We're in East Hampton on a sunny Friday afternoon. Uma Thurman is standing very still on a low platform in a slinky white evening dress. Although the sun shines brightly, the atmosphere of this shot is glamorous and eveningish, and the ELLE team has built a white room out of pieces of paper and scaffolding. Uma stands inside this white cube, appearing a bit like an angel perched atop a wedding cake, or a prisoner, depending on how you look at it.

She smiles her gracious smile, a mixture of warmth and a cool Hollywood noblesse oblige. The camera clicks; the flashes flash. She looks as though she might be about to stroll down a red carpet at some movie premiere but for her shoes. Just out of the camera's frame, her prodigious feet are clad in old ratty Birkenstocks, which have the effect of saying" "Just kidding."

For two days she has been traipsing around various East Hampton locations with the ELLE fashion crew, and this is the last shot. When it is done, she is setting off for her country house for a weekend with her husband, Ethan Hawke, and their thirteen-month-old baby, Maya. After the final picture is, Uma ambles over to the nearby swimming pool, kicks off the Birkenstocks, and sticks her toe in to test the water.

"Oh, my God," she says. "Perfect."

She disappears into the house, reappearing almost instantly in a white bikini. After the application of an enormous amount of sun screen (for a moment she looks like a mime in white face), she steps to the edge of the pool, pauses, and then takes the plunge. The pools floor is dark blue, and when you're underwater it's another world, calm and still. I happen to be underwater, with my eyes open, when she dives in. Her lithe, pale, sun-dappled body makes an arc, down and then through the bubbles. Her eyes are closed. For the first few minutes she just splashes around, gasping with amazement at how nice it is to be in the pool. She does a backstroke, somersaults, makes wild sounds of delight, like a kid. "I needed this," she says.

I mention that this is a whole different vibe from when I'd last seen her, a few months earlier, decked out in full evening regalia for a benefit gala. She was seated at a dinner table next to Lauren Bacall. "There aren't enough men here," said Uma to Lauren with a note of half-joking complaint.

Without missing a beat, Bacall shot back: "Story of my life."

"I love Betty Bacall," Uma says now, while she does the breaststroke. "She's such a great woman. She has somehow retained her sanity. She survived Hollywood."

Even though she is breast-stroking up and down the pool in the sunshine, this anecdote seems to provoke a tiny element of fierceness in her, a flash of steel behind the sunny smile, as though she has survived something, too.

This past year has been rather a placid one for Uma Thurman, looking at it from the point of view of her career; looking at it from every other possible point of view, it's been a wildly eventful period of time for her, full of the tumult that springs around the birth of a child. Acting has taken something of a backseat to living. She has always possessed a certain poise and equilibrium. This has been accentuated, perhaps, by her father, Robert Thurman, who is one of America's most prominent authorities on Buddhism. Her priorities on that most-important question - Does one live to work, or work to live? - have always seemed to be aligned with life.

She gets out of the pool, wraps herself in a towel, and reclines on a chaise longue under a maple tree. "I feel like I'm just now getting back in gear with my work," she says. "I've just finished shooting Vatel, in Paris." The movie is directed by Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields) from a script by Tom Stoppard. "I worked with Gerard Depardieu for the first time." She pauses. "De-par-dee-oo." She stretches his name out, making it sound very French. "Actually, it's a bit terrifying, saying his name. They make a big deal about having to say it just right."

"Did you not like him?"

"I love Gerard Depardieu!" she says. "It's just that it's very intimidating to have to say his name in front of him. He has this big, huge... personality. And before that I did a play, The Misanthrope. That was an education. Every night there is that sensation of the audience being with you, or not. It's quite brutal. The entire experience was equal measures pleasure and pain. I had a great time."

The next thing she was a small part in Woody Allen's upcoming movie, Sweet and Lowdown. "Sony Classics brought it without having seen it," she says. "That's how it works with Woody. He's very secretive. The actors get to see only the part of the script that you are in. He tells you as much as he thinks you ought to know. He supposedly never says much, but her talked a lot to me. When it is finished, the distributor has to buy it without having seen it. It's the only thing in show business in which there is actually no way to hedge your bets." Her face takes on a slightly hard cast for a moment, as though she's remembering some fraught tangle of Hollywood business. I think of that line about Lauren Bacall having survived Hollywood.

And what's next?

"This fall I start shooting the Golden Bowl with Merchant/Ivory. I play Charlotte."

"That's so intense!" I say. It seems perfect. Henry James's characters are always brimming with feelings that are almost beyond their own comprehension, and Uma has a certain liquid expressiveness that would seem to accommodate that perfectly.

She looks at me coolly and cracks her knuckles. They all go at once.

"You're the first person who reacted to the news that I'm doing the Golden Bowl by saying it's intense," she says. She seems amused and, in some tiny way, reassured. The Golden Bowl is Henry James at his most brilliant, eloquent, and impenetrable. It involves two couples and is set in that familiar James territory: European aristocracy (broke) visited by inquiring fresh American faces (rich).

"I'm in my pre-nervous stage about it," she says. I ask if that means she is not yet nervous, or if it means that she gets nervous when she is in the run-up to something (pre-shoot, pre-production, pre-interview... pre-nuptial). It's the latter. "Once everything gets going I'm fine," she says. "I've always wanted to work with James Ivory. He has a humanity that is impressive. He's a national treasure. Working with him makes me feel like I'm back on track. It feels familiar to me, slightly European but essentially American.

Saying she is back on track suggests she feels she might somehow have swerved off-track, but I leave this alone. I ask if she thinks she will ever end up doing another movie with Ethan Hawke, whom she met on the set of Gattaca, the surprisingly affecting 1997 sci-fi thriller. "With Ethan, yeah, we'll probably end up doing one together because people just mention us in the same breath all the time." I ask what he is working on. "He's doing a lot of different things right now, as always," she sighs. "It's a sign of a healthy mind." She clearly doesn't want to delve into the machinations of this relationship, but I like that she seems not only resigned to a certain amount of chaos in the man she is with, but thinks it a sign of well-being.

And then it's time to go to the country. We decide, as a way of continuing the conversation, that she'll drive in my car behind her limousine. It's a long black stretch limo with tinted windows. Its passenger is as follows: Uma, her nanny, and her baby girl, with whom she spends as much time as possible. Except when she's being interviewed.

Our plan is that we'll drive along for a while in my car, and at some point she'll jump out, get in hers, and conclude this little bit of show business. She climbs into the limo for a moment to fuss with the baby. She is understandably reluctant to make her private life public.

I'd rather not dwell too much one her," she said when I first asked about her daughter. "Once you start to bring your child into it, then the press somehow feel they know her or she is fair game, and then the next thing you know she's thirteen and getting busted for smoking pot at boarding school, and the press is covering it like a news story."

Since I have to take notes, Uma gets behind the wheel. So this is the current compromise between being a movie star who gets interviewed for magazine articles on the one hand, and being the mother of a thirteen-month-old on the other: Uma is driving behind the limo, as though she were a private detective, or perhaps a bodyguard. Our caravan pulls out of the soft, leafy world of an East Hampton backyard into the maw of Friday afternoon rush hour in the Hamptons. There's a bag of fat, succulent white cherries between us, and she absently pops one after another into her mouth and spits out the window. She's wearing small almond-shaped, black-rimmed glasses, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. She holds the wheel with both hands, her long fingers wrapping all the way around to touch her palms.

"I didn't learn to drive until I was twenty-three," she says. It strikes me that among Uma Thurman's many talents, driving is perhaps not near the top of the list.

I ask her what it's been like to become a mother as we follow her baby in the limousine. She hesitates on the lip of this topic, negotiating the conflicting impulses: the wish for privacy and the desire to paint a more accurate picture of what has been on her mind other than movie parts. Somewhat heedlessly, she starts talking.

"The architecture of my life has just totally changed since I had her," she says. "I'm still in a state of bewilderment and wonderment about her presence in the world. I'm trying to balance creating a perfect universe for her to grow up in with getting one single thing done. You want to supervise, nurture, and orchestrate her ecosystem, the environment she lives in. And then there is your own work. Any working mother will tell you that there is a little tearing. And the thing that tears is usually yourself."

And how did she decide this was the right time for a baby? "I always wanted be a relatively young mother," she says. (She is twenty-nine.) "Maybe it had to do with when I got closer to my mother's age when she had her children. I think it's the bravest act of hope a person can exhibit in the whole world. It's a leap of faith. I was talking to someone the other day," she continues, "and I expressed an opinion about something, and they said, 'Of course you think that. You're safe.' They were talking about the fact that I wasn't single and had a husband and a child, as though that resolved everything. I was so horrified by this person, this, this...idiot! I feel like I have never had more to lose. I mean, I thought things mattered before. But they didn't. It pales compared to now, all that other stuff. Now it's like if my liver had legs."

"Your liver?"

"It's like if my heart, if something essential to my life-support system, now had it's own will and was capable of walking away."

Do you treat yourself differently now?

"I stopped smoking the day I knew I was pregnant. Ethan and I both stopped on that day. It was the Super Bowl. Now we act as a kind of point-counterpoint to each other. It's clear that if anybody's resolve weakens... It's like you're just one puff away from your entire family being invaded by an evil addiction."

I tell her that I'm fascinated by how people, particularly women, suddenly rearrange their lives to have children. It's the most normal thing in the world, everyone does it, yet it also seems totally incomprehensible somehow, like entering another dimension.

"I was becoming an adult, and it's like, you gotta go. Sometimes you just got to go! Don't wait until the last bus leaves, don't stand there and have to be prodded and pleaded with. Go!"

We come to a stop sign. The limousine lurches across the road. But the next opportunity to move is slow in coming. We wait. We watch the limousine move away.

"Damn it," she says, in a burst of impatience. "I don't need this hat." She tosses it in the backseat, shakes out her hair, and I think: Now traffic will stop! Someone will say, "Hey, it's Uma!" and let her go. That doesn't happen.

Eventually we make it across the road. The limo has waited. We're behind it again, and the mood relaxes. "I like driving, actually," she says. I'm not sure I believe her. "Actually," she repeats. "Act-shoo-alee," she says. "Such a word or my mother's. Ac-shully."

She changes her grip on the wheel. The left had is at twelve o'clock, the right hand at sic. For the first time, this odd proximity - one doesn't often follow one's baby in another car - lends the situation a peculiar feeling. Uma has a visceral, physical connection with her child, and eventually, in spite of out nice chat and the cherries, I suggest we do the switch. Out little caravan pulls into the parking lot, we say good-bye (she insists I take half the cherries, and that is the end of that. I turn my car around, drive about a hundred yards, and realize that she has left her hat in the backseat.

It's a very tricky thing, having Uma Thurman's straw hat in the backseat of your car. What are you supposed to do with it? The process of returning this object to her would require an epic series of phone calls and messengers and who-knows-what else, and she would probably just as soon I keep the hat. But what am I going to do with a straw wide-brimmed hate with a black bow? Give it to some other woman and say, "Here, I want you to have Uma Thurman's hat?" No, I'd probably leave it lying around the house for a while. It would clutter things up. At some point I'd put it on. The image of my wearing this hat was ridiculous and embarrassing and made me feel like the obvious thing to do was return it right then and there. I pull over and turn around, and far ahead of me is the long black stretch limousine. The traffic is heavy, and I have to fight to close the gap, car by car. Finally, I'm behind the limousine. The driver sees me madly waving the hat, and pulls over. I stop in front of him. The sun is glaring. Run the length of the limo. The back window is coming down. The driver must have lowered it for her, because as the window descends, I see Uma in profile, her face a pale cameo against the cool, velvety darkness of the limo's interior. She is preoccupied with something, but before I can change tone, I blurt out, full of triumphant energy from the pursuit: "You left your hat!"

She jumps. At that moment I realize she is feeding her baby. To startle someone is a powerful thing sometimes - people are so vulnerable in the precise moment of surprise; that sharp, abrupt movement is as particular to each person as a sneeze - and the fact that I interrupted this intimate, quiet moment with her child makes it much worse. "Oh," she says, composing herself. "Thank you so much!" She takes the hat. I go back to my car feeling awful. That image stays with me, heartwarming, but also almost frightening in its intensity - Uma's face in profile, its serenity and also its concentration as she gazes down at the feeding baby girl. The enthrallment, the fierce attachment.