Uma Thurman takes on challenging new film role

Actress Uma Thurman arrives at the Cinema Society screening of 'The Life Before Her Eyes,' on Tuesday, April 15, 2008, in New York. [Agencies]

Uma Thurman has always liked a challenge, and she got one with her new film, "The Life Before Her Eyes," an intense drama about a mother haunted by a horrific decision made as a teen-ager.

The movie, directed by Vadim Perelman who also made the 2003 dark drama "House of Sand and Fog," debuted in select U.S. cities last week and expands nationwide on Friday.

Thurman perhaps is best known for roles in director Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill" movies, and for years she has been highly sought out as an actress. But for "Life Before Her Eyes," she also took on the role of producer, helping shepherd a difficult story onto the screen.

"I developed it, kicked it around and kept it alive for years, so it was very satisfying to finally get it made," she told Reuters.

Thurman plays Diana, an art-history teacher living a seemingly idyllic life, but audiences soon learn she is haunted by terrible events in her past as the film cuts back-and-forth between the present and events 15 years earlier.

As a young free spirit, Diana (played by Evan Rachel Wood) and her best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri) were cornered in a high school bathroom by a deranged student gunman who asked them to make an agonizing choice between which girl should live and which should die.

Fifteen years later, in the present, Diana is trying to come to terms with her decision as she struggles to raise her own rebellious 8-year-old daughter and deal with the possibility her husband is having an affair.