Uma Thurman, the actress behind the Bride who says she doesn’t particularly like violence

Uma Thurman

Photo: Georges Biard / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 29, 1970 Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2
Awards	Golden Globe · Academy Award (nomination) · BAFTA (nomination) · Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres · David di Donatello career award (honorary)

“I actually don’t particularly like violence.” Uma Thurman said it to InStyle this year, and the sentence sits oddly beside the picture that a whole generation keeps of her: a woman in a yellow tracksuit, a Hattori Hanzō sword in her hand, a Tokyo restaurant floor slick with what is left of O-Ren Ishii’s bodyguards. She went on to explain that she can enjoy screen violence the way she enjoys an extraordinary dance performance, when the movement is artful, and that for close to two decades she simply stayed away from action films. When she came back, she came back with a checklist. The violence had to be “motivated,” “beautiful” and “genuinely executed.” The actress who built Beatrix Kiddo now treats the genre like a contract she renegotiates clause by clause.

That conditional relationship with her own myth is the clearest way into her career. For most of it, audiences read her as the most dangerous person in the room: Mia Wallace with the needle over her heart, the Bride with her list of names. The real hazards, as she would make public much later, sat behind the camera, with the men who financed and staged those films. Almost everything she has chosen since reads as an effort to keep authorship of an image that the industry would happily run without her.

Her starting point was about as far from Hollywood as an American childhood gets. Uma Karuna Thurman arrived on April 29, 1970, in Boston, the second of four children of Robert Thurman, who in 1965 had become the first American ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama, and Nena von Schlebrügge, a model born in Mexico City to a German father and a Swedish mother, who had worked for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar before training in psychotherapy. Her father went on to hold the first endowed chair in Buddhist studies in the West, at Columbia University, and in 1986 her parents co-founded Tibet House US in New York with Richard Gere and Philip Glass, at the Dalai Lama’s request. The children grew up mostly in Amherst, Massachusetts, and in Woodstock, New York, with stays in Almora, in the Indian Himalayas, that added up to about two years.

It was not an easy childhood to be looked at in. Thurman has described herself as an awkward, introverted girl teased for her appearance and for her name, who sometimes introduced herself as “Uma Karen.” She has dyslexia and has spoken about bouts of body dysmorphia. Acting found her in eighth grade. At fourteen she enrolled at Northfield Mount Hermon, a Massachusetts boarding school, where talent scouts saw her play Abigail in The Crucible. She left school, signed with Click Models and was living on her own in New York at fifteen, a move she was still turning into a story on The Tonight Show in October 2026. Before she had a single film credit she had been on two covers of British Vogue, in December 1985 and May 1986.

Film came quickly. After the teen thriller Kiss Daddy Goodnight, she had three releases in 1988, and the decisive one was Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons, in which she played Cécile de Volanges, the convent girl used as a pawn between Glenn Close and John Malkovich. Malkovich’s verdict on his young co-star has followed her ever since: “She’s more than a little haunted.” Two years later Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June, about Henry Miller and his wife in 1931 Paris, became the first film released with the new NC-17 rating. Many American newspapers refused to advertise it, and far fewer people saw her June Miller than read about her.

The early nineties were uneven. She played opposite Richard Gere in Final Analysis and Andy García in Jennifer 8, earned a Razzie nomination for Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and held her ground between Robert De Niro and Bill Murray in Mad Dog and Glory. Nothing yet suggested a defining role. Then Quentin Tarantino met her to discuss Mia Wallace and, after that first meeting, wanted nobody else.

Pulp Fiction, which grossed more than $213 million worldwide after its 1994 release, made her the face of the film. Mia, the gangster’s wife with the black bob, the twist contest at Jack Rabbit Slim’s and the overdose answered with an adrenaline shot, brought her nominations for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for supporting actress, plus a BAFTA nomination, and the poster was built around her, stretched out on a bed with a cigarette and a paperback. Her response to sudden stardom was unusual. For about three years she turned down big-budget films.

Uma Thurman at the 70th Cannes Film Festival (2017), where she presided over the Un Certain Regard jury. Photo: Depositphotos

When she went back to the studios, it was through a run of experiments. The Truth About Cats & Dogs and Beautiful Girls were modest hits in 1996. In Gattaca she played Irene Cassini opposite Ethan Hawke, whom she married in 1998. The same year brought Batman & Robin, in which she was Poison Ivy in a film often counted among the worst of its kind, although The New York Times compared her turn to Mae West. Roger Ebert wrote that her Fantine was the best element of Bille August’s Les Misérables. She has also admitted that turning down Éowyn in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings was “one of the worst decisions” she ever made. A smaller bet paid off instead: as star and executive producer of the HBO film Hysterical Blindness, about a New Jersey woman chasing romance in the 1980s, she won the Golden Globe for best actress in a television film.

Kill Bill was where the partnership with Tarantino turned into something close to co-authorship. He wrote the Bride for her and gave her joint credit for the character, which the two had imagined on the set of Pulp Fiction from a single image: a bride covered in blood. When Thurman became pregnant, he delayed production rather than recast. She trained for three months in martial arts, swordsmanship and Japanese, and drew on Pam Grier’s Coffy and Gena Rowlands’s Gloria, two of the very few women she said she had seen be “truly women” while holding a weapon. Released as Kill Bill: Vol. 1 in 2003 and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 in 2004, it brought her a BAFTA nomination and two Golden Globe nominations for best actress in a drama.

The critical turn in her story came in February 2018, in an interview with The New York Times. Thurman said that Harvey Weinstein, whose Miramax had released both Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, had sexually assaulted her at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1994. She also described the crash she suffered while shooting Kill Bill in Mexico in 2003, after Tarantino insisted she do a driving shot herself in a car she did not trust. It left her with permanent injuries to her neck and knees. Miramax, she said, would show her the footage only if she signed a document releasing the company from any consequences of her future pain and suffering, and she refused. Tarantino later called the crash the biggest regret of his life; Thurman wrote afterwards that he had apologized and that she had forgiven him. The disclosure rewired how her best-known films read. The fearless women on screen had been played by someone absorbing real risk off it, inside a system that treated her safety as negotiable.

There is a quieter misreading too. Because the Bride was so physical, the business kept trying to fix Thurman as a type, and the years after Kill Bill show what that cost. Be Cool and Prime, opposite Meryl Streep, did respectable business; My Super Ex-Girlfriend, for which she was reportedly paid $14 million, was panned. A. O. Scott called her Ulla, the Swedish would-be actress of The Producers, “the one bit of genuine radiance” in a noisy remake. By the early 2010s a New York Daily News critic was openly wondering “who’s mapping out her career.” Her answer was to stop chasing the leading-lady market. Television brought a Primetime Emmy nomination for five episodes of Smash, as a film star bulldozing her way into a Broadway musical. Lars von Trier gave her one ferocious scene as the scorned Mrs. H in Nymphomaniac, then cast her as the first victim of The House That Jack Built. In 2017 she made her Broadway debut in Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman, and the same year she presided over the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes, six years after sitting on the festival’s main competition jury.

Her private life has mostly been public on her own terms. She was married to Gary Oldman from 1990 to 1992 and to Ethan Hawke from 1998 to 2005. With Hawke she has two children, Maya, born in 1998, and Levon, born in 2002, both now actors; Maya Hawke’s breakout in Stranger Things turned the family name into a second-generation story. She also has a daughter, Luna, born in 2012, from her relationship with the financier Arpad Busson. She sits on the board of Tibet House US, the institution her parents built. On June 16, 2026, Robert Thurman died at home in Woodstock at the age of 84, and the Dalai Lama said that he had lived “a meaningful life.”

Her current run began on television. In 2022 she played a media mogul whose son is kidnapped in Apple TV+’s Suspicion and Arianna Huffington in Super Pumped. In 2023 she starred in and produced The Kill Room with her Pulp Fiction partner Samuel L. Jackson, and became President Ellen Claremont in Prime Video’s Red, White & Royal Blue. Paul Schrader cast her opposite Richard Gere in Oh, Canada, which premiered in competition at Cannes in 2024. Then came the return to action she had resisted for so long: in Netflix’s The Old Guard 2, released in July 2025, she played Discord, the villain facing Charlize Theron. That same month Dexter: Resurrection opened on Paramount+ with Showtime, with Thurman as Charley, head of security for Peter Dinklage’s billionaire Leon Prater, and it became Showtime’s most-streamed premiere. At the end of 2025 she went back to the Bride one more time, voicing and performing her for The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge, an animated short Tarantino built with Fortnite’s tools from a sequence he wrote in the early 2000s and never filmed, released inside the game and then in cinemas after Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.

Pretty Lethal put her new conditions to the test. Vicky Jewson’s ballet-and-bloodshed thriller premiered at SXSW on March 13, 2026, and reached Prime Video worldwide on March 25. Thurman plays Devora Kasimer, a former ballet star with what she called “a unique physical disability,” who runs the remote inn where a stranded troupe of dancers has to fight off a gang of armed men. She described it as “not your everyday streaming Amazon premiere movie” and added: “It’s so over the top, it’s above the top.” Critics split, with 59 percent of reviews positive on Rotten Tomatoes; several singled out her theatrical, campy menace, and others noted how little screen time she actually has. A prestige project went the other way. Announced in 2024 to star opposite Anthony Hopkins in Richard Eyre’s The Housekeeper, a story about the events behind Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, she was replaced in January 2026 by Caitríona Balfe.

The nearest date on her calendar is Friday, October 30, 2026, when Dexter: Resurrection returns to Paramount+ for its second season. The story jumps ahead several years, and Charley, who ended the first season holding Dexter’s son at gunpoint, comes back to New York weighed down by shame over the work she did for Prater. In Thurman’s words, “It’s going to be a path that doesn’t take her in a straight line.” Brian Cox and Dan Stevens join as the season’s new killers. She promoted it on The Tonight Show in October, arriving with apples from her own garden for Jimmy Fallon. Further out, she is set to return as Ellen Claremont in Red, White & Royal Wedding, the Prime Video sequel, which has no release date yet.

That leaves Thurman in an unusual place for an actress whose most famous character now also lives inside a video game. The Bride belongs to everybody. The decisions around her, which scripts earn the sword and which do not, belong to Thurman alone. When Dexter comes back, she is a former enforcer trying to live with what she did for a powerful man, a role that sits uncomfortably close to the questions her own career has spent the last decade answering in public.