One type of actress, whose presence changes the atmosphere around everyone else on screen, doesn’t so much enter a movie as she inhabits it. Actress Uma Thurman has always been like that. Therefore, it’s odd that she spent so much of her career being talked about mainly as a Tarantino discovery, a collaborator, and a muse. Yes, she was those things. However, she was also much more.
Thurman was born in Boston in 1970 to a Swedish-German model mother and a Buddhist scholar father. His upbringing was unusual by most standards. She moved thru Amherst and Woodstock, spent parts of her childhood in India, and discovered acting in an eighth-grade classroom almost by accident. Talent scouts were already circling her when she was performing in The Crucible at a prep school in Massachusetts at the age of fourteen. Soon after, she left. It sounds like a made-up origin story, but it wasn’t.
Before the majority of her classmates had completed high school, she was working on movie sets and modeling for Vogue at the age of fifteen. At a time when most actors her age were pursuing teen comedies, her early roles, especially in Dangerous Liaisons and Henry & June, demonstrated a young actress willing to take on serious, complex material. Critics took notice. Her collaborator on Dangerous Liaisons, John Malkovich, allegedly described her as “more than a little haunted.” She never completely lost that quality.
Everything changed in 1994 with the release of Pulp Fiction. With her fierce cigaret, white shirt, and black bob, Mia Wallace became one of those uncommon movie characters that seem to exist outside of the film itself. After receiving an Academy Award nomination, Thurman unexpectedly found herself at the center of the kind of celebrity that most actors strive for their entire careers. In response, she took a step back. She accepted smaller assignments. She made thoughtful decisions. There’s a feeling that she recognized the risk of chasing the wave too hard even back then.
Another wave came with the Kill Bill movies in 2003 and 2004, and she was cautious about what came next. She recently revealed on The Tonight Show that she purposefully avoided making a series of subpar action movies after Kill Bill. “When you do Kill Bill, you never stop hearing about it,” she replied. She therefore pursued other endeavors, such as television, stage work, and more subdued dramas. From the outside, it might have appeared to be cautious. It sounds more like self-preservation.
When considering Thurman’s career in its entirety, it’s interesting to note that she consistently found her way back to relevance without seeming to pursue it. For an HBO movie, she was awarded a Golden Globe. She performed on Broadway. She appeared in serious European film. In an animated movie about Jesus and Charles Dickens, she provided the voice of a character. The quality usually holds, and the variety is almost overwhelming. That might be the result of an actor being genuinely interested in their work instead of being fixated on their status.
At the age of 56, she is currently starring in Pretty Lethal on Prime Video, which is notably directed by her own son Levon Hawke, and has returned to action with Charlize Theron in The Old Guard 2. It seems worthwhile to take a moment to consider that final detail. She had an unusual name and a striking face when she first entered Hollywood as a teenager, and somewhere along the way, she quietly built an entire life inside and alongside it. Maya Hawke, her daughter, is an actress. She appears in movies that her son is directing.
A version of Uma Thurman’s story is presented as a sequence of iconic moments, such as the sword, the yellow tracksuit, and the dance in Pulp Fiction. That version is correct. However, it omits her patience, her selectivity, and her unwavering refusal to conform to the expectations of others. It turns out that those are the more fascinating aspects.
