The Type You Can’t Type : From ‘Pulp Fiction’ to ‘Month by the Lake,’ Uma Thurman’s at Ease With a Range of Roles

At the age of 24, Uma Thurman has an enviable acting career. She has played a wide range of roles and has been noticed for all the right reasons--for her versatility and skill as an actress.

Sure, she was once on the cover of Rolling Stone’s 1989 Hot Issue, and Mademoiselle magazine once called her “a thinking man’s sex symbol,” but Thurman herself has done nothing to pursue such hype. Yes, she did appear in some steamy bedroom scenes in playing the bisexual wife of novelist Henry Miller in “Henry and June”; but, hey, that was an art-house film, so it was all for a higher purpose.

Truth is, Thurman’s work hasn’t been dogged either by scandal or controversy in the eight years she has been acting.

Until now, that is.

She plays Mia, a gangster’s wife, in “Pulp Fiction,” the Quentin Tarantino film that opens Friday. It is fair to say that one particular sequence involving Thurman is destined for infamy.

Mia is escorted on an evening’s date by John Travolta, a sidekick of her violent husband, who is out of town. In a retro ‘50s restaurant they dance charmingly together; she flirts with him. He frets because his boss is jealous; the last man she tried to seduce ended up dead at his hands.

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Back at her place she snorts what she thinks is cocaine but is really a deadly heroin cocktail, and lapses into a coma. Fearing for his life, Travolta carries her to his car and takes her to the home of his drug dealer. The two devise a way to save her life, in a jarring, hilarious and unforgettable scene.

“I wondered about doing it at first because the script was so shocking,” Thurman says now. “I haven’t made a habit of doing films with a lot of violence, and from what was on the page it was hard to tell, because in anyone else’s hands it could become a sick movie.

“But I let Quentin talk me into it, and I believe in him. It was a matter of finding out what was in his heart, and what was in it was good, nothing malicious or full of hatred or exploitative. He has a pure, wild, crazy sense of humor, and a passion for filmmaking. And the film’s funny. Horrifyingly funny, perhaps, but still funny.”

She also enjoyed working with Travolta. “That dance scene was so camp, I couldn’t pass it up. To dance with Travolta was like being able to do a Western with John Wayne; you’d happily play some barroom slut just for the opportunity.”

She relates all this sitting on a hotel terrace overlooking Lake Como, a place of tranquil beauty where she is making a very different sort of film. In “A Month by the Lake,” directed by John Irvin, and based on an H. E. Bates novella, Edward Fox plays a middle-aged English major vacationing in the late 1930s at an Italian lakeside hotel who becomes stupidly infatuated with the young American nanny played by Thurman. She toys with his affections, then becomes swiftly and openly bored; this sends him on the rebound toward an English woman of his own age, played by Vanessa Redgrave.

Crew members are tiptoeing around Redgrave and cater to her every whim, trying not to incur her ill humor. Due homage is paid to legendary Italian actress Alida Valli, who has a small part in “A Month by the Lake”; she is now 73 and in her sixth decade of filmmaking. Cinematographer Pasqualino de Santis, who made Visconti’s “Death in Venice” look ravishing, must be addressed as “maestro”; he and his camera crew sit separately from the others at meals and eat with their own cutlery, china and linen; none dare to draw near.

Yet all the talk on set is not of these people, but of Thurman. The crew discuss her comings and goings, wonder out loud if she will be difficult or easy during the coming day, and speculate on the possible cause of her occasional mood swings. She is an object of infinite fascination.

At one point, Thurman poses for a photographer in the banquet hall of an 18th-Century villa. She wears a long 1930s-style dress, which accentuates her tall, slim frame; her hair has been gathered into frizzy curls at the back. Something seems to happen to her before a camera’s unblinking lens; she softens, warms and glows.

The sight of her reduces Fox to incoherent British schoolboy slang. “Stunning, isn’t she?” he hisses. “Crikey. I’ll say. Yes. Stunning. A . . . a knockout, really.”

The attention Thurman effortlessly commands is, on the face of it, puzzling. In eight years as an actress, she has never starred in a hit film, and in fact has appeared in notable flops. The one unqualified success to her name was Stephen Frears’ “Dangerous Liaisons,” in which she played a 15-year-old virgin in 18th-Century France, but her role was subordinate to those of Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer.

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She has played a feisty Maid Marian in a made-for-TV version of Robin Hood, a kooky young girl in the commercially neglected John Boorman film “Where the Heart Is” and a Botticelli Venus on a clam shell in Terry Gilliam’s flamboyant romp “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” In “Mad Dog and Glory,” opposite Robert De Niro, she played a young woman sent by a gangster as a “gift” to a man who saved his life. “She was an indentured servant,” Thurman says acidly of the role.

This year has seen no upswing in her fortunes as yet. In Gus Van Sant’s “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” she played Sissy Hankshaw, a bisexual cowgirl with large thumbs, which facilitate her main activity, hitchhiking. The film bombed, despite re-cutting after preview audiences proved lukewarm. “It could have been funnier,” Thurman says flatly. “It should have been funnier.”

It all adds up to a checkered resume, yet Thurman’s reputation remains unsullied, and she is always in demand for prestigious movie roles. Somehow she can make a string of indifferent movies, but rise effortlessly above them.

Yet, on the hotel terrace overlooking the lake, Thurman immediately starts railing against “that stupid thing about being an actor. The pure acting itself is something I can truthfully say I love. Everything else about it I have an ambivalent relationship with, that whole thing about being an actor in the celebrity sense. But as my mother would say, that’s just tough titty.”

Unlike many American women of her generation, she is not given to Valley Girl-speak and does not say the word like every few seconds; she speaks coolly in complete paragraphs, rounding off her thoughts precisely.

“My father still wants me to become an academic,” she says. “But not having had a formal clear road in my education, not having gone to college, my interests are as varied as my reading list. I love literature, so I’d probably have gone charging off into English studies.”

She is from a liberal, academic, Bohemian background. Her father is a professor, a leading expert in Tibetan studies. Her Swedish-German mother, once married to Timothy Leary, is now a psychotherapist. Her name, Uma, is a Hindu word meaning “bestower of blessings.” She had two yearlong sabbaticals with her parents in India; at age 15 she persuaded them to let her drop out of boarding school and try acting.

She moved to New York and precociously set up house in Hell’s Kitchen, where junkies, muggers and hookers stalk street corners; the experience has clearly given her a sophisticated edge. The gamble worked: In New York she landed roles in two low-budget films, “Kiss Daddy Goodnight” and “Johnny Be Good,” and her career began.

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Thurman radiates an almost European sensibility on screen and explains that her mother insisted her children should not think of themselves as American, even though they spent most of her childhood living in New England college towns.

“I’ve been presented to the world through European films,” she says. “I’ve worked so much with European directors: Terry Gilliam, Stephen Frears, John Irvin, John Boorman. ‘Henry and June’ was about a European woman. And in general I have a taste for European films.”

She also seems to pursue work in what some would say is a European way, choosing roles for their own value rather than the career breaks they might bring. Tell her the main characteristic of her career has been its immense range of roles, and she positively beams: “Glad you noticed. To say that is the one thing that can flatter me.”

It has never been truer. “A Month by the Lake” is a period piece, a gentle romantic comedy of manners. While it is not from the Merchant Ivory stable, it’s about English folk in Italy, and is the sort of film whose extras wear cream suits. It could hardly be further removed from “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” or “Pulp Fiction.”

“I love the story,” Thurman says, “the idea of the major having misplaced his concept of what he loved and needed in his life, and finding himself eventually with (Redgrave’s character). It’s a story about tender, ‘less important’ emotions, and it expresses them beautifully.”

She relishes the contrast but hasn’t always felt so bullish about her career: “Around the time I was 21, I decided it takes an active relationship with your life in order not to be gobbled up by being a movie actress and all the crap you deal with, that sense of alienation.”

She took a break from acting, and spent time with her brother. “At that time, I didn’t exactly love a lot of the scripts I was being offered. And there were, um, a few other circumstances.”

Indeed there were. In 1991, Thurman married British actor Gary Oldman; the couple had been an item for some three years. But the marriage ended after 18 months amid speculation that Oldman’s volatile personality had wrecked the union; indeed, her association with Oldman has fueled talk that Thurman is something of a wild child herself.

Her colleagues don’t necessarily disagree. Redgrave says, “She’s special, a fantastically good actress as well as being very beautiful. She has a marvelously individual sense of character and comedy.” John Irvin adds: “She has an idiosyncratic way of finding a character--there’s a wildness about her.

“The joy of Uma is she’s never dull, predictable or safe.”