Four hours, two bottles of good red wine and a handful of cigarettes into my dinner with Uma Thurman, she turns to a startled waiter and makes a request: She'd like a doggie bag, please. A crisp paper sack is promptly delivered, and I watch as the loveliest woman in American movies deftly scoops up the large slice of pate she's been nibbling, slips it into the pouch and tucks it into her shoulder bag.

It's an earthy, economical gesture – and not a particularly surprising one. A mere 27, Thurman has long come across as someone who's mindful of waste. Onscreen, she's smart enough not to fritter anything away: a glance, a smile, an offhand remark. Throughout our interview, too (between drags on the Marlboro Lights that dangle between her architecturally long fingers), she sorts through her words with extraordinary care. Some of these words are delivered with a sly, cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, the kind that was best captured on the delectable Pulp Fiction poster: "I've really got to quit smoking," she says. "I'll have my last one with you, tonight."

I stub out a cigarette of my own to sympathize. "I want to be filled with air," Thurman says. "Not with smoke, not anymore." A few weeks later, her urge to quit is thrown into high relief when the happy word arrives that Thurman and Ethan Hawke, who've been lovers since they met last year on the set of the film Gattaca, are expecting a child in July.

It's an announcement that explains a lot of things about our interview, and not just her worry about giving up Marlboro Lights: There's something about Thurman these days that seems more settled, more at peace, than ever before. She's taking a break from movies, she says, and she's eager to talk about anything – books, cooking, life with her friends in New York – other than filmmaking. I'm still pondering that doggie bag, however, when a simple explanation for it comes bounding through the door of the intimate West Village bistro where we're having dinner. "Muffy!" Thurman shouts as a very large and very fuzzy chow chow races over to the table and nuzzles her happily. A few steps behind, wearing some chin stubble and a goofy grin, stands Hawke. "Hey," he says, leaning in to kiss her. "You were late, so I thought I'd drop by."

Hawke plunks himself down in a chair and scans the table for an extra wineglass. When he can't find one – the restaurant is, by now, packed, and half the people are none too discreetly staring in our direction – he shares Thurman's. With his flyaway hair, battered white jeans and a shirt that could have been filched from a gas-station attendant, Hawke looks a bit like an amiable shaggy dog himself. His arrival sparks a change in Thurman. Some switch has been flicked on inside her. Suddenly she's glowing like a teenager, as if she's been lit from within.

She pulls her chair close to his, and the three of us shoot the breeze for another 30 minutes. The primary subject: books. Hawke's first novel, The Hottest State, has just been published in paperback, and when he makes a cheerfully dismissive comment about it – "All the reviews were pretty bleak," he says – Thurman gives him a shove. "They were not," she intones. Hawke smiles and concedes that "the British reviews were a little better." Thurman and Hawke's lit talk isn't pretentious – they're fans, not critics – but it is ardent. She likes to keep memoirs piled by her bedside: Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes was a recent favorite, as was The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician. (On the other hand, she couldn’t abide Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s best-selling tale about disaster on Mount Everest. "My interest got lost amid all those oxygen tanks," she says.)

Hawke prefers fiction, and he delivers long riffs on the "total fucking genius" of the wildcat novelists Frederick Exley and Denis Johnson and wonders aloud if two recent highly praised books, Don DeLillo’s Underworld and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, weren’t too ambitious and unwieldy for anyone’s good. "Don’t you think they’ve both written better, tighter books?" he asks.

I watch as Thurman and Hawke poke their heads under the table to check on Muffy. And I find that I’m still marveling at the way Thurman has blossomed in Hawke’s presence. During the previous four hours, she’s been good company – warm, funny, forthcoming. But there is always the sense that she is holding a great deal in reserve, and that reserve shows in her features. In person, Thurman is beautiful, but not in that excruciatingly self-aware manner you sometimes see in New York women, and she is certainly not beautiful in the angelic, God’s-gift-to-mankind way she can often be on the big screen.

She wears no makeup, very little jewelry and simple but well-made clothes: a black cardigan over a white T-shirt, black cotton slacks and well-scuffed high-tops. A pastel scarf is knotted around her neck. Everything about Thurman, from her gestures to her vocal inflections, is modest; she calls zero undue attention to her being. She's as little recognizable as a blonde, nearly six-foot-tall film star can be in New York City, and that's exactly how she likes it. "New Yorkers are calm," she says. "That's one reason I love living here.

Nobody faints when they see me on the street." (I restrain myself from telling her about a friend who once spied her picking through the produce section at Balducci's, the old-world Greenwich Village supermarket. He claims it was among the most singularly lovely sights of his life and that he did indeed feel like fainting.) By now it's late. Thurman and Hawke say their goodbyes and exit the restaurant, and I stay behind to fetch my coat. When I finally emerge, they're a half block ahead of me, locked in a long, full embrace on this crisp midwinter night. It's a sight even hardened New Yorkers can't quite take in stride; the pedestrians who walk past look like they just might fall over.

It's tempting, but ultimately fatuous, to comment that Hawke has humanized this goddess, pulled her back down to earth. Thurman didn't need the tug; she's spent most of her decade-long career trying to keep her sense of herself and her own expectations from overinflating. In some respects she's still rebelling against the hype that swelled around her in the late '80s and early '90s, after sexy, bosom-heaving, scene-stealing performances in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Dangerous Liaisons. The roles landed her on the cover of Rolling Stone's Hot issue when she was 19, and offers for lead roles in commercial films and major cosmetic-company advertising campaigns began to pour in.

"I remember thinking that I didn't want to be the flavor of the month," Thurman says. "I've always tried to define myself as more than one thing, and it's important to me to have the courage to fail, to keep trying different kinds of roles. I wanted to know what comedy was like, what a thriller was like, what action was like, what dancing and singing were like. From a craftsman's point of view, I wanted to try to perfect myself in as many directions as I could."

Thurman's defiant eclecticism has sometimes frustrated her fans (the men, mostly) who'd like to see her in tight sweaters and in conventionally feminine roles. Their loss is the more discriminating moviegoer's gain: Thurman has appeared in a series of supporting roles that make a case for her as one of America's most diverse and resourceful actors. She has a knack for popping up where you least expect her: as mobster Bill Murray's gift to Robert De Niro in Mad Dog and Glory; as Henry Miller's wife, June, in the underrated Henry & June; as a cocaine-addled moll who gets an outsize needle plunged into her heart in Pulp Fiction (a performance that garnered her an Oscar nomination); and as an allegedly flawless genetic specimen in the lean, Orwellian sci-fi film Gattaca. Even in slightly wobblier movies (Jennifer 8, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Batman 8 Robin) Thurman has never felt at loose ends. "Sometimes you get to paint with a role," she says. "Sometimes you can only plaster." She doesn't read her reviews, although she does miss Pauline Kael's criticism in The New Yorker. "I'd always loved her work," Thurman says, "and I was so flattered that she made a nice mention of me before she retired, when she wrote a final letter about what she thought of everything."

Next, Thurman appears in another smart supporting role, as Fantine, a single mother who is forced into prostitution, in director Bille August's adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables. The film also stars Liam Neeson as the reformed criminal Jean Valjean and Geoffrey Rush as the gendarme who makes it his life's mission to put Valjean behind bars again. It's an affecting, unfussy production that's a genuine rarity, a movie that comes by its sentimentality honestly.

"I've wanted to work with Bille August for a long time," Thurman says. "And I'm in love with this story. That's one of the things I wish we had more of in modern cinema, the telling of great stories. Les Miserables is one of the greatest stories ever. It's a profound tale about the complexity of human life, about justice, and about redemption and forgiveness."

Thurman read the script and called her agent the same night: "Accept," she said. That word, however, has been tripping off her tongue less frequently in recent months. She's tired of living in foreign hotels (Les Miserables was filmed in Prague), where, she says, "CNN is your best friend." She's tired of being away from Hawke. "As anyone who's been in a relationship knows," she says, "if you're selfish or if you go away for too long and force the other to do all the traveling, the relationship suffers." She's also tired of working so hard. "I've been a very active performer for years, and I think it might be time to be quiet for a while." So this expectant mother has already wrapped up another role, starring alongside Ralph Fiennes in an update of the '60s TV show The Avengers, scheduled to come out later this year. (The mod part of Emma Peel was coveted by Gwyneth Paltrow and Nicole Kidman, among others.) But there's currently nothing else on her plate, and there may not be for some time. "It feels wonderful," she says.

If Thurman wants a sabbatical from movies, she also seems to want a break from talking about them. Our conversation covers many other topics: food, music, Buddhism, American politics. Although she claims to feel "charmless, humorless and utterly witless" when speaking in public, she's a shrewd, forceful conversationalist, a skill she honed while growing up in an intellectual family. Her father, Robert A.F. Thurman, is a noted Tibet scholar; now the Jey Tsong Khapa professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University, he was the first American to be ordained (by the Dalai Lama in 1965) as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Her Swedish-born mother, Nena van Schlebrugge, is a model-turned-psychotherapist who was previously married to limothy Leary. (Thurman also has three brothers: Ganden, Dechen, who is also an actor, and Mipam.) "There was always lively debate at the dinner table," Thurman says. "We were taught to question everything, especially 'facts.' It was always: 'Why is it a fact? How did it become a fact?' You learned to defend your opinions."

Thurman's Nordic good looks have no doubt largely been passed down on her mother's side; the Swedish port of Trelleborg is graced by a massive nude statue of her grandmother, a renowned beauty. But Thurman is more interested in talking about her parents' accomplishments. She bristles at the notion that even a shred of her father's current prominence has anything to do with her celebrity. "He's simply one of the greatest scholars of his time, at a moment when his field is of interest to the national populace," she says. And though she is happy to see long-overdue attention paid to the situation in Tibet, she is not a practicing Buddhist, and she has occasionally been resentful of her parents' Eastern influences. She concedes that, as a young girl, she often wanted to change her name from Uma – a Hindi name meaning "bestower of blessings" – to almost anything else. "I guess I wanted to be more like other children," she says.

Thurman wasn't a movie fanatic as a child, although she does remember sneaking in to see Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange along with a few similarly underage friends; the group of them, she says, were summarily booted out. She fled boarding school at age 15, with her parents' uneasy permission, and moved to New York City. She quickly found work modeling, and many who saw her first appearances on the runways were convinced that fashion had a new star in its midst. Thurman liked the work and admits to enjoying fashion, but soon she took up acting and hasn't glanced back since.

From the start, Hollywood was impressed by her maturity as much as her talent and beauty. When John Malkovich first met her, he famously described her as "a very haunted girl, much too bright for her age. She has this Jayne Mansfield body and a horrifyingly great brain." Quentin Tarantino labeled her "a 23-year-old with the soul of a 40-year-old woman." But maybe the best sound bite about Thurman was delivered by actor Gary Oldman, whom Thurman married in 1990 and divorced 18 tempestuous months later. When Oldman was asked what caused the breakup, he reportedly shrugged and said, "You try living with an angel!"

These days, Thurman is determined to spend her time doing the things she loves best: traveling, driving (preferably with Sarah McLachlan in the tape deck) and especially cooking for friends. She is opinionated about what she puts in her mouth. When the conversation turns to the new, multicultural edition of The Joy of Cooking, for example, she says she wonders whether too much culinary updating is being shoved in our faces these days: "When anyone starts telling you to put cilantro in your macaroni and cheese," she says, "it’s time to load up the double-barrel and shoot yourself." She says she prefers "simple peasant food" and gives me hints on making both popovers and vegetable stock ("don’t add salt until you’ve finished making it and you’re actually using it," she says). Thurman’s fortunate to be able to eat as much as she wants and admits that she doesn’t work out: "I’m lucky that I’m very tall and have a high metabolism," she says. "I can get a little heavy, but it usually falls off when I work. They force you to get up at five in the morning, and you’re up until 10 P.M., and then you’re up at five again. You lose weight naturally."

For now, Thurman is gaining weight – naturally. When we speak again after our dinner, it’s clear she is enjoying her status as a mother-to-be. "After a lifetime of scheming and planning and thinking about what kind of mother I want to be," she says, "I now find that I am simply in awe of the miracle of it." A few days later, my wife, Cree (whom Thurman had not met), is shopping with our three-month-old son in a local supermarket when a stranger bends over to coochie-coo at him. It’s Thurman. The two talk babies for a few minutes, and then Cree congratulates her on the news. "Thanks," a smiling Thurman says. Then, echoing the words of new mothers throughout history, she adds, "I’m just getting used to the idea."

Source: Harper's Bazaar March 1998