Happy Birthday Uma Thurman! The witty and enchanting actor celebrates her 50th birthday today. Playing foxy Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction and ferocious Beatrice Kiddo in the two-part Kill Bill flicks, Thurman was the lissome goddess in the creation myth of Quentin Tarantino. The Miramax duo was the ultimate in indie cool. A spellbound Tarantino often described his auteur-muse relationship with Thurman—who helped him conceive the idea of the bloody bride—as an Alfred Hitchcock-Ingrid Bergman legend.
On this special occasion, BAZAAR takes a look back at the birthday girl’s life and career in pictures. Swipe left to relive some of her biggest moments caught on camera, from being the 15th face of the Campari Official calender in 2014, and featuring in Louis Vuitton Autumn/Winter ’05 ad campaign, to gracing the February 2012 BAZAAR UK issue. Also, scroll as we explore some fascinating facts about her.
1. In what has become one of Tarantino’s most iconic scenes, Thurman’s Mia Wallace and JohnTravolta’s Vincent Vega get up on stage at the fictional Jack Rabbit Slims restaurant and perform the twist during a dance competition; according to Thurman, it was the scene she dreaded most during the making of ‘Pulp Fiction’. “I was more afraid of the dancing than almost anything because it was exactly to my total insecurity,” she said during a keynote speech at France’s Series Mania Festival.
2. She received a Buddhist upbringing and has spent two years in the Indo-Himalayan town of Almora, with the Dalai Lama paying frequent visits to her childhood home. Thurman’s father, Professor Robert Thurman, is the first American to be ordained as a Buddhist monk by the 14th Dalai Lama himself.
3. She infamously embodied Poison Ivy in ‘Batman & Robin’, 1997. Her performance as the green supervillain was compared to the legendary beats of Mae West. A positive remark was made by the New York Times, “Like Mae West, she mixes true femininity with the winking womanliness of a drag queen.”
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