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This time last year, Uma Thurman seemed to have everything a 32-year-old American woman could reasonably wish to possess: she was entering the third decade of a film career that began at age seventeen, when, as Venus, she literally emerged from a clamshell in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. That film was followed by a long string of quirky and demanding roles that established Thurman as the most idiosyncratic sex symbol working in films today. She had a husband and two children; in 1998, Thurman had married the actor Ethan Hawke, and that same year she gave birth to a daughter, Maya Ray. By last year, when they had a son named Levon, Thurman and Hawke—with their particular combination of karmic ambivalence and obvious ambition—had become the signature couple of Generation X. "It was all pretty safe and warm," Thurman told me the first time we met this summer, in Vancouver, where she was filming Paycheck, director John Woo's science-fiction thriller. "But life is so wonderfully cyclical," she said softly and without irony. "Anyway, safe is never where I have wanted to be. In control, maybe, but safe? I don't see the point." In Hollywood, it is never easy to keep from becoming typecast, particularly if you happen to be a nubile, six-foot blonde with cheekbones that could cut diamonds. Thurman spent many years running from her status as a sex symbol—turning a collection of hats, sunglasses, and baggy clothes into a kind of secular chador. But a disguise goes only so far for somebody like Uma Thurman because, as John Malkovich, her costar in Dangerous Liaisons noted when they worked together, she "has this Jayne Mansfield body and a horrifyingly great brain." Still, Thurman never seems to opt for the easy route when a hard one will do. So two months after giving birth to her son, in the spring of 2002, she flew to Los Angeles and began to train eight hours every day for her role in Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino's cartoonishly violent homage to the Hong Kong martial-arts genre. Thurman, who plays a vengeful former assassin out to get even with her boss, conceived the central character with Tarantino when they were making Pulp Fiction—a film for which she received an Academy Award nomination for her role as the drug-addled wife of the L.A. gangster Marcellus Wallace. Tarantino wanted Thurman to star in Kill Bill so badly that he put off the production for nearly a year while she was pregnant. "OK. What would Josef von Sternberg do in this situation?" Tarantino said when I asked him about it. "He is getting ready to do Morocco, and Dietrich gets pregnant. I mean, Uma is my Dietrich, for god's sake. I took the whole color scheme of the movie from her hair." "Re-made in China" by Michael Specter has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the November 2003 issue of Vogue. Click here for the full article. Get more articles like this delivered to your door each month! Click here to subscribe today.
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