The actor Uma Thurman always wanted to be: “I can enjoy her movies forever”
Lots of us have recently been enjoying the stellar work of Maya Hawke on the cultural juggernaut that is Netflix’s Stranger Things, but it’s worth remembering that her mother, Uma Thurman, is what I believe the internet youth refer to as ‘The OG’… or ‘OP’, I can’t remember which.
Regardless, back in the day, Thurman was absolutely cool as fuck, not just a superb actor with ludicrous range but a fully fledged Japanese sword-wielding action hero on top, thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. She launched thousands of yellow and black tracksuited Halloween outfits in 2003 due to her genuinely (despite the word being overused) iconic character ‘The Bride’ and did it all again a year later in the equally slashy second part.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time that Thurman had been cast by Tarantino in a role, and not the first time that combination had produced an iconic character either. Nine years before that, she had made gangster’s wife Mia Wallace a mid-1990s must for women everywhere as the savvy, sexy dance partner of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, a part she played so effectively that she was Oscar-nominated.
It sparked a period during which Thurman was the first name on casting directors lists for any major movie, and she showed she could jump from genre to genre by doing the romantic comedy The Truth About Cats and Dogs one year and then the star-packed, if ill-fated comic book romp Batman and Robin the next, although her role as Poison Ivy came in for some flack.
That seemed to dent her fortunes somewhat, and she turned down a role in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings epic, which she would later describe as the worst mistake she ever made, quite a claim for someone who appeared with Sean Connery in the quite terrible movie The Avengers in 1998.
But Tarantino, at least back then, had a habit of bringing stars back from the wilderness, and the same year that Thurman won a ‘Best Actress’ Golden Globe in 2003 for the TV series Hysterical Blindness alongside Juliette Lewis, he cast her in Kill Bill, the two-part martial arts action thriller, in the lead role he wrote specifically for her, describing Thurman as his muse.
It paid off, in a big way. Thurman was nominated for a Golden Globe for both parts of the film, and it put her back on top of the pile for actors in Hollywood. A sign of that came a couple of years later as she shared top billing with the legendary Meryl Streep in a comedy film called Prime.
Thurman spoke of her admiration for her co-star as well as another Hollywood superstar at the time, saying: “All my life I wanted to work with Meryl Streep, and all my life I wanted to be Doris Day. Well, I worked with Meryl Streep. And I can’t be Doris Day, but I can enjoy her movies forever. One of my favorites with Doris is Pillow Talk. It’s a light, breezy romp of a film that’s so much fun to watch. And that bathtub split-screen scene. It’s an all-time classic.”
Pillow Talk was a romantic comedy from 1959 featuring Day and Rock Hudson and was nominated for five Oscars, including a ‘Best Actress’ nod for Day. She had a career that spanned almost fifty years, excelling as one of the most famous singers of her time, as well as her numerous lead roles on screen for directors, including Alfred Hitchcock.
Thurman added, “I love that Doris didn’t play anyone but herself in her movies, like that one, and it was great. You wanted Doris to be Doris. She was just so full of energy and gorgeous. She sang. She danced. She was in those gorgeous A-line dresses. She epitomized a time period and always makes me smile.”
