Uma Thurman will not be reading this. She does not read her own press. It is not for her, she insists, but for others to indulge in. Reading your own press is like trying to look in the mirror and see yourself the way others see you: It can't be done, so why bother at all? This, at first, can sound like pomposity, but when you think about it, she's right. How unbearable to read, year in and year out, so many sundry others interpreting you based on a three-hour lunch. And yet, here we are, the two of us spending time, in earnest, trying to create a space in which some exchange will take place that will be worth committing to print.

To contrive an experience that the two of us could share--shopping, going to a museum--seems as equally absurd to her as reading about yourself, so the deal is that we are having lunch at one of her favorite restaurants in Greenwich Village, just a couple of blocks from her apartment, which she will be moving out of in five days. We are doing something that she would normally do on a Saturday afternoon, she says, which is to hang out, eat, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes.

The Grange Hall is a smallish, comfortable place with a few booths in the bar area reserved for smokers. I arrive before her, and the host is holding a table even though there are people waiting, because he presumed from the reservation (Thurman in smoking) that it was Uma. I sit in the booth, and as I am blowing my nose I hear a voice behind me: "Do you have a cold?" I look up and she is standing next to the table, unbundling herself from the chilly walk, eyes as big as hubcaps, staring. She slides into the booth and continues to stare. She smiles as she stares, so it is only slightly discomforting. I promised myself that I was not going to strain for words to describe her looks, as others have in the past (placid, otherworldly, ethereal, angelic), but now I can see what all the fuss is about.

One of the many things that distinguish Uma Thurman from, say, Nicollette Sheridan is that there is nothing coy about Uma. She has mastered the art of being at once incredibly direct and genuinely nice. So I don't take offense when she tells me that the only reason she is here having lunch with me is that she has agreed to do some press for Batman & Robin. This may seem like a statement of the obvious, but it usually goes unsaid in these situations; people being interviewed often act as if they just happen to be having lunch with you instead of recognizing that it is their job to have lunch with you.

The character she plays in the fourth installment of what has become one of Hollywood's biggest franchises is Poison Ivy, a delicious new villain. "I really got into it," she says, lighting the first of many cigarettes. "It's so much fun to play a completely uncomplicated but uberconfident creature who's unconcerned with and unintimidated by everything." Batman Forever was criticized for being all bells and whistles and no story, but word on Batman & Robin is that it's spectacular and funny. "Akiva Goldsman wrote the greatest dialogue," says Uma. "Ivy's not so much a physical-fighting character as she is a talker and a manipulator. She sort of saunters around and comes up with ideas on how to damage people. Real women don't get to act that way very often. Sometimes drag queens do." Uma has a tendency to finish her paragraphs of thought with a nervous, almost Beavis-like giggle that is usually followed by a "Ya know?"

Joel Schumacher directed this Batman, as well as the last, and he has gleefully whipped Gotham into a sugary soufflé of camp and rubber nipples, steering it far away from Tim Burton's original and darker vision. "There's a little bit of Mae West meets Divine meets Gotham City going on there," Schumacher says of Uma's Ivy. "I think that's true of all the villains in Batman--they're all out of Masquerade. It's one of the reasons that since the sixties TV show, the Batman villains have always attracted such big stars. There aren't too many roles where people can go over the top legitimately."

From the beginning, the making of Batman & Robin has been cloaked in high drama and secrecy. Even before there was a script, Variety leaked it that the villains were going to be Mr. Freeze (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy--and that the DC Comics one-liner on Poison Ivy is "the most beautiful woman in the world, but if you kiss her you die." "These are fighting words in Hollywood," says Schumacher. "The minute that was printed, every woman in Hollywood, from the Olsen twins to Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies, thinks she's the most beautiful woman in the world. We were fighting off movie stars, their agents, managers, lawyers, and publicists. It's my Gotham City, and for me, there was only one Poison Ivy. Uma is the most beautiful woman in the world."

John Malkovich once famously described Uma like this: "A very haunted girl, much too bright for her age. She has this Jayne Mansfield body and a horrifyingly great brain." Uma once famously described herself like this: "Tall, sandy blonde, with sort of blue eyes, skinny in places, fat in others. An average gal." Today, dressed down, she looks closer to her own description. She is wearing tan Carhartt pants that she bought at a hardware store, a chocolate-brown velour shirt that belongs to her boyfriend, Ethan Hawke, and a chocolate-brown velour coat that has dog hair and some sort of crusty stain on it. She is wearing one thin silver ring on one hand, and a fairly big opal ring that her mother bought for her on the other. Her hair--long and straight--gets tied up in a loose knot and then let down again about five or six times during our lunch. She stopped wearing makeup (dark lipstick and mascara) a while back because, she says, she wanted to "memorize" what she looked like without it and then to accept it. She does not work out. Her only real beauty regimen is going once a month to "the best facialist in New York"--Marcia at the Bliss spa.

If her beauty is somewhat obscured by a baggy weekend wardrobe, her intelligence is not. It is hard to know, exactly, how a woman who did not go to college and moved away from home at sixteen got so smart. Clearly, her rather unconventional up bringing had something to do with it. She spent most of her childhood-- along with her three brothers, Ganden, Dechen, and Mipam--in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor of religion at Amherst College. The Thurman children all have Buddhist names because Robert A. F. Thurman, now the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, was the first American to be ordained (by the Dalai Lama in 1965) as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He is, quite simply, the world's most famous American Buddhist. Nena, their mother, was discovered in Stockholm by the celebrated British Vogue photographer Norman Parkinson in 1955. Like Uma, she is nearly six feet tall and, as a kid, thought she was an ugly duckling. By seventeen, Nena was a top fashion model in Manhattan, working for Eileen Ford and hanging out with her "buddy" Salvador Dali. In 1964, she married the LSD guru Timothy Leary, 20 years her senior. By 1966, she had divorced Leary and married Thurman. "I raised [my children] from early on to be independent, to think for themselves and make their own decisions," Nena once said, and " . . . to see themselves as the extraordinary individuals that they are."

Uma does not call herself a Buddhist, because she does not practice. "Being very exposed to people who are seriously religious," she says, "I'm loath to simply take it by name." Still, it seems obvious that her philosophical mind and open nature are, at least in part, a direct result of her having been raised in a scholarly Buddhist environment. Witness her attitude about looks: "If young girls are not encouraged to be anybody else other than how they look--one way or another, even if they're considered unattractive--it's unhealthy. As a child I didn't have that problem. I wasn't even particularly pretty. In fact, quite the contrary. So I had to get by on my wit. That was how I could make it through the day. Being nice or trying to win friends. Being tough when I was in grade school. There was a point one year that I realized I could act tough because I was tall. And that worked for a while."

I wonder: Since Uma is now considered one of the great natural beauties of the world, whom does she find beautiful? Who's hot?

"Ingrid Bergman is hot," she shoots right back, but then thinks better of the question. "I don't even relate to that. I don't see the world that way. I can't help it. I don't find the two dimensions of a person to be at all interesting." Our food arrives, and she eyeballs my French fries. "May I? I love salty potatoes," she says, grabbing a handful.

Uma, it seems, has experienced a kind of ideological journey where beauty and its intoxicating effects are concerned. Having moved to New York on her own when she was still a teenager, she ended up becoming the object of some intense fetishization after appearing naked in three films at the very beginning of her career. At seventeen, she played Venus in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, rising up out of the water in a half shell; at eighteen, she ripped off her nightgown for John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons; and at 20, she appeared in Henry & June, the first film ever rated NC-17. Much of the madness that her nakedness inspired continues to this day: There are no fewer than eleven Web sites dedicated to Uma. Her struggle against becoming "the sexual flavor of the month," as she once said, determined her next few films.

As she sits across from me, so seemingly comfortable in her own skin, she appears to have won the battle, to have wrestled the beast into submission. "Being categorized by my gender as a certain kind of person--in a sexual sense--was so threatening to me as a young woman because I didn't project those things myself. And it's confusing for adults dealing with a kid like that. They see this sophisticated, developed-looking creature and they don't realize you're still a girl, just trying to carry it around. That was a big thing, and I dealt with it for a long, long time. Just recently, I'm no longer worried about it. I can do what I want now. I don't have a defensive attitude toward work."

Schumacher, who has known Uma since she was a teenager, says she has always been preternaturally well adjusted. "When you start working in movies at such a young age, you better have some kind of center and a sense of how to protect yourself or else you're going to be lost in the shuffle. Just to handle the pressure of that and the other egos around you and the sexual advances. What's great about her is that there is a vulnerable, fragile, sensitive person there, too. She's never slick. I know no one at her age with that beauty, that talent, that intelligence, and also that humor. It's a very rare combination. She's so much fun. A lot of great beauties just take themselves too seriously."

A beautiful-girl dilemma: How to ensure that you're taken seriously while not taking yourself too seriously? Who has successfully escaped an early career of being too blonde and too sexy? Jessica Lange. Michelle Pfeiffer. Are there others? At 27, Uma has made sixteen films, some small and interesting (A Month by the Lake, The Truth About Cats and Dogs), some big and forgettable (Jennifer Eight, Final Analysis), some disastrous (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues). Only once has she veered close to greatness--in Pulp Fiction, for which she was Oscar-nominated. "If there's not a character there that seems intriguing, it doesn't really matter if the movie is large or small--I can't go to work. I've done it before because I liked the whole picture, and it's too difficult. It's you in front of the camera, and you have to exist there. And if you don't have a character to support you in that place, it's three months of wanting to commit suicide." The Truth About Cats and Dogs was one such experience, and out of that came virtually the only bad press I've ever read on Uma. Janeane Garofalo and Thurman reportedly did not get along. While Garofalo tried her best to conceal her distaste for her costar during interviews in support of the movie, one friend of the comedian's says she had taken to answering questions about Uma with an exaggerated shaking of her head back and forth while saying with a big smile on her face, "She was lovely." When Uma talks about the making of the film she uses words like clumsy, awkward, and stressful.

After we finish lunch, Uma will go home to pack up her apartment and put her stuff in storage, keeping only four suitcases for a summer in Europe. When she returns, she intends to look for a house in the country--Upstate New York or Massachusetts--because she is tired of returning, exhausted, from film sets in big cities, only to be in another big city. The first leg of her journey will take her to Prague, where she will film a remake of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, directed by Bille August. Uma's playing Fantine to Liam Neeson's Jean Valjean. Then she will go to London to play Emma Peel in a remake of the sixties TV show The Avengers costarring Ralph Fiennes.

This fall, Uma will appear in what could turn out to be another Pulp Fiction. Produced by the same team, Gattaca is the directorial debut of one Andrew Niccol, a 32-year-old comer from New Zealand who directed commercials in London for a few years before ar riving in Los Angeles. Gattaca-- a science-fiction mystery--stars Uma and Ethan Hawke (their romance began on the set a year ago). Even viewing a bootleg video of a rough cut that was only 45 minutes, I was awed. In Gattaca, set in an unspecified future, the perfection of genetic engineering has created a totalitarian society where men in business suits blast off into space every few minutes. It is creepy and beautiful and Uma is perfectly cast. "Uma's character is a diamond," says Niccol, "perfect to the naked eye, but with the most minute flaw. Apart from her talent, there is the physical aspect to Uma - she has this otherworldly quality. My God, if Uma Thurman isn't the perfect genetic specimen, what hope is there for the rest of us?" When I ask about romance on the set, Niccol says, "I don't like to gossip, but being a director is like being a very expensive matchmaker." When I ask Uma about her tendency to date her costars, she says rather dryly, "Boredom is a great motivator."

"Is that a science experiment or a decoration?" Uma is staring curiously up at the windowsill above our booth in the restaurant, on which someone has lined up several Mason jars filled with amber-colored water. In each jar are dogwood branches ready to burst into bloom. "Maybe someone had mercy on the boughs that dared to bud so early," says Uma, vaguely concerned, "and they wanted to just kill them slowly indoors rather than let them freeze."

The restaurant is completely empty and we are out of cigarettes, so Uma goes off to the bathroom. While she is gone, I discover that the bar sells cigarettes, and upon her return to the table, I tell her of our good fortune. "How lucky for us!" she says, lighting up and ordering a beer. As she orders, she puts her hand over my tape recorder as if she were covering my eyes. She does not want me to mention the beer. I agree to that - but only if she tells me why...and if it's a good reason. "The good reason is that if I could quit smoking, then I would, because I don't want to encourage it. So, I feel like having a beer in the afternoon....I don't want to encourage that either."

"You don't think having a beer in the afternoon is an OK thing to do?" I ask, genuinely puzzled. "You have some kind of guilt about it?"

"Now it's getting worse," she says laughing. "I will not go on with this."

I mention this little exchange because (a) I didn't think it was a good reason (she drank only half of it and gave the rest to me) and (b) it snapped us back to reality. We are not having lunch, we are working. "The interview is an interesting process when not used in and exploitative way," she says, suddenly more animated than she has been all day. "A really good friend of mine is writing a book about the interview, which I think means, literally, 'in between the lines.' To see between. Ya know? He's a well-known journalist and he's done some famous interviews, and his whole thing is that he doesn't have to write about people he doesn't find interesting. That's the hard part, probably, to write about something that's not interesting. And in a weird way--in my own sick way--I have often chosen to be uninteresting."

"Really?"

"Oh, yeah," she says, leaning back, lighting a cigarette. "You meet someone and you can't quite tell what's going on, or they seem to have an agenda and I immediately deflate. I don't become guarded; I just get very, very...small. I use very few colors. Stay very calm about it." She wraps her tan wool scarf around her neck and shoulders and ties her hair back up. "There's this other seduction, which is really kind of misguided, which is this thing of trying to win someone over. I've often seen pieces about other people where they're so clearly trying to gain control over the situation by charming and flattering and bringing journalists into situations that will baffle them. Driving fast in Jeeps!" She laughs. "Trying to inflate oneself, give action to oneself. That's totally not my way. Nor is it my way, through some artificial effort on my part, to entrust upon you some particular image, which is completely impossible, because..." She trails off for a second. "...Out of the whole library of a life, I'm not just one lunch."