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Posted
on 25-Apr-01 12:59 AM
Uma Thurman: A Goddess From Union Square
MOVIES
By JENNET CONANT
THERE are dozens of lovely leading ladies, all more or less
interchangeable, who make their names playing sweetheart roles.
There are plenty of bodacious bodies out there (and some are pretty far out there), as this is what Hollywood looks for first in its young, female stars. And there are plenty of pretty faces, if you are not too fussy about their acting or diction and do not object to "a clone-type of beauty," as the director James Ivory has put it.
But for the demanding part of Charlotte Stant in an adaptation of
"The Golden Bowl" — arguably the least likable of his spirited
heroines and the most challenging of Henry James's novels — Mr.
Ivory and his producing partner, Ismail Merchant, were convinced
that something much rarer in Hollywood was needed, something like a true screen goddess.
"Whoever played the part would have to bring a particular kind of
glamour to it, because Henry James very much wrote her that way,"
said Mr. Ivory, noting that he had had great luck casting the
elegant British actresses Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson in previous adaptations of such classic E. M. Forster novels as "A
Room With a View" and "Howard's End."
This time, however, he needed an American actress to play the
beautiful but penniless Charlotte, who manages to ensnare a Gilded
Age billionaire (played by Nick Nolte) on the order of Andrew
Carnegie. She had to be a superior sort of woman in every way —
smart, sophisticated and ravishing — so that when her reckless
passion for a weak Italian prince (Jeremy Northam) drives her to
betray all those close to her, it is ultimately her self-betrayal
that reverberates the longest and most deeply.
"There was only one person who came to mind," said Mr. Ivory,
talking about the film recently over a cappuccino at the Columbus
Bakery on First Avenue in Midtown, "who was our first choice from
the very beginning, who was full of that kind of vitality and life, with a beauty that is very individual and completely beguiling, and that was Uma."
The next morning, after arriving for an interview at a restaurant
in her Union Square neighborhood, the actress in question, Uma
Thurman, was trying to disentangle herself from her 3-year-old
daughter, Maya, telling her, "Mommy has to work now," as she
smilingly packed nanny and child off to the park. After ordering
coffee and French toast with syrup (a meal that would send most
soy-sipping Hollywood starlets into shock) this rangy, 6-foot
actress — who looked as elegant in black leather and a sleek
ponytail as she did in period dress — explained that she initially
turned down the part of Charlotte.
During the summer of 1998, she said, she was flattered to even be
considered for the role, but the timing was not right. She had just had a baby with her new husband, the actor Ethan Hawke, and she was not prepared to spend 10 weeks on location in England and Italy.
"I was a new mother, and I felt I wasn't emotionally ready," said
Ms. Thurman, who is 30. She spoke with cheerful hindsight of her
early fears about being "a good enough parent" and her daily bouts
of guilt about not spending "every minute" with her baby. "It was
also a very, very tricky part," she said. "It's dark and
unsympathetic in a lot of ways, though I had a lot of compassion
for her in the end."
Ms. Thurman actually passed on the project more than once, despite repeated overtures from the filmmakers. But she was taken enough with the character to instruct Creative Artists Agency, which happens to represent both her and Merchant-Ivory Productions, to keep tabs on the project after she heard that it had been postponed for several months. What finally changed her mind was a letter she received from Mr. Merchant, who has earned a reputation for being relentless in the pursuit of big stars for his small, independent productions. ("The Golden Bowl" cost $15 million.)
"I wrote her that she reminded me of Vivian Leigh's character in
`Gone With the Wind,' " Mr. Merchant recalled, sounding pleased
that his note had had such a positive effect. "Scarlett had a
tortured relationship with the wrong man, and a jealous friendship, and Henry James's novel, while completely different, has some of the same emotional drama. I felt strongly that there was something unique about Uma, that she alone could bring that character to life and capture her strength and at the same time convey a certain mad desperation."
He was also confident that the recent changes in Ms. Thurman's
life would only help her performance. "She's lived a lot, you know; she was married and divorced and married again," Mr. Ivory said, referring to her brief union with the actor Gary Oldman. "She had bounced around Hollywood long enough and had experienced enough to imagine all of the situations in the story. It's a quality that comes with time. In that way she is like Emma Thompson, who was only 31 when we did `Howard's End.' They are young actresses who have the maturity and talent to make you believe in them."
Ms. Thurman has grown up in front of the camera, metamorphosing
from a coltish model to a sophisticated leading lady. She made her
film debut at age 16 as the fetching ingénue in Stephen Frears's
"Dangerous Liaisons" (1988), then moved on to a series of siren
roles, which made the most of her cascading blonde tresses,
culminating in the bewitching Poison Ivy in Joel Schumacher's
"Batman and Robin" (1997).
"Much of the wit and wickedness you see, Uma brought to the part," Mr. Schumacher said. "She is clearly a legendary beauty along the lines of Garbo or Dietrich. She has that same timeless quality. But she can also be very funny and goofy. The great thing about Uma is that she can be all dressed up in a ball gown and look like the queen of Romania and still act like one of the guys."
Ms. Thurman won critical acclaim, and picked up an Oscar
nomination, for her off-center portrayal (wearing a black bobbed
wig) of a sultry cocaine addict who dances a mean twist with John
Travolta in Quentin Tarantino's 1994 hit "Pulp Fiction."
Hard as it may be to believe, though, it was her campy turn as
Poison Ivy that caught Mr. Ivory's eye, when he happened to see the Batman film on an airplane. "She was sensational looking," he said, "but more than that, there was this tremendous presence of the conquering woman. It just struck me all of a sudden that she could be Charlotte, setting out to conquer New York society."
For most of her childhood, the last thing Ms. Thurman wanted was
to stand out anymore than she already did, and not simply because
she was so tall. "It's funny how children really want normal,"
recalled Ms. Thurman, who has the wide-set eyes and striking Nordic features of her mother, Nena, who is half Swedish and half German.
"You just want to be flawed enough to fit in, good enough to fit
in. It's strange, because you would think special would be the real goal, but it's not. Special is weird."
She sheepishly admits to having spent years coming to terms with
her name, Uma Karuna Thurman. The name, inspired by a Hindu
goddess, was a "double whammy" that her father, Robert, a Buddhist
scholar, took infinite delight in inflicting on her, she said.
Every time she complained, her father would teasingly come up with
a new variation. As a child, she noted dryly, "I was so not in on
the joke."
She added: "Growing up in Amherst, Mass., it was very strange.
Because both my parents are Buddhists, we were excluded from church life and so many aspects of communal connectedness. On top of that, there's my mother, who regarded anything bad that we did as an example of `American behavior.' It took until my late teens before I understood that I was an American."
Once she came to that realization, she went through a die-hard
"cheerleader phase," which her mother took as a personal rebuke.
"For years, I tried terribly hard to conform and always failed,"
Ms. Thurman said. "It's very good for your mimicking skills. I had
the burdensome name to boot, so I always tried to change that. I
kind of cheated and turned my middle name into Karen, which was the closest thing I thought I could get away with. It's on my high
school registration: Uma Karen Thurman. In certain after-school
activities, like dance class, I even pulled off being Diane and
Kelly."
When did she finally become reconciled to being Uma? "I think I'm
still working on that, actually," she said, laughing. Over time,
though, it has gotten easier. "I think these things are your
essential markings," she explained, "and they may start out as
burdens but they end up as gifts."
Ms. Thurman has only recently returned to New York after a long
stay in Los Angeles, where her husband is making a film. She has
not worked in the 18 months since completing back-to-back costume
dramas. When Maya was only a few months old, she slipped on a
corset ("It's the only way to go after having a baby!") for the
French drama "Vatel" in which she stars as Louis XIV's mistress,
who falls for a valet (Gérard Depardieu), a man as gifted in the
kitchen as he is in the bedroom.
"I think looking back that I did manage to do things pretty
smoothly," she said, explaining that the baby spent most of the
time asleep in her trailer, in the care of a nanny, so that they
were never really apart. "It gave me the confidence I could do
both, which is why I decided I could go on location again and do
`The Golden Bowl.' "
But the long hiatus has given her time to think about her
priorities. "The onus is on me now to pick projects that are really important," she said. "Otherwise, I'd be climbing the walls of my trailer."
In order to gain more control over her career, Ms. Thurman is
producing and starring in her next project, an HBO movie based on a 1997 Off Off Broadway play that she optioned called "Hysterical
Blindness," by Laura Cahill. "It's also a very short shoot, and
it's local," she said, "So I may be doing more of this."
She is finding other ways to combine work and motherhood that do
not take her far from home: recently she signed a lucrative
advertising contract to be the "face" of the new Lancôme fragrance
Miracle.
Slipping on a black ski cap and tiny blue-tinted sunglasses, she
goes unrecognized as she strolls through the Union Square farmer's
market. Stopping at a flower stand to buy a pot of daffodils for
Maya's room, she reflected on Charlotte's fate. The heroine had to
be calculating to compensate for her lack of a dowry. "She was
brought up to be a completely dependent creature," Ms. Thurman
said, "but because she had no money of her own, she was unable to
compete in the great race to make a good marriage. In those days,
women could not work, so her survival was at stake."
While women today have many more options, Ms. Thurman said, they
still have hard choices to make. "In the end, somebody has to
bend," she said with the hard-won wisdom of a Jamesian heroine.
Hollywood has not provided her with many role models of female
independence, personal or artistic, and Ms. Thurman said she was
just trying to feel her own way. "The challenge is to find the
masculine that can bend without being emasculated and the feminine
that can be strong without becoming unfeminine," she said, "and
then somehow maintain that flexibility together."
(Jennet Conant's most recent article for Arts & Leisure was about
the actresss Juliette Binoche.)
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