People Magazine

NEW MOM UMA THURMAN SHOWS PLENTY OF SEX AP-PEEL IN THE AVENGERS

Being a stunt double sounds like hard work -- unless you're working for Uma Thurman. Last summer, on the London set of her new comic action film The Avengers, based on the '60s TV series, Thurman insisted on doing many of her own stunts as scientist-turned-spy Emma Peel. In one scene the actress dangled 20 feet aboveground from a flame-spitting hot-air balloon -- despite an intense fear of heights. "I remember the look of mortal fear on her face," says director Jeremiah Chechik. "She was not pleased about being up that high." Nonetheless, when she returned this February for a reshoot -- now several months pregnant -- she risked her neck once more. Again, "she had to hang off a balloon," says special-effects coordinator Joss Williams. "We had to be very careful with her." She is, notes Chechik, "a very proud woman."

These days, she has another reason to be proud. On July 8, Thurman, 28, gave birth to her first child, daughter Maya Ray, two months after marrying the father, actor Ethan Hawke, 27. "I'm having a wonderful time," she told the Associated Press in June. "I was really ready for this life change." The couple, who live in an apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, recently bought a $1.25 million four-bedroom house a half-hour drive north of New York City. "Uma will be a completely devoted mother," says her former acting coach and friend Cindia Huppeler, whose son is Thurman's godchild. "Having a child is something she's always wanted." Thurman, agrees her Pulp Fiction co-star Samuel L. Jackson, "is going to be such a cool mom. She's a very loving and giving person."

For proof just look at her very public affection for Hawke, whom she met on the set of Gattaca in 1996. The couple seem to be completely, overwhelmingly, nauseatingly in love. In March, while Hawke was in Canada filming the upcoming drama Snow Falling on Cedars, she dragged him to Vancouver's Absolutely Diapers store, where he practiced changing a life-size infant doll. The couple, says salesclerk Allison Plewes, "were cooing" at each other. "It's the most exciting time in my life," says Hawke, who was born in Texas and raised in Princeton, N.J. At Brooklyn's River Cafe two nights before their May 1 wedding, he pulled out a sheet of paper and began reading to their unborn child as Thurman rubbed her belly. They looked, says maitre d' Stephane D. Hainaut, "like two teenagers in love."

Most movie stars are a bit more reserved in public. But Thurman, say friends and coworkers, has never had much interest in her image. She and Hawke spent much of their preparenthood time together casually dining in Manhattan restaurants. If fellow patrons gape, says Huppeler, "Uma totally ignores the attention. She accepts it as part of her job." On the set of The Avengers, says special-effects coordinator Williams, "she did not insist on big-star treatment. She drank what the rest of us drank in plastic cups -- she didn't have a bone-china tea set." Peter King, Thurman's makeup artist on the film, found her friendliness a bit surprising. "She'll talk to anyone," he says. "It's weird, because it's like having this big star on set who's not aware of it at all."

Her laid-back attitude is apparently all in the family. Her parents, says Thurman, "are very special, eccentric, wonderful people." Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University, is a close friend of the Dalai Lama and was the first westerner to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk. In 1987 he cofounded the nonprofit Tibet House in New York City with actor Richard Gere. Her mother, Nena von Schlebrugge, a former model who was once married to Timothy Leary, is now managing director of Tibet House. Uma (named for a Hindu goddess) declines to say whether she practices Buddhism; she and her three brothers -- Ganden, 30, a director at Tibet House; Dechen, 25, an Off-Broadway actor; and Mipam, 21, a Columbia undergrad -- "were not raised in some orthodox religious way," she says. "We were raised to be individuals and to question authority and to seek our own experience."

Thurman did just that. Growing up in Amherst, Mass., she told Vanity Fair in 1996, she was shy and began acting as a way to "express myself free from my own inhibitions." In the mid-'80s her family moved to Woodstock, N.Y.; soon after, Thurman, 16, got her own apartment in Manhattan and enrolled in the Professional Children's School. She supported herself as a model with Click Model Management. "She was a little aloof," says Click owner Frances Grill. "She was a lot more intelligent than most girls her age. She was a loner and mostly hung out with adults. I think she felt modeling was not something someone should take seriously."

Meanwhile, she auditioned for films, landing a role in 1988's teen comedy Johnny Be Good. She broke out as Cecile, an innocent seduced by John Malkovich in 1988's Dangerous Liaisons, and as the goddess Venus in 1989's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. She gained simultaneous reputations as an intellectual and a sex symbol. "She has this Jayne Mansfield body and a horrifyingly great brain," Malkovich told Rolling Stone. Overwhelmed by sudden success, she headed to England -- and met actor Gary Oldman, 12 years her senior. Their 1990 marriage lasted less than two years. After the divorce, she told Cosmopolitan, "I didn't feel light for a while. The girlish laughter had gone."

She has, over the years, apparently gained it back. After playing author Henry Miller's wife in 1990's steamy Henry & June, the first NC-17 film, she danced away with an Oscar nomination for her role as gangster's wife Mia Wallace in 1994's Pulp Fiction, did ditsy comedy in 1996's The Truth About Cats and Dogs, and camped it up as Poison Ivy in last year's Batman & Robin. And after a relationship hiatus, she began a four-month romance with Beautiful Girls costar Timothy Hutton in 1995, meeting Hawke shortly after they broke up.

Thurman has no plans to slow down now; later this month she begins shooting Woody Allen's untitled next film. And the new mom doesn't care if Hollywood starts giving her motherly roles. "I think motherhood is sexy," she told the Associated Press. "I don't expect anyone else to, but for me it's one of the sexiest things I've ever done. By far."

-- DAN JEWEL