Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke: How cheating rumors and a busy career sunk the perfect Hollywood marriage
Maya Hawke, daughter of former Hollywood couple Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, recently opened up about how her parent's generation has 'f***ed' hers.
Maya made the revelation while posing for Nylon magazine's April issue.
"We’re just so annoyed at our parents’ generation. They had it so easy. They were all just high and driving around in cool, gas-guzzling cars. Destroying our environment... and having no wars, and no plagues and no pandemics," she said. "We’re in our 20s, we’re supposed to be having fun, and doing drugs and partying. But instead... We’re going to SoulCycle and trying to outlive our planet. We have a horrible president, and it’s just really irritating. They really f***ed us."
Although they were once the "it" couple of the industry, Maya's parents divorced when she was seven years old.
Thurman and Hawke fell in love after meeting on the set of sci-fi thriller 'Gattaca', which debuted in 1997. After dating for a year, they tied the knot, and later in the same year, Maya was born. Her brother, Levon Roan, was born four years later. Fans quickly began falling in love with the couple as Hawke did not mind walking on red carpets and posing beside his wife who was taller than him. They even began color-coordinating their outfits out in the public.
Although everything seemed to be going well, reports of their alleged separation started swirling in the media in 2003 after speculation that Hawke had cheated on his wife with their nanny, Ryan Shawhughes, while he was shooting for a movie in Montreal. Finally, the couple filed for divorce in 2004, which was finalized in 2005.
In an attempt to shut down the rumors of his infidelity, Hawke did an interview with 20/20 magazine in 2004, trying to shift the blame of his divorce on his wife's busy career.
“Uma and I did not split up over anybody's infidelity. We had a lot of problems before I ever went to Montreal. 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. "Then I'm living in a hotel room taking care of my kids while you're off on a film set six hours a day doing what you love. Do that for nine months and see what a good mood you're in. I don't know if it's just too hard to be married to a woman that wants to be a movie star. I know that she has that right to want that."
Hawke and Shawhughes married in June 2008 and now have two children together. At the time he claimed that he did not start a relationship with his current wife till he was divorced from Thurman.
Later in a 2013 Elle magazine interview, reflecting back on his short-lived marriage, Hawke said that he had committed to a relationship too early in life, when he was just 27.
"Success when you’re young is really overwhelming. The world felt out of control. And I wanted to stop it from spinning so fast. I thought marriage would decrease my variables or something. I was absolutely wrong," he said. "There was this discovery that the male brain isn’t done until 28. I definitely think my frontal lobe was not finished. I had no business taking vows that would last more than two weeks."
"Through the failure of my first marriage, I learned a lot about myself. Until you know yourself, you don’t know how to share your life with another person," he added. "And this may sound too self help-y, but when I was a young man, I had all these ideas about who I wanted to be. But they weren’t totally rooted in the truth."
Following his divorce, Ethan's career in Hollywood took off. He got nominated for four Oscars. In 2018, in a GQ interview, Hawke admitted that his “personal life fell apart" after his divorce with Thurman, which also effectively alienated his friends in the industry.
“I don't know if you feel this way, but when you're depressed, it's really easy to see everything that is fake about other people and life, and I just started seeing all that. How phony celebrity was, how phony everything is," he said. "You channel your inner Holden Caulfield, you know?”
On the other hand, Thurman never married again, She does share a daughter with French financier Arpad Busson.
In 2005, Thurman called her all-too-public breakup 'excruciating' during an interview with Oprah. “You can move on, and you can be lucky and you can seize the moment and you can take one step after another. You bear two children with somebody — that’s not a small thing — and then you can hardly talk to them," she said.