An interview with... Gwyneth Paltrow
Her clean living and yummy mummy reputation have not always worked in Gwyneth Paltrow's favour, but as Gabrielle Donnelly finds, her genuine warmth and family values set her apart from the typical Hollywood jet set...
This month's new release by director Steven Soderbergh, Contagion, sees the world faced with a deadly virus that threatens to wipe out 15 per cent
of its population. "It's not just a
virus, it's a super-virus," explains Gwyneth Paltrow, who stars in the film alongside Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Jude Law. "It's like the Bubonic Plague and could do a lot of damage all over the world. I play the person who releases the virus." She stops and smiles, more than
a little wryly. "When I read the script Steven sent me, I said, 'Thanks a lot - this is going to do a lot for my already warm and fuzzy image!'"
The thing about Gwyneth is that she makes it, frankly, inconveniently difficult to dislike her. Oh, you can call her a spoilt rich girl, blessed with more good looks than is right or fair. You can point to her TV director daddy, her top actress mommy, her upbringing surrounded by the cream of the crop of Hollywood's movers and shakers and say she's never known a day's professional struggle in her life. You can look at her life now, the marriage to Chris Martin, the famous friends with first names like Madonna and Stella, the house in Belsize Park where she whips up trendily organic food for her trendily named children and say you wish we all had it so good. And then you meet her and suggest to her, very gently, that she might just be perceived by the more, well, normal among us as being ever so slightly on the privileged side.
And she shrugs those toned shoulders, flicks back that perfect golden hair, looks me square in the eye and comments, deadpan, "Aren't I (expletive - and it was an expletive - deleted) annoying!" Damn the woman, on top of all of that, she is actually pretty likeable.
The Gwyneth Paltrow story is well known. Born in Los Angeles, the adored and adoring daughter of television director Bruce Paltrow (who tragically died of cancer just days after Gwyneth's 30th birthday) and his blonde and beautiful actress wife Blythe Danner, she was given her first major screen role at age 18 in the movie Hook by its director Steven Spielberg, who happened to be her godfather, picking up an Oscar at just 27 for Shakespeare in Love - and doing so, by the way, in a sugar pink dress credited with having single-handedly brought pink dresses back into fashion. It is, let's face it, just not a biography that you or I can find anything very much in common with. Or is it?
"I was raised by people who were in show business, but we also had incredible family values," she says today firmly. "Yes, there were certain pressures, but my mother and father understood the acting world because they were part of it. I was lucky because they both taught me the importance of what is real, which is family and friends and the personal connections you make in life. And that's stood me in good stead - my family has always been my main focus, and the friends I have, I've had forever.
"The Oscar? You know, it was actually a great blessing to win it when I was so young because it let me see how little it mattered! Oh of course, it was a wonderful feeling to win and a great honour to achieve it, but it's really not something that makes your life better on a day-to-day basis, you know? It doesn't make you have less of an ego or be a more giving person or more present to the people you love, which is what life should be about - and the only way to know that about the Oscar is to win one because, believe me, winning takes the mystique right out of it!"
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