This year the Karlovy Vary IFF will welcome actress and producer Uma Thurman – Golden Globe winner for Hysterical Blindness, Academy Award nominee for Pulp Fiction, and recipient of more than twenty other prestigious festival prizes. Ms. Thurman will accept the Festival President’s Award on the occasion of the gala Opening Ceremony of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
From the beginning of her exceptionally rich acting career, Uma Thurman has had an opportunity to work with noted movie directors. Two of her first opportunities came with Stephen Frears’ adaptation (1988) of the novel Dangerous Liaisons and Terry Gilliam’s surreal tale The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). In the mid-1990s, however, the part of Mia Wallace in Quentin Tarantino’s cult sensation Pulp Fiction (1994) marked a turning point: She was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and she won numerous other awards. Another successful Tarantino collaboration followed nearly a decade later on the cult double-header: Kill Bill: Vols. 1 and 2 (2003, 2004). She received two Golden Globe nominations for her role as The Bride.
Uma Thurman’s varied filmography includes a wide range of genres, from small-scale independent pictures such as the comedy The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) to blockbusters like Batman and Robin (1997) and Les Misérables (1998). She worked with Woody Allen and Sean Penn on the biopic about musician Emmet Ray, Sweet and Lowdown (1999), and for her role in Mira Nair’s made-for-TV movie Hysterical Blindness (2002) she won a Golden Globe. Ms. Thurman and Pulp Fiction costar John Travolta met again on the set of the gangster flick Be Cool (2005), and she was directed by Lars von Trier in his sexual study Nymphomaniac: Vols. I and II (2013, 2014). She is currently working with her colleagues Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken on the family comedy The War with Grandpa directed by Tim Hill.
In addition to acting, she is also a movie producer, and this year she served as president of the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes.
Photo credit: Peter Lindbergh
