Uma was indeed having lunch, at a very nice restaurant in downtown Manhattan called Orienta, but the rest was just an act of imagination, the actor's alternate reality, or, to put it in lay terms, a big, fat lie. It was a nasty, gray Saturday in December, and the sidewalk outside the restaurant was crowded with people emanating that preholiday anxiety that almost constitutes its own meteorological condition. It was nice to be inside because it was warm in the restaurant and empty, but it was because it was empty that Uma, who lives in Manhattan, was creating another lunch in another world. She is friends with the erstaurant's owner and was making up a story for him to phone in to Page Six, the New York Post's avidly read gossip page, so he could get a little free publicity. (Did I mantion that the place is called Orienta? Downtown Manhattan. Try the creamy coconut soup.)

Uma was, in short, exercising the power of being an icon in the greater alternate reality of popular mass culture, and she was exercising that power for the forces of good. She was also resisting the forces of my fascination with the word canoodling as pertains to its use on Page Six, which is frequent. In fact, Page Six is, in my experience and observation of the world, the only place people canoodle. It is its own alternate canoodling reality. I could write a whole big academic paper about this, and if I did, I would call it "The Ontology of Canoodling: A Teleological Examination of the Heterotopic Dimensions of Gossip." And I would cite the item on Uma it ran on Page Six several days later: "Sightings... Uma Thurman enjoying a long, but canoodle-free, lunch with a tall handsome black man at Orienta, the new french/Vietnamese/Thai eatery on Sixth Avenue between Eleventh and Twelfth." This would be extra satisfying because I would be citing a sighting.

Actually, it is not unrepresentative of the ontology of Uma Thurman—or, to put it in lay terms, Uma Thurman herself—that she helped place this term in the way. She is the kind of person to whom being in control of her own destiny (in this case fabricated, but if you don't fabricate your own destiny, who will?) is important. She has, she had explained on an other occasion, been like this since she was a little girl. "When I was younger," she had said, "I was obsessed with Barbie dolls. I was just obsessed with them as these icons, even though their proportions meant that they would never menstruate and all that stuff we know now. I played with them for hours and made them into sex slaves. They had boyfriends, and they were addicted to them, and then some other guy would come and lock them in a room. I don't see what's wrong with young girls being allowed to fantasize and imagine the great unknown of being a woman through these hyper-Dynasty dramatic ways. Especially if you feel tyrranized by it. To turn that which is your greatest fear and therefore has the greatest tyrrany over you into a mental exercise, whether it be a fantasy, whether it be a desire to be overpowered mentally or physically or anything else, it's a way of taking control."

Uma's item mongering is also representative in these ways. She is from a large, close family and therefore plays for the team, not her statistics. She is loyal to those on her side, as she was to both Orienta's owner and to her boyfriend, actor-writer Ethan Hawke, who in his appearances on Page Six is usually referred to by his full, heterotopic (lay terms of, or relating to, an alternate reality) honorific, "hunky heartthrob Ethan Hawke." And, in some fundamental sense, Uma is simply contrary — not in a hostile way but in a way that announces an unusually active refusal of conventional contexts, pretty much whatever they happen to be. During lunch at Orienta, for example, she mentioned that she considered using a lipstick until it wore out a commendable personal attribute in others, because it would mean that they were organized and had respect for their belongings and were not part of today's disposable system. She was half joking, but of course that also meant that she was half serious.

Uma's next two roles are as the misérable's misérable. Fantine, in Bille August's Les Misérables and as the ultimate modern woman, Emma Peel, in this summer's The Avengers. These two parts could practically have been designed to demonstrate the guiding hand of sheer contrariness, and it is possible that they were. "It depends" she responded when asked what she looks for in a role. "Sometimes I look for something I'd never do." This sounds like a fortune cookie, but it makes a certain kind of sense, teleologically speaking (okay, but no more hints after this: in a goal-oriented way), because Uma views her career as a learning process. "I've constantly tried to confuse myself," she said. "I've constantly tried not to do one thing until I got really good at it. So evenwhen it's not intelligent, I've chosen to go in the opposite direction from where I might be stronger." Uma actually has a favorite fortune-cookie message, and it is this: Remember the lesson, forget the experience.

Uma herself springs from an unconventional context. Her parents, as her given name indicates, were Buddhists before it was chic. As you probably know, she has been a cultural icon in a moderately major way since her performance as Cecile de Volanges in 1988's Dangerous Liaisons at the age of seventeen and in a less moderately major way since her 1994 performance as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction was nominated for an Academy Award. As you are doubtless aware, ontology is really the philosophy of the natuer of being, and teleology is the consideration of things in terms of their movement toward an end point. And, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you, heterotopia is a neologism coined by the late postmodern French theorist Michel Foucault, and in a postmodern-thory context, it means a place where normal rules of behavior do not apply, such as Studio 54, the US Senate, or an on-line chat room for vampires. In a conventional context, it means the displacement of organs to other parts of the body.

Besides all of which, at the time of her fictional lunch with the tall black man, Uma was, in fact, in the early stages of pregnancy, so early that she was not yet telling people. The baby is due in July, and conventionally, pregnancies are not publicly confirmed until after the first trimester.
Long story short: no canoodling.

Uma opts, in general, not to be part of today's disposable system.
She herself was not wearing lipstick. She was wearing a blue wool cardigan over long underwear and a pair of black ski pants that she thinks of as cat-burglar pants. She was smoking Marlboro Lights. And she was accessorizing. Her accents were a bottle of multivitamins and a bottle of vitamin C. Accents are important, as is good nutrition. She was getting over a cold. She was rather shy but also completely self-possessed. Or so it seemed; on the latter point, Uma herself is the sole authority. But she made a similar first impression on Liam Neeson, with whom she stars in Les Misérables. "There was a mixture of wonderful intelligence and incredible shyness," he said in a recent phone conversation. "I don't know why I took notice of the shyness, but that's what I was struck by." He briefly excused himself so that he could go shout at pigeons on the windowsill of the room he was in. "She was someone who didn't field questions lightly, no matter how trivial the questions were, "he continued. "Do you know what I mean?"

I do. However, despite her admirable determination to do the unintelligent thing, there are actually some themes discernible in Uma's roles, of which, since she made her debut in Kiss Daddy Good Night at sixteen, there are quite a few, although she is only twenty-seven. She has been in two movies based on French literature (Les Misérables and Dangerous Liaisons); two in which she wears a black wig with bangs (Kiss Daddy Good Night and Pulp Fiction; and, because her costars in Les Misérables and The Avengers are, respectively, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, she only needs to make one with Ben Kingsley in order to hit the leading-men-of-Schindler's-List trifecta.
Both Neeson and Bille August use the word dignity in describing Uma, and there is something inviolate and swathed about her. "She does have a quality onscreen," said Neeson, now pigeon-free or possibly pigeon-resigned. "All the clichés come to mind—oh, the camera loves her, she's got the x quality—but it's all true. Clichés are clichés because they're based on something true." This last thought has itself become something of a cliché. But clichés are clichés because they're based on something true.

But to pause on the second step of this particular Neesonian infinity, he has a point. Some things don't need to be fully understood to be enjoyed—most of the lyrics to the Association's "Along Comes Mary," barring the first line and the chorus, for example—and as an actress (and a public figure), Uma is one of them. A recent Umathon that included movies and performances from every possible point on the quality spectrum confirms this, as does director Jeremiah Chechik. "She has areal sense of protecting what's true about, I guess, her essence," he said on the phone from London, where he is in postproduction on The Avengers. "And in the tradition of movie stars, that mystery is something that telegraphs and translates really well to the big screen."

Uma is rare among actors in that she is pleasantly articulate on the subject of acting. "I was just astounded at how light she was and how scary that was," she said. She was talking about television's The Avengers and about Diana Rigg's performance as Emma Peel, a character who is known adn was possibly named for her M(ale) Appeal. "There was this really delicate fine line between this fresh, cheerful, always-got-a-good-idea person and this unself-consciously self-confident dynamic of a very dark body of water, of female sexuality. She doesn't lean on herself at all in that way some great divas have, like: Now I'm going to lean forward, and that's really gonna work on you. Now I'm going to pick up this spoon, and that's really gonna work on you. She's high-voiced and strong and clear as a bell."
Discussing Fantine, a character whose entire narrative arc in Les Misérables pretty much consists of sustaining one blow after another until succumbing to the one she can't sustain, Uma said, "Bille wanted her to be more desperate and weak and totally crushed. But the reason she got there is she won't quit- She has this kind of strength in her where she keeps believing her side of the story. She won't totally buy into society's point of view." She said this with dignity.

Uma Thurman was in another restaurant on another, even nastier—but still canoodle-free!—December day. She used her hands a lot as she talked, and obviously when she smoked, and this was very physically expressive. She was speaking energetically, although tha agenda was what she referred to as a painful early-life-and-childhood questions. There was one of those three-sided paper table things that sometimes sit near the votive candle and announce specials and so forth, and the side facing Uma bore an apt quotation: "Women are never what they seem to be. There is a woman you see, and there is a woman who is hidden." The author of this quotation was listed as Erma Bombeck. This seemed not quite right, since to me this is a text the general implication of which is clear: lingerie. I felt intertextual friction.

Uma believes her life is boring. She said this many times, apologetically. And hers is indeed the typical story of a woman whose father was the first American citizen to become a Tibetian Buddhist monk and whose first wife (Christophe de Menil) was a member of a family that is probably the premier private American patron of the arts and who is generally acknowledged to be the foremost Buddhist scholar in the western world, not to mention a woman whose mother, also a Buddhist, was a top fashion model, friend to Salvador Dali, and ex-wife of Timothy Leary. Like the average, fifteen-year-old girl, Uma left the boarding school she had started attending at thirteen and moved to New York, where she went to children's professional school, bacame an emancipated minor, and supported herself briefly as a model before being cast in her first role, in Kiss Daddy Good Night, which is actually a really fun thriller marred only slightly by sometimes appearing to be lit with a sixty-watt bulb. As with most actresses just starting out, hers was the starring role. We have all heard this one a thousand times.

Uma grew up primarily in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father taught at Amherst College. Her family— she has one older and two younger brothers—spent their summers in Woodstock, New York. To say that being a faculty brat is an alternate reality would be stretching a theme to its breaking point, but the academic environment is its own little world, and not just because some seemingly completely ordinary person at the departmental picnic might be examining things teleologically and expecting you, a small child, to comment appropriately. It is a world with many of the cultural signifiers of money—travel, an appreciation of high art, a greater likelihood of serving asparagus to your dinner guests than the average household—without much actual money to speak of. Instead of money, academics have thought. They are always trying to stop their children from watching television. One of Uma's big treats when she was little was being allowed to watch Dynasty with her mother.
"It was a very heady environment," Uma said, making energetic pretty lines in the air with her right hand, "but in a positive way. You had to be able to use your mind to get through dinner. Being seven was not an excuse for not being a functioning human mind, with responsibilities and an understanding of oneself as an individual and so forth." On the ring finger of her left hand, Uma wore a diamond ring, quite conceivable engagement in style, and on her left wrist she wore a slender antique silver-and-diamond bracelet, a bangle almsot. Asked to show her ring, she put her hands behind her back. Asked later if she remembered doing this, she cut the question off before the word engagement had actually been spoken. The exchange went like this: "Do you remember when I asked to see your ring and you—" "No comment."

Really, you would have to say that Uma is an intellectual, by which I don't mean that she's a genius (by which I also don't mean that she's a moron). I just mean that she is a person whose primary response to this or that aspect of life is thinking about it. If you think about it, this is not a universal; many people respond to this or that aspect of life with a strategic, reflexive lunge in the general direction of self-interest. By which I don't mean that Uma is extraordinarily altrustic. I just mean that her strategic lunges in the general direction of self-interest are probably considered. If she had lived several decades ago, she would have gone to the same parties as Lionel and Diana Trilling. (Although she doesn't like parties or being the center of attention in public. "I have such anxiety about it. I can be introducing two of my brothers to two of my best friends, and I'll be searching my mind for a name.")

In any event, she lives now, at a time when there is not much of a place for an artist-intellectual of any quality, good or bad. Hunky Heartthrob Ethan Hawke's novel, The Hottest State, for example, is invariably greeted with scorn by people who haven't read it, though not by people who have. The couple, who met on the set of last fall's sci-fi indie Gattaca, have agreed to not discuss their relationship in the press. They have no comment on whether the pregnancy was planned. But when Ethan's name came up, in relation to a question about Uma's brief, youthful marriage to Gary Oldman (another tedious and uninteresting part of her life), she decided it was okay to say a few nice words.

"An older, very witty woman once said to me that most women don't even count their marriages before the age of twenty-one," she said. "It was an amazing initiation into adulthood. But I have a real relationship now, which is wonderful." Of H. H. E. Hawke himself, she said, "He's an interesting person; he's not your average guy who became an actor to get girls." When the notion was floated that rock stars are the thing your average guy wants to become to get girls, she said, "That's what guys do everything to do. Ethan's an exception." Uma and Ethan have been together getting on for two years, live together, and are expecting a baby together. Otherwise, as far as the relationship goes, she's a hidden woman, and as far as being an artist-intellectual goes, she's not only in an alternate but a virtually nonexistant reality. Not to stretch a theme to its breaking point.

This is absolutely the furthest any article about Uma Thurman has ever gone without discussing her looks. No competition.

Uma has a dog named Muffym who is not really named Muffy. "Her name came to be Muffy," she said, "My father gave her a proper Tibetian name, Senge Mukha, which means golden-flower mountain lion. But who's going to say 'Senge Mukha' to a dog? So it was Mukha, and she's very fluffy, so it got to be Muffy. It suits her, too. She's a marvelous person." The little smokers' alcove where were sitting was next to a window on which a menu was posted. It was pouring rain, and about every fifth or sixth person walking past stopped under the awning to peer at it, so that sitting there was a little bit like being on the observer's side of a two-way mirror. Or so the NYPD Blue has lead me to believe. We were—why not share the wealth?—at a very nice restaurant in downtown Manhattan called Café Loup, discussing how Uma's humdrum background affected her early-life-and-childhood forays to conventional context.

Amherst had its cultural advantages, but Uma had a funny, seriously Buddhist name for her time and place and "it was very Izod, too, and I felt very out of place," she said. "It's hard, particularly if you don't have those Izod shirts or you have them and you just don't wear them right. I just failed on a daily basis trying to assimilate, particularly during the time I was in public school. I found it very difficult, but I haven't taken it as a beaten dog or anything."

Uma got her first kiss around age eight. ("It was brief, swift, and then it was done. It was a professional job. I needed to be kissed, and I was kissed.") Around eleven, she found the reject-fringe crowd. ("There was some Grateful Dead listening, but it was more like kids who wanted to go to Parsons School of Design. It was more new wave. Remember that Squeeze song 'Pulling Mussels from the Shell'? I always thought that the words were 'pulling muscles with Michelle.' I used to jump around and sing that until somebody asked me if I was doing it on purpose.") She went through a brief period of clove-cigarette-smoking, fine-sensibility-having adolescence. ("When I rode horses, I developed tics. I liked the idea of having neuroses, and I was worried about not having any, so I developed a slight obsession with tapping my stick ten times during the ride") Then she went to boarding school, where her performance as Abigail in The Crucible was favorably noticed by some talent agents from New York. Then she took control of her own destiny.

Uma is very beautiful, but if you bring it up, she gets mildly cross, as I suppose we all would if we were continually being catechized about our appearance, as Uma is. She has been described as otherworldly, exquisite, a modern-day Dietrich, a contemporary Garbo. But Uma, whose life is boring, says that she does not view herself as especially good-looking, by which I think she really means that she doesn't want to dwell on her looks, since I'm sure she knows she was a model. She was an ugly duckling as a little girl—"I looken funny. My nose and all my features were exactly the same size they are now, but my had was smaller"—but I don't think that has miuch to do with her current position on the subject of her looks. (Although, I do think it has something to do with her shyness, since she associates it with "being all and awkward and not very athletic and too eager to please.") By the time of Uma's childhood, her mother's modeling career was just another piece of parental history, and she was raised to evaluate herself in other terms: "My mother is completely unmaterialistic and unadorned," she said. "She appreciates the good gemstone on occasion, but aside from that, she was totally uninterested in aesthetics and had that opinion about me, too, not to rely on aesthetics, because they're false."

Plus, it has always been my experience and observation of the world that young actors of both sexes are not very enthusiastic about the concept that while they are deep in imagination, the actor's alternate reality, part of the external reality is that they are easier to light and photograph than the average citizen. If Uma is a little extra sensitive, she has also been the object of an extra-drooly press from the extra-young age of seventeen, when she was briefly extra-erotically topless in Dangerous Liaisons.

"It's so strange not to be able to recognize yourself in your representation, in how you come off to people," she said on one or another of the December days. "All young kids struggle with self-image enough as is." Contrarily, reaction against her early enshrinement as a sex goddess has itself guided her career, from the obvious body double in the nude scenes of Jennifer 8 to the counterphobic choice of a part that included extensive, NC-17-rated lesbian sex in Henre & June. "A lot of women have been initially characterized by their sexuality or their sensuality, or lack of thereof," she said. "Either how they overcome having it, or are dismissive of it." And I guess that to claim that I am not doing that right now, albeit in a way that implies a kind of lofty alternate reality, would just be, to put it bluntly, a big, fat lie. But, to put it equally bluntly, anatomy is a destiny you don't control: There is a woman you see.

And there is a woman who is hidden. Besides liking Barbie dolls in bondage (which, if it's ananlogous to Uma's take on Emma Peel in bondage—"They're constantly tying her up. And you can see why; she's so intimidating"— doesn't necessarily express the view of women you might think), Uma admired Bond girls. "You know how the Bond girl is always being slightly smeared and put down as this antifeminist prejection?" she asked on the nastier of the two December days. "I know that when I was younger, I loved Bond films, and I wanted to be a Bond girl, and I thought they were incredibly powerful. I was awed and impressed by their large breasts and amazing bodies and their confidence with their sexuality and their ownership of it, even if they all ended up dying all the time. They ended up dying so romantically, and villaneous ones were so powerful.

"I still love Bond girls," she saidm "and, you know, there's this kind of weird swing that come through my work in the last few years of taking on these negative female icons one way or the other, the Poison Ivys of the world, and the femme fatales, and even silly things like The Truth About Cats & Dogs. And I did this on purpose and with complete intention. Because when I started out, I was so afraid of being pushed into some false image of womanhood. Now it's more about not being afraid og any image, not feeling that anyone could really pigeonhole you in a way that you would believe that it was true."

Uma also likes Jane Austen, who in her own was was interested in women, control, and destiny, too, though not in refusing conventional contexts. One thing Uma enjoys about Austen's work is how much it taught her about the subtleties of life, about how the minutiae of behavior, the smallest things, express who you are all the time. When her own reticence was remarked on, she said, "Oh, I don't know. There might be personal things hidden all over the place.

It was the earlier of the nasty December days, and Uma looked a little startled. This was because I had just told her about a dream I had the night before, in which she was giving a baby a bath in water that then cascaded out, washing the baby, who now had the head of an elephant, into my arms. "Oh, so you know the mythology of my name," she said. "Uma, mother of Ganesha." Ganesha, it turns out, is the elephant-headed Hindu god. "That's funny. Very funny, actually." I didn't, in fact, know the first thing about the mythology of Uma's name, or her pregnancy. As soon as I found out, I played the lottery, but I didn't win.

"I was chuckling inside," Uma said later. It was now an overcast day in January, although most of the weather between our last talk and this one had been unseasonable mild. El niño. It was too soon to know if it was a boy or a girl, she said, but if it was a girl, she'd be allowed to play with Barbie dolls.

Because of the pregnancy, when not forging through the nasty December air on her way to very nice erstaurants in downtown Manhattan, Uma had been in the process of moving out of an apartment she had never really moved into. But she has always moved a lot anyway. "People say moving is so stressful," she said. "I find being in a space that you can't ever feel like you should really unpack your boxes is even more stressful. The reason I move is the hope of new space."
She said this before her pregnancy had been confirmed. Afterward, she said, "All that stuff becomes incredibly pressured, as you can imagine. A little bit of the folly goes out of it. I always used to say, even when I was in my teens and going from apartment to apartment, that I had a sneaking suspicion that I would never be able to make a home for my own sake. I suspected that my moving and my endless need for reinvention would not cease until I had somebody else's best interest at heart." This sentiment may sound not quite right for a person to whom being in control of her own destiny is important. But in the context of what she said about why she wanted to be independent since she was four or five, it makes a certain kind of sense. "One of my most hopeful things is that I feel incredibly open-minded," Uma said. "I don't feel like an expert and I don't have an agenda to cram down the throat of some being I've never seen before. And I feel that way organically. I'm not just making it that way."

Source: Esquire March 1998