Uma Thurman

Uma Thurman was a teenage model on the cover of British Vogue in 1985 and a film actor by eighteen. Dangerous Liaisons (1988) was the breakthrough, and Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen the same year cast her as Venus rising from a shell, which set an early pattern of directors using her for iconography rather than character.

Pulp Fiction (1994) broke that pattern. Mia Wallace is a small part with enormous gravity, played in a deadpan that made the dialogue land, and it brought Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for supporting actress. The collaboration with Quentin Tarantino continued into Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), where she carried a four-hour revenge epic largely on physical performance and picked up two further Golden Globe nominations.

Between the landmarks the filmography is genuinely strange, which is to her credit. She is the disillusioned insider in Gattaca, Poison Ivy in the much-mocked Batman & Robin, Fantine in the 1998 Les Miserables, a superhero girlfriend in a broad comedy, and twice a participant in Lars von Trier's late provocations, in Nymphomaniac and The House That Jack Built, where her one scene is the best thing in the picture.

She holds a Golden Globe for a television film and remains, for most viewers, inseparable from two Tarantino performances made a decade apart. The gap between what she is famous for and what she has actually done is one of the wider ones in American film.