Gorgeous Uma Thurman Speaks about Divorce & How It Feels to Be Single Again | "It’s Extremely Hard & It’s Hard on the Whole Family"

Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, once the hottest stars of Hollywood, had been married for five years before splitting up.

Getty Images/Photos by (L) Chris Jackson and (R) George De Sota

By Asmita S

February 14, 2020

Posted February 14, 2020

Kill Bill actress Uma Thurman is known as one of the sexiest actresses alive and there is no disputing that. The talented actress has entertained us for more than 30 years even though she's been a bit way from the spotlight of late. However, the 49-year-old has faced many difficulties in her personal life that have shaped her to become the fearless, inspiring woman she is now.

Once happily married with kids, she found herself single in the year 2005 after her divorce from Ethan Hawke. When she took on the role of a single woman in the film Prime, she connected with the role at a personal level. She told The Morning Call in 2005, "I understood exactly what this character was going through. I know what it's like to wake up a decade later and be single again and alone again and thinking that you had a plan and the plan got derailed."

Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman | Source: Getty Images (Photo by Sebastian Artz)

The actress, who was voted sexiest actress alive, by Glamour's magazine in 2020 had been married to Hollywood actor, Ethan Hawke, for five years but their relationship gradually fell apart. They had two children, Maya, now 21, and Levon, now 18. She opened up about the "hard" divorce in a TV interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2005, according to Express UK. She told Oprah, "Oh gosh! I don’t talk about this very much. Half of America that gets married goes through what I just went through."

Oprah, who is known to break through many taboos, corrected her, "No, 57 percent." The Must Love Dogs actress laughed and said, "Thank you. You know, it’s extremely hard, and it’s hard on the whole family. You’re a family, and then you’re not a family in the same way."

Unlike other stars who have blamed their partner or their fate, Thurman displays remarkable maturity when she owns her share of the responsibility. "Our marriage failed. I should take full responsibility for the failure of my own marriage. Blaming anybody doesn’t make you feel any better," she said with her trademark honesty. In the interview, she spoke about the pain she felt after they went separate ways.

Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman | Source: Getty Images (Photo by Vince Bucci))

"It’s excruciating, it’s weird because you know you have a nice boyfriend and then husband, and the children are doing ok and work’s ok. Then suddenly you cross these little ceremonies where it’s all this, this is like a blizzard again. And you sit through it and it’s like wow - and you can’t believe that you’re feeling what you are feeling, and you are still so far from your life feeling whole again. You can move on and you can be lucky and you can take one step after the other. But there’s something fundamentally wrong," said the mom-of-three. She went on to have another daughter, Luna, with her partner, Arpad Busson, in 2012.

The actress who is now working in the Netflix horror series Chambers, thinks that their high-pressure demanding jobs may have been one of the reasons things did not work out between the two. She had returned to work after Levon was born and it had shaken up their hard-earned stability.

"But we had two children, we were going through a really bad time, my son was 18 months old. I hadn’t really worked much between my children, which had given us a lot of stability. I had a child and went back into an incredibly demanding job - I think that put a huge amount of pressure on our marriage," she said.

When a marriage is in a difficult phase and you have children, even when you work on it there is no guarantee that things will get better. "When you bear two children with someone that’s not a small thing, and then you can hardly talk to them. You work on it because they need you, and your children need you, too. And we worked on it, he worked on it," she added.

While she shouldered the blame, Hawke did not accuse her of failing them at all. "Uma and I did not split up over anybody's infidelity," he told GQ magazine, adding that his life fell apart when they split. "You know you'd come up with these rules: 'One person works, the other person doesn't. Well, then somebody's always out of town,'" Hawke explained.

Even though marriage had been hard, Thurman always loved being a mother, which she believes is the "best-kept secret." She had struggled with the guilt of being a working mom, she tried throughout her life to balance the two and feel less conflicted.

"I just do my best. Any working mother will tell you it’s the same. I think every working mom is kind of a superhero. I think we all are," she told People. Her daughter, Maya, was recently seen in the Netflix show Stranger Things and her son, Levon, is an actor as well, who was seen in the 2018 short film Blackout.