Uma Karuna Thurman (born April 29, 1970) is an American actress. Known for her collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, she has performed in over fifty film and television productions since the 1980s, across genres that range from comedies and dramas to science fiction and action. Her accolades include a Golden Globe Award and nominations for an Academy Award, two British Academy Film Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Following her appearances in two covers for British Vogue, Thurman starred in Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Henry & June (1990), and Mad Dog and Glory (1993). She rose to international prominence with her portrayal as Mia Wallace in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She reunited with the director to play the Bride in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2 (2003–2004), which brought her a BAFTA Award nomination and two additional Golden Globe Award nominations.
Thurman's other film credits include The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996), Batman & Robin (1997), Gattaca (1997), Les Misérables (1998), Paycheck (2003), The Producers (2005), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010), Nymphomaniac (2013), The House That Jack Built (2018), Hollywood Stargirl (2022), and The Old Guard 2 (2025). She made her Broadway debut in The Parisian Woman (2017–2018).
Thurman won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Film for her performance in the HBO film Hysterical Blindness (2002) and was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for appearing in the NBC series Smash (2012). On television, she has starred in The Slap (2015), Imposters (2017–2018), Chambers (2019), Super Pumped (2022), and Dexter: Resurrection (2025–present).
Uma Karuna Thurman was born on April 29, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Robert Thurman, was a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies and an author who lived as an ordained Buddhist monk for three years. Her mother, Nena von Schlebrügge, a high-fashion model, was born in Mexico City to a German nobleman and Birgit Holmquist, a Swedish model.
Thurman spent altogether around two years in Almora, Uttarakhand, India. She grew up mostly in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she went to Amherst Regional Junior High School, then moved to Woodstock, New York. She has three brothers, Ganden (born 1967), Dechen Karl (born 1973), and Mipam (born 1978), and a half-sister named Taya (born 1961), from her father's previous marriage. Thurman's first cousin once removed is Swedish soccer player Max von Schlebrügge. Thurman has dyslexia, and has been open about her struggles with the condition.
She is described, in a 2004 biography, as having been an awkward and introverted girl who was teased for her appearance and unusual name (sometimes using the name "Uma Karen" instead of her birth name). When Thurman was ten years old, a friend's mother suggested a nose job. As a child, she suffered bouts of body dysmorphic disorder. She attended Amherst Public Schools, where in eighth grade she discovered her love of acting. At age 14, she attended Northfield Mount Hermon School, a preparatory school in Massachusetts, where talent scouts noticed her performance as Abigail in a production of The Crucible and offered her the chance to act professionally; she then dropped out to pursue an acting career.
Modeling and acting beginnings (1985–1989)
Thurman began her career as a fashion model at age 15, and signed with the agency Click Models. Her early modeling credits included Glamour and the December 1985 and May 1986 covers of British Vogue. She made the transition to acting with her film debut, the teen thriller Kiss Daddy Goodnight, which was released in 1987. Thurman was subsequently cast in three 1988 films — Johnny Be Good, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and most notably, Dangerous Liaisons. In the comedy Johnny Be Good, she played the girlfriend of a top high school quarterback prospect, and in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, she made a brief appearance as the goddess Venus; during her entrance she briefly appears nude, in an homage to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.
In the Oscar-winning drama Dangerous Liaisons, co-starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, Thurman took on the role of a naive teenager, seduced by a manipulative man. The picture was an arthouse success, and garnered Thurman recognition from critics and audiences; film critic Roger Ebert found her to be "well cast" in her "tricky" key role. At the time, insecure about her appearance, she spent roughly a year in London, during which she often wore loose, baggy clothing. Malkovich said of her, "There is nothing twitchy teenager-ish about her, I haven't met anyone like her at that age. Her intelligence and poise stand out. But there's something else. She's more than a little haunted."
Early prominence and Pulp Fiction (1990–1995)
In 1990, Thurman appeared with Fred Ward and Maria de Medeiros in Henry & June, a sexually provocative drama about the relationship and affairs between writer Henry Miller and his wife June Miller in 1931 Paris. This film was the first to receive an NC-17 rating and partly because many American newspapers refused to advertise films with the new rating, it did not get wide release in the United States. However, it won Thurman good notices; The New York Times wrote: "Thurman, as the Brooklyn-accented June, takes a larger-than-life character and makes her even bigger, though the performance is often as curious as it is commanding." After playing Maid Marian in the 1991 British adventure film Robin Hood, Thurman began filming Dylan Thomas, a biopic on Welsh poet Dylan Thomas starring her then-husband Gary Oldman with herself as Caitlin Thomas, however the project was shut down shortly after filming began. Thurman went on to star as the patient of a San Francisco psychiatrist in the neo-noir drama Final Analysis (1992), opposite Richard Gere and Kim Basinger, and as a blind woman romantically involved with a former policeman in the thriller Jennifer 8 (also 1992), with Andy García.
Thurman portrayed a young woman with unusually big thumbs in Gus Van Sant's 1993 adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The film was a critical and commercial failure, eventually earning Thurman a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Actress. The Washington Post described her acting as shallow and remarked: "Thurman's strangely passive characterization doesn't go much deeper than drawling and flexing her prosthetic thumbs". Also in 1993, she starred as a waitress opposite Robert De Niro and Bill Murray in the drama Mad Dog and Glory and auditioned for Stanley Kubrick while he was casting for his eventually unrealized adaptation of the novel Wartime Lies.
In Quentin Tarantino's neo-noir black comedy Pulp Fiction (1994), Thurman played Mia Wallace, the wife of a Los Angeles mobster. Several actresses were considered for the role, but Tarantino wanted Thurman after their first meeting. The film grossed $213.9 million worldwide and received widespread acclaim, appearing on many critics' lists of the greatest films ever made. She dominated most of the movie's promotional material; Mia is considered one of the most iconic female film characters of the 1990s. The Washington Post asserted that Thurman was "serenely unrecognizable in a black wig, [and] is marvelous as a zoned-out gangster's girlfriend". For her performance, Thurman was nominated for the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and launched into the celebrity A-list. She took little advantage of her new-found fame by choosing not to do any big-budget films for the next three years. In a 2003 interview with Time magazine, Tarantino, who considers Thurman his muse, remarked that she was "up there with Garbo and Dietrich in goddess territory".
Established career (1996–2002)
Thurman's next films, the romantic dramedy Beautiful Girls, in which she played a fairly wise love interest, and the comedy The Truth About Cats & Dogs, in which she top-billed as a ditzy blonde model, were modest commercial successes amid a positive critical response upon their theatrical releases in 1996. In 1997, Thurman starred opposite Ethan Hawke in Gattaca, a science fiction film set in a future society driven by eugenics where potential children are conceived through genetic manipulation. The film received critical praise and became successful on the home video market, despite lackluster box office receipts. Her next film role was that of supervillain Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin (1997). Budgeted at $160 million, the film grossed a modest $238 million worldwide and is often considered to be one of the worst films ever made. Thurman's performance, however, was largely highlighted upon the film's release; the Houston Chronicle remarked that "Thurman [...] sometimes seems to be doing Mae West by way of Jessica Rabbit", and a similar comparison was made by The New York Times: "[L]ike Mae West, she mixes true femininity with the winking womanliness of a drag queen". She obtained a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Best Sci-fi Actress and was also nominated for Favourite Movie Actress at the Kids' Choice Awards.