"I swear it's hormonal," Uma Thurman says of her new-found giddiness. But with her kick-a-- part as Emma Peel in The Avengers and offscreen roles as mother-to-be and home renovator, this screen goddess needs no excuse to unleash her wicked wit.

A THURMAN IS ONSTAHE, HAPPILY addressing a large crowd, dancing, even singing and clapping. Tall, attractive, and charismatic, Thurman savors the spotlight and holds it confidently. This is not Uma Thurman, but her father, Robert, a Tibetan scholar who has become more of a public figure in the past few years as film and music celebrities have joined the call for Tibetan freedom.

Hosting the annual Tibet House benefit concert in March at Carnegie Hall, Robert Thurman stood with Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, Patti Smith, and Live, clapping enthusiastically if awkwardly, on the wrong beat. Later, at the Waldorf-Astoria, the disparities between Buddhism and celebrity became clearer, as robed monks accepted good wishes from dyed-hair rockers wearing leather pants. In a quiet corner, away from the buffet tables, the open bars, and the ironies, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke quietly fulfilled their obligations as honorary chairs of the benefit.

Though Thurman has been intensely educated in both Buddhism and celebrity, she has embraced neither. That night she used the latter to help the former, knowing that her name would bring publicity to the event. Her father, who co-founded Tibet House with actor Richard Gere, among others, delighted in the attention brought to the cause. But Uma, then five months pregnant, felt "bugged" by patrons who wanted to taste celebrity by chatting with her. "I'm pretty tired these days," she says later, "so my threshold for public life is extremely low-and it was never very high to begin with." She imagines a charity dunking booth, in which well-dressed donors could pay money to try to dunk her in water. She likes the idea, which makes more explicit the exchange of their money for her annoyance.

Thurman takes a wry, almost parental view of her dad's time in the spotlight, as lecturer, author, and advocate: "He's a ham; he's charmingly naive, and that's nice. He doesn't consider the lower motivations, like, Why would somebody wanna make you look like a complete jerk? So far as that cynical, protective instinct goes-the withholding, terse, oblique answers-that's not him."

She knows about the cynical instinct, because for years she's worn an oblique veil in interviews. As she admitted last year in Vogue, "I have often chosen to [seem] uninteresting." She's no recluse-New Yorkers regularly spot her at markets, restaurants, and arts performances-but she's mastered the trick of hiding in full view. The product of a remarkable background, Thurman has a steely resolve, a sharp-tongued wit, and a teasing audacity in her repertoire. She does not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise; the only suffering will be at the fools' expense. Making herself seem uninteresting requires a substantial masquerade, like a rooster climbing into a sheep costume.

She has been in eighteen feature films since 1987, but her turn as Emma Peel in The Avengers could be her last for a while. "It was not that easy a role to cast," says director Jeremiah Chechik (Benny & Joon). "You need somebody who's smart and sexy. Uma's sexuality comes out of a certain confidence-there's no coyness to it." Because smart-and-sexy roles are scarce, and because she's starting a family with new husband Hawke, Thurman has no current plans for a nineteenth film. The retreat from Hollywood seems to have freed her. Five years ago, when I first interviewed her, her high-minded nobility didn't seem to leave room for any frivolity. Now, at the age of 28, she has developed a boisterous tic: a loud, persistent laugh, a display of indulged delight, which "gets everyone a little shook up," she says.

"I apologize; I know I'm highly amused all the time," she says after one giddy out burst. "I swear, it's hormonal. I just laugh in this vicious, terrible, wicked way."

THURMAN AND Hawke recently bought a country house in upstate New York, not far from Manhattan, and while he's in Vancouver, shooting Snow Falling on Cedars, she's overseeing renovations. Before driving up to the house one afternoon, Thurman stops in the East Village to pick up a bathroom cabinet she's had refinished. Or, rather, that should have been refinished. As the storeowner loads the mirrored cabinet into the back of her Range Rover, Thurman reminds him that the work is tardy, and also incomplete. Although she maintains a pleasant smile, she also prods him. When he drops the name of a prominent magazine editor whose fireplace is for sale in the store, she corrects his mispronunciation. When he can't get a tool out of the small fifth pocket of his jeans, she suggests he might need looser pants. And when he offers her a $150 credit for the tub he removed from her country house, she reminds him that he'll probably sell the fixture for $1,000-especially if he drops her name to buyers.

"I put off having a life for years, because I was working," she says in the car, heading north. Thurman used to change New York apartments constantly, an ordeal usually endured only by those who can't afford the price of stability. She and Hawke share a "tiny apartment" in the Village-the baby's room will barely fit a crib and changing table-so they hurriedly bought the house after she got pregnant. We pull into the driveway of an aged relic overlooking the Hudson River. It was once a magnificent home, and it will be again-in time for her child's third birthday, maybe.

Even a real estate agent would have to call Thurman's beloved retreat a mess. The shuttered exterior is so faded it could be a setting for a Stephen King story, the kitchen is the only room that's been renovated recently, and the backyard garden hasn't been weeded in a season or two. Now that Thurman is dealing with contractors instead of directors, she's learned their language as well. Inside the house, she carefully inspects a new bathroom that's under construction, and has an intense talk with a builder about grout joints. The bedroom sconces have been set in the wrong places, she observes, and must be relocated. She approaches domesticity with characteristic rigor, and she'll confront the workmen as readily as she did director Philip Kaufman during the NC-17-rated Henry & June. (See story below.) Tussles such as these excite her.

In public, Thurman often appears as an alabaster princess, our very own Helena Bonham Carter, refined and unsullied. In what ways is this public portrait incomplete? Here's a hint: With evident embarrassment, she admits that she listens to Howard Stern, though only when she's alone in her car, for the thrill of hearing someone speak "utterly gross and unforgivable things." Thurman usually silences her gross impulses in public, so it's no wonder she finds ambivalent delight in Stern, the blurting king of American junk culture. She might even envy his freedom.

ANDREW NICCOL HAS SEEN facets of the hidden Uma. The New Zealander directed Thurman in Gattaca, where she met Hawke. Although it was "one of the season's worst box office flops," as Janet Maslin of The New York Times noted, Gattaca is a venturous, often poetic parable of hidden flaws, set in a beautiful, gridded future. One day, while Hawke was filming a scene, Thurman, who was out of camera range, tied her costar's shoelaces together, Niccol recalls. "She's funnier and more mischievous than you might think," he says. "She has all of these wonderful vices. I would never attempt to drink her under the table. She's sort of a homebody, which I think no one would believe. But she's also sophisticated: She can order in restaurants in half a dozen languages."

She is a fierce opponent, whether playing hearts ("It's about honor and humiliation") or board games ("Scrabble has sold out to commerciality. I mean, pee pee is in the Scrabble dictionary,"), and her flair for gamesmanship prevails even in conversation. Parrying a question about thematicism in her films, she stops and, with a glint, asks, "Aren't you really interested in, like, finding an assistant director who'll say I'm a real bitch?" Setting locations for our interviews requires a diplomat's negotiation skills, as well. At first she denounces any setting other than a restaurant as a ploy of fake promotional "intimacy." "Every, time I hear about an actor who takes an interviewer to a soup kitchen or something," she says with a laugh, "I wanna throw up."

Q: You've chosen an obviously absurd example.
A: Of course. I didn't want it to resonate with any possible truth-then someone would think I was talking about them, and there's almost nothing I could say that wouldn't resonate with someone. I need to buy a toilet. You could join me doing stuff-particularly if you're into manual labor. [A pause, and another glint] Can you paint a porch?

WHILE THE OPENING scenes of The Avengers were being filmed last June, a fire erupted on the London set. "Actually, it was me, running around with a torch, trying to get a few days off," Thurman says puckishly.

The '60s TV series, a British production, brought mod London to America, in its full glory,: Emma Peel, a liberated widow, wore leather catsuits and often rescued partner John Steed just before one of his bespoke suits could be bloodied by a villain. There was a lot of gender reversal in the show-you don't expect sexual stereotypes from a program where the male boss is named Mother. Although Thurman throws a lot of kicks and punches in the film and even battles her evil clone, who wears "a sleazier version of the catsuit, with really disco pointy heels," costar Ralph Fiennes, as Steed, fights the final battle against Sir August De Wynter (Sean Connery), who assaults the globe with bad weather. Steed is "not really manly, in the traditional sense," Thurman notes. "It's not what we would home-grow over here. He'd have huge muscles and a big thick neck; he'd come up with really good one-liners when he kills people." At this juncture, the names Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis come to mind, not that Thurman would ever be so specific.

Almost all men between the ages of 30 and 45 had the same three erotic inspirations in adolescence: the cover of Herb Albert's Whipped Cream & Other Delights album, Catwoman, and Emma Peel. (The last two wore catsuits, which may explain why a generation of men still drool like schoolboys over women in leather.) "I heard over and over again from men how sexy Diana Rigg was," Thurman says. She found that Rigg's Mrs. Peel had an "almost Nancy Drew quality. She was clever and un-self-conscious." And Thurman preferred that winking innocence to the "artificiality in the modern portrayal of sexuality-the dropped voice and batting of the eyelashes, all that stuff which I cannot take seriously."

Mrs. Peel was also an inspiration to women. In 1970, feminist author Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will) was handing out pamphlets for a conference on rape when a passing male goosed her. Brownmiller, as she wrote in her essay "On Goosing," imitated Peel by kicking her adversary, in the ass; she fell and sprained her ankle. "It was very, inspiring to watch Emma Peel do these karate kicks and also look so good, so feminine," Brownmiller says now.

Thurman describes the movie as a fantastical, fluffy, colorful, tongue-in-cheek comedy." During filming, she spent lots of time "being chased by snow machines," and little time thespianizing with Fiennes. "This piece didn't really bring us together artistically," she says. "Ralph's a fine fellow, but it's not like doing a drama, where you spend time with the person-it was very, light, like a Ping-Pong game." With the combined talents of production designer Stuart Craig (Dangerous Liaisons), set decorator Stephanie McMillan (The English Patient), and costume designer Anthony Powell (Tess), who've won three, one, and three Oscars, respectively, the movie devises a surreal catalog of British style. The bad guys even race around in large teddy-bear costumes. "I just stare at people and hit them," says British comedian Eddie Izzard, who plays Connery's chief thug. "Oh, and I chew gum-that was my Method touch."

"The dialogue is very, Noel Coward," raves Chechik. "There's great banter between Uma and Ralph." Although Thurman enjoyed the dialogue, she dissents from Chechik's hyperbole. "Coward is Coward," she says simply. After having made several pictures at indie-giant Miramax, including Pulp Fiction and A Month by the Lake, she's ventured over to Warner Bros., the most star driven of studios, for Batman & Robin and now The Avengers. But playing an action role was "a one-off for me, a lark," she says. "Batman was a total departure. I've tried every different genre. I've purposely forced myself into uncomfortable situations. I'm always doing something contrary."

To understand Thurman's career choices, recall her distinguishing role, in 1988's Dangerous Liaisons. In the film, she blossoms from a stammering convent girl into a finger-sucking wench. It was partly her beauty and talent that struck moviegoers; but it was also, to be honest, her topless unveiling in bed with John Malkovich. Bands wrote songs about her-the male singers in Majesty Crush's mildly creepy "Uma" and Zoinks!'s cinephilic "Uma Fourteen Times" ("I long to hold ya / I know I'm no Travolta") lust for her. And in Heavenly's "Ben Sherman," a female singer regrets that her deluded boyfriend pines for Uma.

At eighteen, she'd won the temporary position she has called "cultural girlfriend of the week." The title felt fake to her-she hadn't even had a "real boyfriend" yet. "I was presexual at that time. So everything made me a little uncomfortable. I was very precocious, and I was a provocateur in my own life. 'Give me, show me, I'll try it.' I tried to play that [sexuality] without necessarily owning it as a woman. That did slow me down. That's part of the reason I've had this schizophrenic career."

For years she recoiled from the sexuality of her Liaisons performance. So much attention had been lavished on her looks that she asserted control by withdrawing: She cloaked herself in sweaters; deflected interviewers with protective, oblique non-answers; and took roles in which her beauty was insignificant. She tried to redirect public attention by governing what parts of her people could see.

At times she seemed to take lesser work just for the chance to play a flawed or conflicted character, as though apologizing for Liaisons: a remote blind girl in Jennifer 8, a thriller without any thrills; a nervous bartender who leases herself out as a "thank-you present" for Robert DeNiro in Mad Dog and Glory; and an archetypal dumb blond up staged by wisecracking Janeane Garofalo in The Truth About Cats & Dogs.

Thurman's attempts to retract her power failed, and her talents reemerged only when she agreed to play desirable creatures once again. "Holy s---," Michael Rapaport's character murmurs the first time she appears in Beautiful Girls. As Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction, she's a failed actress so adventurous that gangsters risk death just to massage her feet. And in Batman & Robin, she's Poison Ivy, a kinky Helmut Newton fantasy who causes George Clooney to ignore Elle Macpherson.

Thurman says she used "every dirty femme-fatale trick in the book" to play Ivy. The stylized hand movements were derived from Japanese Kabuki theater. Poison Ivy was "an opera character. I found it ludicrous having to throw a punch in that character. She was a talker and a thinker. That whole fight at the end was the one thing that I really objected to. It seemed so beneath the character to actually have to scrap. But I don't control Batman & Robin, so . . ."

Q: Your value system seems so at odds with the things you have to do as an actress, with the mechanisms of moviemaking. Why do you even like this job?
A: It's very creative, even when it sucks, even when you're in a dreadful situation. The rest of it, I never really took that seriously. You can't have your value system terribly damaged by things you don't have much respect for.
Q: But I imagine your being appalled constantly at all the things you have to go through. I imagine your waking up and thinking, What will appall me today?
A: [Huge laughter] I find that so amusing that it's gotta be true. Yeah, you're right. I probably have suffered most by my bad attitude. By having a critical eye in a situation where I see other people having a good time, and I sit on the sidelines and say it's all so dumb. I might have more fun if I weren't always worried that I'm about to pollute myself by going to a party. [Another laugh] So, you think I have a bad attitude?
Q: No, you're the one who called it a bad attitude.
A: I don't know what else to call it. "Cynical, vicious sense of humor"? [A laugh] "Nasty appetite for criticism"?
Q: None of this viciousness is on the public record, you know. So I guess you're just quietly appalled.
A: No, but people catch on. If in week one you get appalled by someone you're making a movie with, and you have another fifteen weeks to go, it's really hard. [A laugh] 'Cause if they appall you in week one, they're probably gonna appall you every day. Say you're working with a rude, sexist, obnoxious, loud, flatulent, barbaric gorilla who sits around and makes really gross remarks. In the beginning, it's amusing, like, "Can you believe that guy? He's so out-front, which is kind of refreshing, isn't it?" Give it about two weeks, and you'd do just about anything for a sound barrier.

Q: And is this rude, sexist, obnoxious guy a real person?
A: Oh, it's an amalgam of all things appalling.
Q: So if I looked, would I find an assistant director who thinks you're a real bitch?
A: Oh, millions of them think I'm a complete a--hole, I'm sure. My only problem with ADs is when they lie. Even if you say, "If I get the truth, I'll do anything, but if you lie to me, I'll have to start interpreting you, and you don't want that," it never works. [A laugh] So they think I'm some kind of smart-aleck, snide bitch, the kind who says something outwardly offensive-like, "Oh, you're lying again"-and then laughs hysterically.
Q: You've said that?
A: Oh, of course. They say, "Five minutes," and I say, "See you in fifteen! 'Cause that's when you're coming back, right? If I stuck a nail in my a-- and sat here, you'd still be back in half an hour. [A big laugh] If I were bleeding from the brain, you would still be back in two hours."

SHE LIKES TO BRING interviewers to expensive restaurants. That way, she jokes, at least she can extract a good meal from the magazine that's prying into her life. Today's lunch specials at the sedate three-star French joint in TriBeCa include liver, fish, and stinging-nettle soup. What are stinging nettles? "They're good for you!" the waitress and Thurman exclaim in unison.

There are two reasons why she knows about these prickly plants. For one, Thurman's first child is due in July. Although she says she's had an easy pregnancy, she's sacrificed her beloved pack-a-day cigarette habit. She's also had to pay more attention to nutrition, and nettles are "superhigh in iron." So she orders the soup, as well as the liver dish.

Also, Thurman was stung by nettles in India, where the painful plants are abundant. It was just one of the many rare experiences of her itinerant youth. Her father, the son of Elizabeth Farrar (an off-Broadway actress and former roommate of Bette Davis), married young to Texas heiress Christophe de Menil, whom he had met at Harvard. They soon divorced, and Thurman voyaged to India, eventually becoming the first American ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He then married Nena von Schlebrugge, a Swedish model who'd also been married briefly, to '60s narcophilosopher Timothy Leary. (Like both parents, Uma had a short first marriage. In 1990, she wed tempestuous actor Gary Oldman, now a recovering alcoholic; the couple split within two years.)

The Thurmans named their only daughter for the Indian mother-goddess, and the family moved around a lot, as Professor Thurman taught at Amherst, Harvard, and later Columbia. He also returned to India, where he continued to study with the Dalai Lama. Nena Thurman, who earned a degree in psychotherapy, has said, "I raised [my children] to be in dependent.... Squabbling was encouraged."

Like all kids, Uma rebelled, rejecting Buddha and Freud for the mundane. "I wasn't content to be eccentric." Middle-American products such as Pop-Tarts and Wonder bread "were just things of beauty to me. I saw them like Andy Warhols, each of them." Having had "a Swedish-German mother and an eccentric, intellectual Buddhist father," she says, rebellion "wasn't about wearing weird clothes or tattooing myself. Instead, I left home." She went to boarding school at thirteen but didn't fit in well there either, so a few years later she moved to New York to model and study acting.

As her Hollywood career quickly ignited, Thurman's family didn't always understand her choices. "My nickname was Florence-as in Nightingale. Because I was always attaching myself to sick and diseased people and trying to help them. You realize that you're not gonna save anybody's day. They might like their unhappy circumstances, and ultimately resent you for thinking you're going to offer them something else. 'Oh, you like being a miserable creep?! You like slamming your head against the wall?! Oooh! And you don't want me to keep sticking my hand in there, trying to cushion it?! Gosh!' " At this juncture, the name Gary Oldman comes to mind. Not that Thurman would ever be so specific.

And though she left home to escape the confines of her family, she's now best friends with her three brothers, Dechen, Ganden, and Mipam, all named for Hindu deities. "We fight, too, but we're really close." Because of the variety of beliefs represented in the Thurman clan, the simple matter of a family Christmas tree elicits earnest debates about environmental duty and the pagan origins of the tree tradition. "These battles get fought annually. The tree always loses," she trills.

Uma once hated her first name and wished she could be a Karen, like the other girls. But when her baby is born-she doesn't know the gender-she'll give it an unusual name, so the child will "feel like part of a tribe. Somebody named Jack would have an identity crisis in my family." As for a surname, she expects the child will eventually claim the last name of "whichever parent he or she hates the least."

Thurman puts her left hand on her pregnant stomach, rises, and gets ready to start searching for a new toilet. The check arrives, and even with our three desserts, it's barely more than $100. "We didn't spend very much. Maybe we can put the toilet on the magazine's expense account. We'll ask for a free subscription, to go with the toilet." She laughs. "I'm sorry, that's very vulgar."

THURMAN LAMENTS THE American government's decision not to press China to vacate Tibet, a country the Chinese have occupied since 1950, torturing and killing its peaceful population. Our government pledged to fight for international democracy after World War II, she explains, but politicians now hesitate to jeopardize lucrative trade agreements with China by defending Tibetans, whose culture rejects material wealth. "Suddenly those billion Chinese look like candidates for Nike sneakers," she says with a hint of a sneer.

Although she's not a practicing Buddhist, her parents' religion left an imprint on her values. So it's taken her years to find a comfortable middle ground in the film business, to adjust to what her father has described as "the temporary and highly unstable flow of adulation." Ten years have passed since Dangerous Liaisons. With Heather Graham's topless unveiling in Boogie Nights, the culture has a new girlfriend of the week, and Hollywood has a new Uma. Now, Thurman says, she no longer frets about how she's perceived, on- or offscreen. "There's nothing scary about being sexual or being intellectually disrespected."

Q: It hardly seems you would have to worry about being intellectually disrespected.
A: An actress? Are you joking?
Q: Yes, but you've got a reputation as the Albert Einstein of actresses.
A: That's totally insulting! It's a put-down of all women, certainly all actresses. They say that about everyone: "And she's smart." It means underneath it all, she's not really. [A laugh] Which is maybe true.
Q: It's less likely that you would have to prove your intelligence than that you would need to hide it, to not make people feel-
A: To not make them hate me? They do any way. [Another laugh] But if your theory is that a lot of these wacky recent choices, these Warner Bros. sex-bomb parts, come out of a totally different sense of comfort, that's true. I feel incredibly strong and unconcerned with repercussions-I know that's really dangerous.

She refers to our earlier discussion, about her state of being constantly appalled. ''I have to hold myself in check, prevent myself from being obnoxious. Because I have a wicked, bad sense of humor." And so, when Thurman has her "salty, savory, scrumptious" thoughts about the various appalling figures she meets in her job, "I chuckle over them privately.

"I rufffle feathers all the time. As a successful actor, you deal with people who are already afraid of you. So you make a joke, and they go, 'What did that b*tch say?' If you also have a razor-sharp tongue and a terribly wicked glint in your eye, it's too much. I'm not telling you I succeed. I just put up a vain effort to let everybody get along."

When what you really want is . . . ?

"Off the record?" she asks. She leans across the table and turns off the tape recorder. The tongue is just as razor-sharp, the humor just as wicked as she claims.

Written by Rob Tannenbaum