On this date in 1970, Uma Karuna Thurman was born in Boston. Her father was a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies who lived as an ordained Buddhist monk for three years. Later in life, after dabbling in Buddhism, she described herself as agnostic. Her mother was a high-fashion model born in Mexico City. Thurman moved to New York City at age 17 to join the Ford Modeling Agency and posed for Glamour and British Vogue.
She made the transition to acting with her film debut in the teen thriller “Kiss Daddy Goodnight” (1987) and was cast in three 1988 films: “Johnny Be Good,” “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and most notably, “Dangerous Liaisons.” She had later roles in “Pulp Fiction” (1994), “The Truth about Cats and Dogs” (1996), “Gattaca” (1997, with co-star and future husband Ethan Hawke), “Les Misérables” (1998), “The Golden Bowl” (2000), “Kill Bill (Vols. 1 and 2)” in 2003-04 and “Motherhood” (2009).
For her performance in the HBO film “Hysterical Blindness” (2002), Thurman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Film. Thurman has starred in the miniseries “The Slap” (2015) and the series “Imposters” (2017–18). She made her Broadway debut in 2017 in “The Parisian Woman.”
She married English actor Gary Oldman in 1990, divorced two years later and married Hawke in 1998. They had a daughter, Maya, and a son, Levon, before divorcing in 2005. In 2012 she had a daughter, Rosalind, with French financier Arpad Busson.
PHOTO: Thurman at the Calvin Klein Collection fashion show in 2012; Jiyang Chen photo.
