Catching up with Uma Thurman

A smile is Uma Thurman's umbrella. She's shed 50 pounds, learned kung fu, mastered the samurai sword and stars in the new movie Kill Bill. Yet it's not all sunshine.

By Jamie Malanowski

"She's like Clint Eastwood in the body of a beautiful woman."

Most actresses, especially those past their 20s, complain that there aren't enough good roles for women, that the parts that are available aren't substantial. Not Uma Thurman.

After back-burnering her career for several years to concentrate on marriage and motherhood, Thurman, 33, is in the picture again with one of the season's most thrilling films, written just for her. Thurman has reunited with Quentin Tarantino, the director who, in 1994's "Pulp Fiction", provided her with her most indelible screen role. It's literally a comeback with a vengeance: In "Kill Bill", Thurman plays the Bride, an assassin bent on revenge after being left for dead at a wedding chapel massacre. Thurman describes it as "a massive B-genre epic" -- "Kill Bill" will be released in installments; the second volume opens in February -- and even after living for a decade with the project, she still seems awed by its ambition.

The saga weaves together elements of Japanese samurai movies, chopsocky flicks and classic spaghetti westerns, heavily dosed with Tarantino's signature outrageousness and humor. It may turn out to be the director's magnum opus. Thurman's Bride stands to join our most memorable female action-film icons, right alongside Pam Grier and Sigourney Weaver's Lt. Ripley in the "Alien" movies.

However, Thurman's big moment is being overshadowed by some offscreen drama. A few weeks before the tabloids announced that her marriage to Ethan Hawke was in trouble, I visited Thurman not far from their rambling farmhouse in New York's Hudson River Valley. It was a stifling August day, and Thurman had recently returned from Canada, where she had completed a thriller, "Paycheck", with Ben Affleck. She took the part almost like a cool-down exercise after a workout: "I was too wrought up after "Kill Bill" to just go home."

Thurman is not the type to have hobbies or a five-year plan. As a screen personality, she always has been a little more cool and little less cuddly than the Meg Ryans of the world. That might explain why Thurman didn't let on to me that her marriage was on the rocks. (Her press representative stoutly denied a split was in the offing.) She didn't discuss Hawke, 32, at all, refashioning innocent questions about him into opportunities to talk about the challenges of balancing home and career.

"We work like hell at our marriage'' is about all she would say.

Thurman seems like a gentle sort: soft-spoken, elegant and languorously intellectual. She's not an actress you associate with the part of a predatory martial-arts expert. Yet Thurman serves as a muse to a director whose idea of comic relief is a torture scene scored to Stuck in the Middle With You. Much as a teenage girl would write "Mrs. Justin Timberlake" a hundred times in her notebook, Tarantino scrawled "Uma Thurman is going to 'KiLL BiLL'" on the cover of his script.

"He was drawn to her from the moment she auditioned for Pulp Fiction," says Tarantino's producer, Lawrence Bender. "You could see it in his eyes."

The Bride was proposed in 1993 during the filming of Pulp Fiction, when the director and the actress went out to dinner. "We started talking about revenge movies, and I started talking about this character, the Bride, and very quickly we [came up with this idea] and got all excited," Thurman recalls over a plate of eggs Benedict drowning in hollandaise sauce. "Quentin immediately went off and wrote eight pages of it, and we both agreed it would be our next movie."

Instead, the caffeinated pop-culture auteur went off to make Jackie Brown, and Thurman appeared in several films, the most memorable of which, Gattaca, stands out because she fell for co-star Hawke. The couple married in May 1998 and immediately set about building a family. They have fashioned a bohemian, nearly Hollywood-free existence, raising their two children -- daughter Maya, 5, and son Levon, nearly 2 -- between their country home and an apartment in Manhattan. They surround themselves with a wide circle of creative types: artists, writers and, of course, actors.

In a way, their lives resemble the one Thurman's parents provided for her and her three brothers. Her dad is a professor of Asian religions; her mom is a model-turned-psychotherapist. The family moved quite a bit, spending stretches in Boston, India and an artist's colony in New York. "I miss Massachusetts," she says. "There's something nice about the people there: good, liberal, solid."

Thurman has been acting half her life. She's been nominated for an Oscar (Pulp Fiction), has won a Golden Globe (HBO's Hysterical Blindness) and has had her pick of roles, directors and leading men. But even after 24 feature films in 15 years, it's nearly impossible to pin her down in a neat little category. "I believe in change," she says, then laughs. "I've always been willing to lean forward and fall on my face."

But the responsibilities of motherhood have forced Thurman to make sure the parts she takes are in films she really believes in. "There was never a question of whether I wanted to play [the Bride], in the way I usually question whether I want to," she says. "It was more a question of whether I wanted to undertake this journey."

The Bride has expertise you don't learn at the Actors Studio. Preparing to play her took three months of training in a variety of martial arts, including samurai swordsmanship, and filming spanned nine months in four countries. To complicate matters, Thurman was pregnant.

"I called to tell her I'd worked out the shooting schedule," Bender says. "I told her, 'After your delivery, we've allocated eight weeks for recovery, and then we begin shooting.' 'Lawrence,' she said, 'I'm not baking a loaf of bread here.' " Between the rigorous training and the vigorous filming that followed, Thurman dropped 50 pounds.

"I don't know how she did it," says co-star Vivica A. Fox. "All that training, fighting, battles with swords, and then she went and breast-fed her son. To have all that activity, all those hormones swirling -- it blew my mind." However she managed it, her colleagues are impressed. "People will be amazed," Bender says. "She's like Clint Eastwood in the body of a beautiful woman."

Photo by George Lange