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Uma Karuna Thurman (born April 29, 1970)
is an Oscar-nominated American film actress. She
performs predominantly in leading roles in a variety of
films, ranging from romantic comedies and dramas to
science fiction and action thrillers. She is best known
for her films directed by Quentin Tarantino. Her most
popular films include Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Pulp
Fiction (1994), Gattaca (1997) and the two Kill Bill
movies (2003–04). She is currently the
"face" of Virgin Media in the United Kingdom.
Biography: Thurman was born in Boston,
Massachusetts. Her mother, Nena Birgitte Caroline von
Schlebrügge (b. 1941), was a fashion model who was born
in Mexico City, Mexico to German nobleman Friedrich Karl
Johannes von Schlebrügge and Brigit Holmquist, who was
from Stockholm, Sweden. Thurman's father, Robert
Alexander Farrar Thurman, was born in New York City to
Elizabeth Dean Farrar, a Scots-Irish American and a
stage actress, and Beverly Reid Thurman, Jr., (of
English and Dutch descent) an Associated Press editor
and U.N. translator. Thurman's mother who was briefly
married in 1964 to LSD guru Timothy Leary after the two
were introduced by Salvador Dalí; she married Thurman's
father in 1967.
Thurman's father, a recognized scholar and professor at
Columbia University of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies,
was the first westerner to become a Tibetan Buddhist
monk.[citation needed] He gave his children a Buddhist
upbringing: Uma is named after an Uma Chenpo (in
Tibetan; Mahamadhyamaka in Sanskrit, meaning “Great
Middle Way”). She has three brothers, Ganden (b.
1971), Dechen (b. 1973) and Mipam (b. 1978), and a
half-sister named Taya (b. 1960) from her father's
previous marriage. She and her siblings spent extended
amounts of time in Almora, India as children, and the
Dalai Lama would sometimes visit their home.
Since Professor Thurman moved between various
universities, the family often relocated when Uma was a
child. She grew up mostly in Amherst, Massachusetts and
Woodstock, New York. Thurman is described as having been
an awkward and introverted young girl who was frequently
teased as a child for her large frame, unique angular
bone structure, unusual name (sometimes using the name
“Uma Karen” instead of her birth-name), and size 11
feet (Thurman's famously large feet would later be
lovingly filmed by Quentin Tarantino in the films he
made with her). Even friends made a point of
highlighting her unusual features -- when she was ten
years old, a friend's mother suggested she receive a
nose job.
Although these unique physical attributes would later
make her beauty iconic, these childhood attentions may
have led to her bouts with body dysmorphic disorder, a
syndrome involving a disturbed body image, which she
discussed in an interview with Talk magazine in 2001.
Thurman attended Northfield Mount Hermon, a college
preparatory boarding school in Gill, Massachusetts,
where she received her first acting experiences in
school plays. She was unathletic and earned average
grades in school, but excelled in acting from a young
age. It was after performing in a production of The
Crucible that she was noticed by talent scouts, and was
persuaded to act professionally. Thurman left her high
school to pursue an acting career in New York City and
to attend the Professional Children's School where she
dropped out before graduating.
Career, Early works, 1987–1989: Thurman began
her career as a fashion model at the age of 16, when she
was discovered at a Stockholm playground. She signed
with the agency Elite Model Management. Uma followed in
the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, who were
also fashion models. Standing six feet tall with a
naturally lanky frame, Thurman was an immediate success,
and her modeling credits included Glamour Magazine and
Vogue. In 1989, she appeared on the cover of Rolling
Stone magazine, for the annual “Hot issue”.
Thurman made her movie debut in 1988, appearing in a
total of four films that year. Her first two were the
high school comedy Johnny Be Good and the teen thriller
Kiss Daddy Goodnight at the age of seventeen, but both
films were only marginally successful and failed to gain
her notice. Thurman’s next role was in the film The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen, playing the goddess
Venus alongside Oliver Reed’s Vulcan. During her
entrance Thurman briefly appears nude in a homage to
Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus. With a
budget of $46 million USD and box office receipts of
only $8 million, the film was a commercial failure,
although it has since gained an enthusiastic cult
following.
Her fourth role, as Cecile de Volanges in Dangerous
Liaisons, was her breakthrough role, which brought
Thurman to the attention of the film industry and the
general public. Actresses Glenn Close and Michelle
Pfeiffer earned Oscar nominations for their
performances, and Thurman drew an inordinate amount of
attention for a topless scene in which she appeared.
Garnering the lion’s share of attention proved too
much for the shy, insecure 19-year-old who thought she
was funny-looking,[6] and she fled to London for almost
a year, during which she wore only loose, baggy
clothing.
Soon after the release of Dangerous Liaisons, magazines
and other media outlets were eager to profile the
actress. Thurman received praise for her professionalism
from her co-star John Malkovich, who said of her,
“There is nothing twitchy teenager-ish about her, I
haven’t met anyone like her at that age. Her
intelligence and poise stand out. But there’s
something else. She’s more than a little haunted”.
Major works, 1990–1993: In 1990, the
19-year-old Thurman co-starred with Fred Ward in the
sexually provocative drama film Henry & June, the
first film to receive an NC-17 rating. Because of the
film’s restrictive rating, it never played in a wide
release but would attract more attention to Thurman’s
career. Critics embraced her in her first leading role,
The New York Times wrote, “Thurman, as the
Brooklyn-accented June, takes a larger-than-life
character and makes her even bigger, though the
performance is often as curious as it is commanding”.
Thurman’s first starring role in a major production
was 1993’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (directed by
Gus Van Sant), although the film was a misstep for her
being a critical and financial disappointment (Thurman
was even nominated for a Worst Actress Razzie). The
Washington Post described her acting as shallow, writing
that, “Thurman’s strangely passive characterization
doesn’t go much deeper than drawling and flexing her
prosthetic thumbs”. Thurman also starred opposite
Robert DeNiro in the crime drama Mad Dog and Glory,
another box office disappointment. Later that year, she
auditioned for Stanley Kubrick while he was casting a
movie to be called Wartime Lies, which was never
produced. She described working with him as a “really
bad experience”.
1994–1998: After Mad Dog and Glory, Thurman
auditioned for Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
Tarantino originally had no intention of casting her,
after seeing her performance in Glory, but ultimately
decided to cast her after having dinner with her: “And
Uma and I were doing that scene. We were living the
movie, all right? I left thinking… God, she could be
Mia!” Pulp Fiction would become one of the most
successful cult hits of all time when it grossed over
$107 million on a budget of only $8 million USD. The
Washington Post wrote that Thurman was “serenely
unrecognizable in a black wig, [and] is marvelous as a
zoned-out gangster’s girlfriend”. Thurman was also
nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar the
following year.
Entertainment Weekly claimed that, “of
the five women nominated in the Best Supporting Actress
category this year, only [Thurman] can claim that her
performance gave the audience fits”. Thurman also
became one of Tarantino’s favorite actors to cast,
whom he described in a 2003 issue of Time:
“[Thurman]’s up there with Garbo and Dietrich in
goddess territory”.
Films of varying quality and success followed Pulp
Fiction. She starred opposite Janeane Garofalo in the
moderately successful 1996 romantic comedy The Truth
About Cats & Dogs as a ditzy blonde supermodel. In
1998, she starred opposite her future husband Ethan
Hawke in the dystopian science fiction film Gattaca.
Although Gattaca was not a major success at the box
office, it drew many positive reviews and became
successful on the home video market. Some critics were
not as impressed with Thurman, such as the Los Angeles
Times which stated she was “as emotionally uninvolved
as ever”.
The two biggest film flops of Thurman’s career came in
1997 and 1998. She played Poison Ivy in Batman &
Robin, the fourth film of the popular franchise. Batman
& Robin was a large failure at the box office and
became one of the largest critical flops in history.
Thurman’s performance in the campy film received
mainly mixed reviews, and critics made comparisons
between her and actress Mae West. The New York Times
wrote, “like Mae West, she mixes true femininity with
the winking womanliness of a drag queen”. A similar
comparison was made by the Houston Chronicle:
“Thurman, to arrive at a ’40s femme fatale,
sometimes seems to be doing Mae West by way of Jessica
Rabbit”.
The next year brought The Avengers,
another major financial and critical flop. CNN described
Thurman as, “so distanced you feel like you’re
watching her through the wrong end of a telescope”.
She received Razzie Award nominations for both films.
She closed out 1998 with the powerful tale Les Misérables,
a film version of Victor Hugo’s classic novel of the
same name, directed by Bille August, in which she played
the role of Fantine.
Hiatus, 1998–2002: After the birth of her first
baby in 1998, Thurman took a rest from major roles to
concentrate on motherhood. Her next roles were in
low-budget and television films, including Tape, Vatel,
and Hysterical Blindness. In 2000 she narrated a
theatrical work by composer John Moran titled,
"Book of the Dead (2nd Avenue)" at The Public
Theater. She won a Golden Globe award for Hysterical
Blindness, a film for which she also served as executive
producer.
In the film she played an excitable New
Jersey woman in the 1980s searching for romance. The San
Francisco Chronicle review wrote, “Thurman so commits
herself to the role, eyes blazing and body akimbo, that
you start to believe that such a creature could exist
— an exquisite looking woman so spastic and needy that
she repulses regular Joes. Thurman has bent the role to
her will”.
2003–present: After a five-year hiatus from any
major film roles, Thurman returned in 2003 in John Woo's
film Paycheck, followed by her next collaboration with
Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill. Paycheck was only
moderately successful with critics and at the box
office, but Kill Bill relaunched her career.
In Kill Bill she played one of the world's top
assassins, out on a revenge quest against her former
lover. She was offered the role on her 30th birthday
from Tarantino, who wrote the part specifically for her.
He also cited Thurman as his muse while writing the
film, and also gave her a formal joint credit for the
character of Beatrix Kiddo, whom the two conceived on
the set of Pulp Fiction from the sole image of a bride
covered in blood.
Production was delayed for several
months after Thurman became pregnant as Tarantino
refused to recast the part. The film reportedly took
nine months to shoot, and was filmed on location in five
different countries. The role was also her most
demanding to date, and she spent three months training
in martial arts, swordsmanship, and Japanese.
The two-part action epic became an
instant cult classic and scored highly with critics. The
film series earned Thurman Golden Globe nominations for
both entries, and three MTV Movie Awards for Best Female
Performance and twice for Best Fight. Rolling Stone
likened Thurman to “an avenging angel out of a 1940s
Hollywood melodrama”. In the same article, she was
quoted as saying the training was so difficult, and the
harm done to her character before she recovers and sets
out on her vengeance quest was so vicious, "It
should have been called Kill Uma!"
The main inspirations for “The Bride” were several
B-movie action heroines. Thurman's main inspiration for
the role was the title character of Coffy (played by Pam
Grier) and the character of Gloria Swenson from Gloria
(played by Gena Rowlands). She said that the two
characters are “two of the only women I've ever seen
be truly women [while] holding a weapon”. Coffy was
screened for Thurman by Tarantino prior to beginning
production on the film, to help her model the character.
By 2005, Thurman had become one of Hollywood's highest
paid actresses, commanding a salary of $12.5 million USD
per film. Her first film of the year was Be Cool, the
sequel to 1995's Get Shorty, which reunited her with her
Pulp Fiction castmate John Travolta. In the film she
played the widow of a deceased music business executive.
Later in 2005 she starred in the film Prime with Meryl
Streep, playing a woman in her late thirties romancing a
man in his early twenties.
Thurman's last film of the year was a
remake of The Producers in which she played Ulla, a
Swedish stage actress hoping to win a part in a new
Broadway musical. Originally, the producers of the film
planned to have another singer dub in Thurman's musical
numbers, but she was eager to do her own vocals, however
it has not been confirmed if she performs all of the
vocals in the film. She is credited for her songs in the
credits.
With a successful film career, Thurman once again became
a desired model. Cosmetics company Lancôme selected her
as their spokeswoman, and named several shades of
lipstick after her (these were only sold in Asia). In
2005, she became a spokeswoman for the French fashion
house Louis Vuitton.
On February 7, 2006, Thurman was named a knight of the
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France for outstanding
achievement in the field of art and literature.
In May 2006 Thurman bought the film rights to the Frank
Schätzing novel "The Swarm", which is now in
development and due for release in 2008.[28]
Her most recent movie, co-starring Luke Wilson, is My
Super Ex-Girlfriend which was released on July 20, 2006
in Australia, and on July 21 in the United States.
Thurman stars as a super-heroine named
"G-Girl" who is dumped by her boyfriend and
then takes her revenge upon him.
Personal life, Relationships and family: While
living in London to avoid the Dangerous Liaisons hype,
she began dating director Phil Joanou, who had just
produced U2’s movie Rattle and Hum in 1988. While
visiting the set of his latest project, State Of Grace,
she met English actor Gary Oldman. The two hit it off
immediately — even Joanou later said it was obvious
that she and Oldman were meant for each other, so he
stepped aside.The two were married in 1990, but the
marriage only lasted two years, reportedly caused by the
little time they spent together due to their busy acting
schedules.
On May 1, 1998, she married actor Ethan Hawke, after the
two met at the set of Gattaca; he subsequently dedicated
his novel ("To Karuna"), to her. Prior to
their engagement, Hawke had proposed twice before she
accepted. Thurman herself acknowledged that they married
early on because she had become pregnant; at the time of
their wedding she was seven months along. The couple
have two children, daughter Maya Ray (b. July 8, 1998)
and son Levon Roan (b. January 15, 2002).
In 2003, Thurman and Hawke separated, and in 2004 they
filed for divorce. Many news outlets reported that the
cause of the divorce was because Hawke had cheated on
Thurman with Canadian model Jen Perzow, after he had
suspected Thurman of cheating on him with Quentin
Tarantino. Hawke denied that the cause of the divorce
was infidelity, saying that it was caused by their busy
work schedules. In a 2004 Rolling Stone cover story,
both Thurman and Tarantino denied ever having a romantic
relationship, despite Tarantino once having told a
reporter, “I’m not saying that we haven’t, and
I’m not saying that we have”. When asked on The
Oprah Winfrey Show if there was “betrayal of some
kind” during the marriage, Thurman said, “There was
some stuff like that at the end. We were having a
difficult time, and you know how the axe comes down and
how people behave and how people express their
unhappiness”.
She currently resides in Hyde Park, New York. In 2004,
she began dating New York hotelier Andre Balazs. At one
point, they lived in a loft apartment in New York City's
SoHo neighborhood, down the street from Balazs’s
Mercer Hotel. Thurman also owns a townhouse in the New
York neighborhood of Greenwich Village.In March 2006,
Thurman’s publicist announced that the couple had
split. However, they continued dating on-and-off
afterwards and are reunited as of October 2006.
Politics and opinions: Thurman also dedicates
herself to a variety of political and social causes and
interests. Thurman is a supporter of the United States
Democratic Party, and has made donations to the
campaigns of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joseph
Driscoll. She is a strong supporter of gun control laws,
and in 2000, she participated in Marie Claire’s “End
Gun Violence Now” campaign. She also participated in
Planned Parenthood’s “March for Women’s Lives”
to support the legality of abortion. Thurman is also a
board member of the New York- and Boston-based
organization Room to Grow, a charitable organization
providing aid to families and children born into
poverty. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees
of the Tibet House. |
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