'The deadliest woman in the world': The Bride and Uma Thurman's revenge on Hollywood's men
Uma Thurman chose Thanksgiving as an opportunity to break her silence over Harvey Weinstein, whose films she has starred in since Pulp Fiction made a success of both the actress and producer in 1994. In an Instagram post, she intimated that she would be coming forward with her own experiences of sexual harassment and wished everyone a happy Thanksgiving – with the exception of Harvey Weinstein "and his wicked conspirators", to whom she wrote: "I'm glad it's going slowly – you don't deserve a bullet".
Her comments accompanied a photograph of the actress looking vengeful while in character as The Bride in the opening scene of Kill Bill Vol 2 – a woman whose sole purpose is to murder the men who wronged her in the most violent, grisly ways possible, including beheading, eye-gouging and general death-by-sword. Pertinently, she never uses a gun.
Thurman has previously explained that her silence on the scandal ricocheting through Hollywood will end once her anger has dissipated. Similarly, she warned on Instagram that we will have to "stay tuned" to see what else the actress has to say.
But her choice of image makes this a pertinent time to re-tell the story of her involvement in the character's creation.
The Bride, known in the film by the codename Black Mamba (her real name, cinephiles theorise, is Beatrix Kiddo), is a formidable killer trained in martial arts and handy with a blade. Part of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, she spends the two-part Kill Bill 1 and 2 on the hunt for Bill (David Carradine), her boss and lover, who left her for dead after (she believes) killing her unborn child.
Thurman's ferocious performance rendered The Bride one of cinema's greatest characters and confirmed her position as the muse of Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2's director and creator.
But with so many keen to rhapsodise on the relationship between Tarantino and Thurman – although they've always denied a romantic history, many don't believe them – as artist and muse, the fact that Thurman was integral to The Bride's very being is frequently overlooked. Even movie magazine Empire, which lists The Bride as number 23 in their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters, has just Tarantino down as her creator.
The story of The Bride's beginning is tied to the genesis of Kill Bill, and Thurman and Tarantino's first project together, Pulp Fiction. Tarantino had been musing on the idea of a revenge movie based around "the deadliest woman in the world".
But he hadn't mused alone. As Thurman explained in a "making of" short film released with Kill Bill Vol 1: "We were out with people from Pulp Fiction one night 10 years ago," she said in 2003, "and I start telling him about this character I wanted to play and this name I wanted to call the character." That name was Beatrix, "[Thurman] worked for somebody with that name," Tarantino told Entertainment Weekly. "Kiddo" was his contribution: "That’s what I call women – when I really like a girl, I call her kiddo."
Tarantino, meanwhile, had been expressing his enthusiasm for kung-fu movies. It was the start of a two-week long discussion about Kill Bill, which had been given a name right from the beginning.
"We kept going back and forth and spun this idea together of this assassin who has to leave the business and get married," Thurman continued.
The actress had a crystalline idea of Kill Bill Vol 1's opening scene, Tarantino said: "She was like, 'Quentin, What if the first time we see the Bride, she’s beaten up, blood all over her face, but when we see her, she’s wearing a bridal gown?' And that was when The Bride was born."
The conversation, some believe, even made it into Pulp Fiction. In the retro diner Rabbit Slims, Mia (Thurman) tells Vincent Vega (John Travolta) about an acting job she had that could have made her a star. "It was a show about a team of female secret agenets called fox force five." There as a Japanese Kung-Fu master, while her character, Raven McCoy, had a specialism in knives. She was the deadliest woman in the world - with a knife". Sound familiar?
What happened next is fairly well-committed to cinematic history: Tarantino went on to make Jackie Brown, and the pair drifted apart until a chance meeting seven years later inspired him to pick up the notes made from those early discussions and start work on them.
He always had Thurman in mind for the role, he told IGN:
It took me a year and a half to write the script and I spent that year and a half hanging out with Uma. I was living in New York, writing it there and we were just doing it together. I was writing it, but she was reading it and we're talking about it and we're hanging out and I'm getting to know her all over again, and, a lot of things had changed with her, so I was getting to know her all over again, her rhythm of speech and that kind of stuff you want to do as a writer.
Crucially, Thurman fell pregnant, pushing back filming by several months. But this too, Tarantino said, changed The Bride: "If I had written it [in 1994], I probably would have based it on the Uma of that time: a 22-year-old girl." Instead, The Bride also became a mother, a fact that became a vital part of both her character and the plot of the Kill Bill films (her daughter is central to one of the rumoured plots of a much-anticipated third film).
Tarantino gave Thurman a co-writing credit on the films, specifically for her work on The Bride. In fact, you can see it in the films' closing credits: "Based on the character of 'The Bride', created by Q & U" – Q standing for Quentin and U for Uma.
She went on to endure the extremities induced by Tarantino's direction. As she told co-star David Carradine at the time: "Why does Quentin do these things to me? He's always cutting me up, and getting me covered with mud, and having me tied up and shot in the face with a shotgun. What the hell is this s---? I mean, he says he loves me, but what kind of love is that?" She started production weeks after having given birth and embarked upon gruelling martial arts training. Filming itself took a year, and involved Thurman leaving her young family to travel to Beijing and Mexico for months at a time.
But Thurman has fond ties to her character nonetheless, not least because The Bride inspired a new generation of young women to adopt a strident confidence that became synonymous with the actress. "I know that some high school girls were referring to defending themselves as saying they were gonna do an Uma on that person," she told IGN. "There is that thin line between self confidence and aggression. Even when we were going around the world doing the premieres, you'd have all these girls dressed up as me in my track suit, ushering people around. And they looked so strapping." By resurrecting The Bride 13 years later, Thurman has empowered women once again.
