Uma Karuna Thurman

Thurman began her career as a fashion model at age 15, and signed with the agency Click Models. Her modeling credits included Glamour, the December 1985 supplement cover of Vogue and the May 1985 cover of British Vogue when she was only 15 years old. She made her movie debut in 1988, appearing in four films that year. Her first two were the high school comedy Johnny Be Good and teen thriller Kiss Daddy Goodnight. She had a small role in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, playing the goddess Venus alongside Oliver Reed's Vulcan; during her entrance she briefly appears nude, in a homage to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. The most acclaimed of these first four films was Oscar-winning drama Dangerous Liaisons, in which Thurman's character of Cecile de Volanges is seduced by the manipulative Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich). At the time, insecure about her appearance, she spent roughly a year in London, during which she often wore loose, baggy clothing. Malkovich said of her "there is nothing twitchy teenager-ish about her, I haven’t met anyone like her at that age. Her intelligence and poise stand out. But there's something else. She's more than a little haunted."
• Career prominence (1990–1993)
In 1990, Thurman appeared with Fred Ward and Maria de Medeiros in sexually provocative drama Henry & June, the first film to receive an NC-17 rating. Partly because many American newspapers refused to advertise films with the new rating, it did not get wide release in the United States, but the film won her some good notices. The New York Times wrote: "Thurman, as the Brooklyn-accented June, takes a larger-than-life character and makes her even bigger, though the performance is often as curious as it is commanding".
In 1993 she was for the first time the main star, in Gus Van Sant's 1993 adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It was a critical and financial disappointment; Thurman was nominated for a Worst Actress Razzie. The Washington Post described her acting as shallow, writing that, "Thurman's strangely passive characterization doesn't go much deeper than drawling and flexing her prosthetic thumbs". She also starred opposite Robert De Niro in the drama Mad Dog and Glory, another box office disappointment. Later that year she auditioned for Stanley Kubrick while he was casting for unmade film Wartime Lies. Her agent said she described working with Kubrick as a "really bad experience."