Stylist's Debbie McQuoid spends an afternoon at the home of Uma Thurman, Tarantino's muse, and falls a little bit in love in the process.

Picture credits: Getty Images,Rex Features

A series of events have brought me to where I sit now; perched at Uma Thurman’s kitchen counter in her Manhattan apartment, nonchalantly sipping peppermint tea and trying to surreptitiously store away in my memory bank every book, photograph and brand of cleaning product I can see.

I’ve flown to New York to talk to the actress about her new film Bel Ami, a remake based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 classic novel about Parisian scoundrel and womaniser Georges Duroy, played by Robert Pattinson. Our original meeting was scheduled for this morning at The Gramercy Park Hotel, but a sick child (hers) has postponed it to this afternoon. A family dinner party means it’s easier for me to visit her at home, is this OK? Of course. Do I mind if she prepares the ragù while I interview her? Not at all.

Totally thrown – I came here to sit in a fashionable but neutral hotel suite and ask questions – I am now a guest in her apartment. The star of cult favourites Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Vol 1 & 2, and, yes, admittedly, a few duds too (My Super Ex-Girlfriend …anyone?). I’m in Uma Thurman’s pad.

There are a few rules I have agreed to; not too much detail about the apartment and no detail at all about Maya, 13, and Levon, 10 – her children with ex-husband, actor Ethan Hawke.

As soon as I enter, I can see why. This is a home; her home. The hallway table spills over with framed photos of friends and family, the living room bookshelves are bursting with board games, the kitchen table is scattered with half-completed school homework. She opens and shuts the fridge (full of family foods) and laments the shelf-life of herbs. Rosemary in particular. “It turns so quickly,” she remarks. It’s all so terrifyingly intimate.

At 6ft tall, the 41-year-old is utterly contrary to the typically Hollywood-grown petite actresses. And right now she’s standing over me – hair back, bare-faced, luminous skin – with a kitchen knife (not unlike the one she wields in Kill Bill) as I shrink into my chair.

“I’m not very relaxed naturally,” she says, not meaning to sound a little bit so. “I’m one of those highly focused, overly intense characters. I often drive myself nuts.” It’s true; there is an intensity to Uma. It’s in her mouth; the way she slightly grits her teeth when she’s chopping a vegetable, punching her way out of a wooden box in Kill Bill or flirting with near death and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. “I actually find work can be quite relaxing,” she says. “When the children were little I wasn’t able to work like I did before. So now, when I do work, it’s very much like, ‘This is good, this is my time.’”

In Bel Ami, Uma plays Madeleine Forestier; a “passionate contributor to the world” who becomes Georges Duroy’s lover, then wife, as he sleeps his way to the top through the wives of 19th-century Paris’ power players. Although the story’s main focus is Duroy’s naked ambition, the women, especially Thurman’s Madeleine and Christina Ricci’s Clotilde, stand out for their ‘relaxed’ attitudes towards sex and relationships.

“Maybe those women were more liberated than many women are today?” Uma muses. “They’re certainly getting away with it; operating in a culture that supports backdoor behaviour.

Uma’s referring to the fascinating campaigns for the US presidential race; where Republican candidates Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney seem to be throwing personal and ethical baggage at each other more than any policy criticism. Her voice drops to an astonished whisper. “It’s crazy. It’s like a freak show on the world stage. It’s televised and presented as really legitimate, but it’s clearly a wildly eccentric bunch of individuals in a gigantic country, all professing various different ideologies consumed by personal interest,” she says.

Her son calls out to his mum; I’m reminded of my intrusion into her home and pick up the book lying in front of me. She’s reading Suzanne Collins’ teen sci-fi bestseller The Hunger Games aloud with her children, but is unaware of the upcoming film versions I tell her about. This brings us to the topic of Twilight, another film franchise she hadn’t paid much attention to until she met her Bel Ami co-star; tortured heart-throb du jour, R-Patz.

“He’s very serious,” she reveals. “He did a huge amount of rehearsal in his own time. I think that’s what you do as a young actor, when you take your work very seriously and want to take it to the next level.”

When Stylist Met Uma