Uma Thurman

Uma Karuna Thurman was born on April 29, 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in Amherst and attended the Amherst Regional Middle School followed by Northfield Mount Hermon School, but would ultimately drop out in order to pursue a career in acting.

She originally began working as a fashion model at the young age of 15 and was signed to the agency Click Models, even appearing twice on the cover of British Vogue in December 1985 and May 1986. Her first feature film appearance was in the 1987 movie Kiss Daddy Goodnight. She appeared in two further films, Johnny Be Good and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, before her breakthrough performance as Cécile de Volanges in Dangerous Liaisons in 1988. That would mark the beginning of a famed career on screen, solidified by her Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA-nominated performance in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 smash hit Pulp Fiction. Often referred to as "Tarantino’s Muse," she would return to work with the iconic filmmaker in 2003’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and 2004’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2, earning two more Golden Globe nominations.

Some of her most notable screen credits of the 1990s include The Avengers, Gattaca, the role of Fantine in the 1998 film version of Les Misérables, and the role of Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin.

She won her first Golden Globe in 2003 for her performance in the TV movie Hysterical Blindness. In 2005, musical fans got to see her show off her singing skills in the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical The Producers, taking on the role of Ulla. She would once again dabble in the musical genre when she joined the cast of the Broadway-centric TV series Smash, appearing as Rebecca Duvall and picking up her first and only Emmy Award nomination in 2012.

Other notable film appearances of the 21st century for Ms. Thurman include Paycheck, Be Cool, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, and Lars von Trier’s acclaimed Nymphomaniac films.

After briefly appearing off Broadway for Classic Stage Company in an adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope in 1999 and for The Public Theater in Book of the Dead (Second Avenue) in 2000, Thurman made her Broadway debut in Beau Willimon's The Parisian Woman, which ran from September 11, 2017 to March 11, 2018 at the Hudson Theatre.