Uma Karuna Thurman

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."
• 1994–1998
After Mad Dog and Glory, Thurman auditioned for the Quentin Tarantino ensemble movie Pulp Fiction, which grossed over $107 million on a budget of only $8 million. The Washington Post wrote that Thurman was "serenely unrecognizable in a black wig, is marvelous as a zoned-out gangster's girlfriend." Thurman was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar the following year. She became one of Tarantino's favorite actresses to cast; he told Time magazine in 2003 that she was "up there with Garbo and Dietrich in goddess territory."