Getting the Lowdown on Uma

Uma Thurman is unmistakeable. At nearly 6ft tall - even higher in heels - she is usually taller than everyone around her and most definitely more beautiful. Today is no different. Taking tea at one of the Riviera's smartest villas set between the Alpes Maritimes and the sea, she effortlessly holds the spotlight, a tall siren with long blonde hair surrounded by dazzling Mediterranean sun offset by lawns and Cyprus trees.

She's here for the Cannes Film Festival, of course, and we meet to talk about her three upcoming films, the gorgeous new Merchant Ivory film The Golden Bowl, a French costume drama in English called Vatel with G?rard Depardieu, and Woody Allen's imminent Sweet And Lowdown. Even on a damp and chilly Cannes afternoon, Thurman looks every inch the sex-goddess, but it's this sort of 'siren divinity' that makes her both fun and unforgettable.

A sassy 30-year-old with canny blue eyes, she's at once knowing and innocent. John Malkovich described her as having 'Jayne Mansfield's body and a horrifying great brain'. I'd say she's a tough rider on life's rougher roads, yet speaking in beautifully composed sentences, she also seems to have a pragmatic, organised mind. She graciously dismisses the suggestion. 'I wasn't discovered at McDonald's or Howard Johnson's,' she says with a huge laugh. 'My background prepared me for life and gave me a fairly open, free-thinking attitude to life and this business we're in. Common sense is highly underrated, don't you think?'

'My father would love me to become an academic but I've put college on hold. When I do go I'll probably appreciate it much more than if I'd done it as an excitable young woman. My current school of learning is motherhood and acting. Motherhood's the new subject on my curriculum.'

Uma Karuna Thurman's own mother, Swedish model-turned-psychotherapist Nena, was spotted at 16 in Stockholm by photographer Norman Parkinson. (A nude statue of Nena's mother, Brigit Holmquist, a famous beauty and later baroness, stands in the port town of Trelleborg.) Salvador Dali, no less, introduced Nena to her first husband, LSD guru Timothy Leary. Thurman's father, Bob, is a professor of Eastern religions and speaks Tibetan without an accent, according to the Dalai Lama. He was the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan monk before he gave up his robes to marry. Uma was born on 29 April 1970, and grew up a Buddhist with her three brothers, Ganden, Dechen and Mipam, in a 'non-traditional academic environment' in Massachussetts, at the family's bohemian summer retreat in Woodstock, New York (yep, that Woodstock) and on family field trips to India and beyond.

'When I compare notes with others, no one quite had an upbringing like mine. I was part of an odd family, definitely eccentric, plus I was tall with big feet and bony knees. I felt quite ugly.' She stomps out her cigarette, saying how much she hates smoking. The feet are still big but the knees seem just fine. 'I had a big nose, big mouth and these kind of far-apart eyes that looked like I had two fish swimming between my ears.'

'Acting was an idea I had as a child because as a kid I changed school so many times I was never particularly integrated into any sort of social strata with other children. On stage in plays I didn't feel any inhibitions and I wanted to go there. I was confident I could get there, but there are two parts of the journey: why you leave and where you go. I wanted to get out of where I was, so it was more like being pushed from behind than being ambitious in going ahead. It was impossible to turn round and go back. By the time I was 15 I was living alone in New York and earning a fortune as a model so there was no turning back. Of course, I didn't know how risky it was. Ignorance is sometimes an incredible strength.'

Thurman made her first film at 16 and then, in 1988, made the world sit up and take notice when she stripped off, albeit modestly, for the role of Venus in The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, followed by a topless appearance in Dangerous Liaisons with John Malkovich and Glenn Close. Since then she's danced the twist and survived an overdose with John Travolta in Pulp Fiction - for which she was Oscar-nominated - and made an idiosyncratic selection of not always good (The Avengers) but always interesting (The Truth About Cats And Dogs) films.

'I'm very relaxed about my career nowadays because my work, which was the 100 per cent most important thing in my life, is not that any more. It still is important but somewhere along the line perspective has snuck up on me. Recently I started to see the seeds of my body of work as my little legacy and relax into my life.'

This relaxation came with motherhood and her second marriage. In the early Nineties, when she was only 20, she was married briefly to Gary Oldman - their stormy relationship broke up after only a few months - but four years ago, she met Ethan Hawke while making Gattaca. He was 26, the same age as her. They discovered they had very similar backgrounds, having both started young, missed out on college and lived bohemian lives in Manhattan and come into the public eye at the same time, her in Dangerous Liaisons, he in Dead Poets Society. They married suddenly on 1 May 1998, at a joint ceremony with a Buddhist blessing (hers) inside an Episcopalian church (his) and nine weeks later had their daughter Maya Ray, two next month.