Hawke, 27, in an intimate ceremony on May 1st in New York City. Uma made it clear that, for the foreseeable future, her creative urges will be focused on motherhood, rather than Hollywood. But who's gonna pay the bills? Ethan?! Yeah right. Early 1999 has seen Uma back in the spotlight as she returns to work. She completed work on Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (which also stars Gretchen Mol). Then she did work off-Broadway as Alceste's coquettish love in the Classic Stage Company's production of Moliere's The Misanthrope (source: USA Today). It was updated to modern London and ran from Valentine's 1999 and closed two weeks later. Why? Bad reviews. In April 1999, Uma began work on the $36 million production of Roland Joffe's Vatel. It stars Gerard Depardieu as the title character, who was the master chef during the reign of Louis XIV. After that, she will work with Merchant Ivory for the period piece The Golden Bowl which also stars Nick Nolte and will reteam with Dangerous Liasion writer Christopher Hampton for The Custom of the Country based on the 1913 novel by Edith Wharton. Uma plays the lead Undine Sprass, who is called "one of the most ruthless heroines in literature." Hampton also directed the feature. From epics to the year 2000 and beyond, roles reversed. Ethan was nominated for an Oscar in a supporting role for his role in 2002's Training Day. Meanwhile, Uma starred in indie flicks - Tape a three cast ensemble (the other being Robert Sean Leonard from The Last Days of Disco) based on the play Tape and is directed by Dazed and Confused's Richard Linklater - who also directed Ethan in that modernnversion of Hamlet. It was filmed in four weeks; Chelsea Walls - Ethan's directorial debut set in a New York hotel. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001 and opened theatrically April 19, 2002 in New York. It co-stars Kris Kristofferson and Steve Zahn. Also throw in "Hysterical Blindness" for HBO where she and Juliette Lewis played two New Jersey girls search for love and meaning. She managed to fit in child bearing and her gig at Lancome...but an old friend was calling... In 2002, the reunion of Tarantino and Thurman finally materialized. The one-two punch that launched a million college walls with the ultra hip cool poster backed by the ultra hip movie. Tarantino had penned Kill Bill - the ultamite revenge film fronted by a Woman just for Uma - who also contributed to the story on the set of Pulp Fiction. The project would include the likes of Gordon Liu, Yuen Woo-ping, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, with location shoots in Beijing and Tokyo. Set for a 2003 release, things have come full circle as Uma regains her dominance amongst the elite, focused solely on working with the best people (Paycheck's John Woo, also reuniting with John Travolta in Be Cool), and setting trends in her own dominant way. Uma may be a little disheartened to see no one challenge her self-authorship while people are fighting over a piece of shit. But there's a simple reason for this. When it's truly art, the artist is obvious. Word. |
Tao of Uma!: All About Uma! - Profile Unleashed January 5 1998
Someone must have noticed - she began modeling at 16, as her mother had
done years before when she was fresh off the boat from Sweden. Uma loathed
her cover-girl aping, and, luckily, she didn't have to work at it long: at
sixteen, she landed her first leading assignment--as a young vamp who
seduces men to rob them--in the low-budget thriller Kiss Daddy Good
Night (1987). Inglorious as this debut may have been, Uma managed to garner
the only favorable notice granted the utterly forgettable film.
Dangerous Liasons was the prestigious mainstream film of the year, it had
an incredible cast: John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Glen Close. As
Cecile de Volonges, a virgin corrupted by Malkovich's Valmont, she earned
reviews as good as any of them.
In Phillip Kaufman's Henry and June (1990), her third major costume film,
saw her once more as an onject of beauty struggling to become a subject. Her
June Miller, a bisexual Brooklynite, obsesses both Henry (Fred Ward) and
French writer Anais Nin (Maria De Medeiros). Between them, they feverishly
penned thousands of torrid pages about their encounters with her. The film
became something of a cause célèbre for its strong bisexual content, which
nearly resulted in the film receiving an X rating (it was finally released
with an NC-17 rating, a first in the film industry).
She went back off the beaten track when she agreed to appear as Mia Wallace,
the gangsta's wife, in Pulp
Fiction (1994) (co-starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and Bruce Willis). It is her most successful movie to date grossing over
$200 million and ressurrected her career. Her initial reservations about the ultraviolent content
were overcome by meeting Quentin Tarantino and being encouraged by his
"painterly" vision of underworld brutality. When Tarantino had dinner with
Uma at the Ivy restaurant in L.A., he felt that he had met the Mia of his
subconscious, the only character he had ever written with no other
particular real-life person in mind. Uma's agent had put her up for the part
of Honey-Bunny. It was a sensitive period for Uma, who had a miserable time
on the set of Mad Dog and Glory, where crew members had ogled her
nude scene and she had felt like a slab of beef.
For the big needle scene the script call for her to rise with her arms
forward like a character from Dawn of the Dead or Dracula.
But Uma recalled hearing about an over tranquilized tiger that was revived
with adrenaline and "just went ballistic"; she insisted that Quentin let her
try it that way. "The rehearsal was really a scream," she says. "At first
Quentin wasn't really too into this idea, and he said 'Well, just show it to
me. John [Travolta] punched an imaginary needle through my chest, and I just flew across
the room like the Tasmanian Devil, just like it is in the movie! I scraped
my knees up and I think I cracked Rosanna Arquette in the chin with my
knee. When I did that, they all just scattered." (Source: Jami Bernard - Quentin Tarantino)
Her black nail polish and black wig set off the Vamp look. For her performance as the
heroin-sniffing moll-with-it-all, Thurman snagged her first Oscar
nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Pulp Fiction was her first
and so far only blockbuster, grossing $213 million world wide.
Add Joel Schumacher to that list. In early 1996, after meeting with
Schumacher in New York, she emerged with the role of Poison Ivy, who kills
her enemies with a kiss, in the fourth installment of the Batman series,
Batman & Robin - beating out Julia Roberts and Demi Moore. She'll
be joining a cast that includes Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze
and George Clooney as Batman, where she entices Clooney's Bruce Wayne away
from his fiancée, played by Elle Macpherson, and Chris O'Donnell's Robin.
So, where does Poison Ivy--"a vicious tart killer" I think she called her--fit in?
"I chose Batman & Robin because I had never made a movie like that," she replies, "a bizarre, pop-culture Kabuki
movie with larger-than-life, ridiculous characters. It was an experiment. I try to sample
different genres. Do I sound defensive?" Yeah.
miserable about it. There's something strong and stubborn in [her]
character that probably brought trouble down on her. She doesn't
really think that she was wrong for falling in love. She doesn't
really think that her child [Cosette] is a worthless, filthy bastard.
She thinks her child is beautiful and loves her and is somehow
secretly proud of her. And so she doesn't fully buy into the whole
party line that suppresses her. And it's that stubbornness and that
independence of mind that I think brings down such hard punishments on
her socially. There's a vanity and a pride to this woman. She doesn't see herself as worthless.
What was interesting about the character is that she has faith in love, she has responsibility,
she has convictions. And they protect her, they shield her. She stays
clean on some level, deep down. She accepts it all socially. But her
love is pure. It's like a white light in the character."
Uma seemed a natural choice for the part of Fantine
because she can effectively convey the nuances of
the intricate relationship between Fantine and Liam Neeson's Jean Valjean.
"Uma Thurman shares many of Fantine's qualities," says director Bille August.
"The character is a very open human being with a big heart, but she is also a
very profound person who lives a very complicated life. Throughout her
professional career Uma has dared to take big risks and, in most cases, won
great victories. In Uma's interpretation, Fantine has become an extremely
subtle and moving character."
Her intelligence stands out among her peers, even strong female actresses
Michelle Pfeiffer or Winona Ryder. For example, when a topless Uma Thurman was photographed last January by a sneaky paparazzo
while on a beach in St. Barts in the Caribbean and sold the photo to Playboy
for its September 1996 issue - she did nothing. Her shrewd decison not to sue caused
a lack of publicity. "If she had filed suit--I mean, she would've lost it
anyway since the shots were taken on a public beach--sales would have been
better," says a New York Daily reporter. Call it sweet revenge for Uma.
"I'm so contrary that probably you're just saying that I'll go find some [small stories]," she
says on the subject of carrying a small movie with her big star name. "I keep
being compelled to do the opposite thing I did last time. Now I'm
having a baby, so I'm not doing anything. I wish there was a whole
salad bowl of opportunities that I could just flip through and always
pick the best of the best. It's not really the truth. You're always
reacting to something in your career, [though] from the outside it
doesn't necessarily seem that way. So I don't think anything will keep
me from making small movies if the movie industry can keep making
small movies. Even the small independent movie companies don't want to
make small movies. Forget about me, they want a big blockbuster star before they even go ahead."