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Issue Date: December 23, 2001
Not Simply Sitting Pretty
Admittedly, Gwyneth Paltrow has had certain advantages: good breeding, great beauty.
But she's earned our respect.
And now, like so many, she's rethinking her life's priorities.
by Jeffrey Zaslow
As a girl growing up in Manhattan, Gwyneth Paltrow would answer the doorbell and find young actors such as Michael Douglas or Christopher Reeve, or the best singers on Broadway. "It was always very lively in our house," she says, "with artists and people singing or playing the piano. Even though we were sort of fancy Upper East Siders, there was a kind of downtown, bohemian quality to my parents' friends." Her mother, Blythe Danner, is a stage and screen actress. Her father, Bruce Paltrow, was a producer of TV's "St. Elsewhere". But Paltrow says she never dreamed of becoming a movie icon. "If you're a child of it, and your parents are well-respected, hard-working people, you just think, 'It's an honorable profession, my family tradition, and I'm going to carry it on.' You don't think 'Show biz, lights, fame!' "
Now, of course, the 29-year-old has the highest level of fame. She has won the most coveted awards, including a best actress Oscar for 1998's "Shakespeare in Love". She has had Hollywood romances with Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck. She has earned stellar reviews playing Shakespeare onstage. And her movie output is prodigious, including last month's controversial "Shallow Hal" and the new comedy "The Royal Tenenbaums", about a family of child geniuses.
In "Tenenbaums", Paltrow plays a character who was celebrated as a ninth-grade playwright but has since grown into a troubled adulthood. "It's a pretty different performance for her," says "Tenenbaums" director Wes Anderson. "She's brooding and a little depressed." In some ways, that also describes Paltrow's mood these days.
Her film character "gets power from people trying to figure her out," Paltrow says. Similarly, in her own life, the actress recognizes that she has become an object of fascination among strangers. "I do feel people are trying to figure me out -- on a global level. But I don't have much invested in the public's opinion of me. I care about how I am to my family and people I love."
Tall and stately, eating a macrobiotic lunch of brown rice prepared exactly to her specifications by a hotel chef (she also prefers tea made from black soybeans), Paltrow comes off as both a pampered movie star and that wide-eyed kid in her parents' living room. She's clearly ambivalent about her fame, and she also admits to feeling a "malaise" since Sept. 11. "I've been very depressed. I'm off. I'm not myself." Promoting her movies "feels idiotic, frankly, in the wake of Sept. 11."
At 6 a.m. on Sept. 11, she took a yoga class at Chelsea Piers in Lower Manhattan, which later that day was turned into a makeshift triage hospital. Just before the first plane hit, she returned to her home in West Greenwich Village, a mile from the World Trade Center. She ended up watching television coverage with her assistant and her two macrobiotic cooks, "a couple who sort of take care of me." That day, she was touched to hear from a family in Spain who had hosted her as high school exchange student. "They e-mailed me and said, 'We're all Americans today.' "
In the days after the attack, the smell of it hanging in the air in her neighborhood, Paltrow visited firefighters at nearby fire stations. "They're wrecked," she says. She vows to remain a New Yorker for the rest of her life: "I'm never leaving." She considers New York one of the most beautiful, festive places on Earth around Christmas, and she hopes the holidays "will be healing" for New Yorkers.
The day before this interview, Paltrow flew to Los Angeles from New York, and out her plane window she saw the gash in the city skyline. "It was the most bizarre, startling, awful thing," she says. She's preparing for terrible possibilities. For her birthday in late September, her brother's girlfriend gave her a gas mask. She says the gift was given, and accepted, in complete seriousness.
Americans now feel vulnerable in ways that Paltrow sometimes felt before Sept. 11. She was stalked by a 51-year-old pizza delivery man, who has since been institutionalized. "It's a feeling like you never know what's around the corner. You don't know if your child will inhale anthrax or if there's a small nuclear device. If people are taking this terrorist attack personally, then they know what it's like to be stalked."
For her own sense of security, Paltrow relies heavily on her parents and younger brother, Jake, a director. Those who watched her break down while accepting her Oscar got an idea of what her family means to her. Her dad was struggling with throat cancer at the time, and her grandfather was dying of liver cancer. She says she could not help but weep. "I was so close to my grandfather, and my father is my life. If I didn't have my father, I really feel like I would die. He was so sick there in the audience. It was too much."
She felt embarrassed by her acceptance speech: "I felt so exposed, and then people made fun of me." She empathizes with Julia Roberts, who also was criticized for her emotional Oscar speech. "People can't imagine that we're just women. We're put in a situation that is overwhelming and scary and once-in-a-lifetime."
For support, she often turns to her friend Madonna. "She's like an older sister to me," says Paltrow, who spent a week this year hanging out with the singer on tour. "Anything I've been through, she's been through 10 times worse, 10 times more and 10 times longer. She gives me great advice about saying no and taking care of myself." Paltrow showed off her voice in the karaoke movie "Duets", directed by her father, but she says she has no interest in attempting a music/acting career, as Madonna and Jennifer Lopez have done. G.Pal., she promises, will be no threat to J.Lo.
Indeed, she says she wouldn't mind a lower profile and has dated non-stars, although she's lately been seen with "Tenenbaums" co-star Luke Wilson. "If you date a guy who's famous, that wears off in about a second. Then you're left with a regular guy. You don't see the trappings of fame," she says. But non-celeb boyfriends have struggled with her celebrity: "I feel it's a strain and makes them uncomfortable."
Paltrow says she stopped reading articles about herself after the 1999 Oscars. "I'd started to wonder: Why am I reading all this stuff? I felt like it wasn't healthy." If she sees one of her movies reviewed while she's paging through her daily copy of "The New York Times", she'll read it. Otherwise, she says, she stays away from reviews, too. Her father understands her urge to cocoon. He says he worries about everything in his daughter's life. "Celebrity brings danger. I also worry about people taking advantage of her kindness and generosity of spirit," he says.
When Paltrow was 10, her dad took her on a father-daughter trip to France, telling her, "I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who will always love you." "I felt very special and grown up when he said that to me," she recalls. As her dad remembers it: "She was ready for Paris at 10. She was ready for everything." Her mom remembers kissing her good night as a girl. "She was always full of music," Danner says. "We'd sing in bed, and her harmonies were extraordinary." These days, Danner wants to see her daughter's major TV appearances but often finds out from friends after the fact. "I missed her on "The Tonight Show" the other night. I said, 'Gwyneth, why didn't you tell me?' She said, 'Oh, Mom!' "
Descended from a line of rabbis on her dad's side and Daughters of the American Revolution WASPs on her mom's, "Gwyneth has a gentility and an elegance that Blythe has, yet she has a spark to her that I have -- strong and sassy and irreverent," her father says.
When "Titanic" was being cast, she was asked to consider playing upper-class Rose. "She has the aristocratic bearing that role required," says "The Hollywood Reporter"'s Robert Osborne. Paltrow did not like the film and assumed it would do "terribly" at the box office. "Apparently, I was wrong," she says, grinning. "But I like little French movies. I'm a nerd like that." Osborne hopes Paltrow finds a powerful film "that could be her "Wuthering Heights", her "Laura", her "Gaslight". She's been doing movies that aren't terribly important." Paltrow is aware of such talk, but she says that no matter how closely the outside world wants to examine her, "I have to trust myself." W
Contributing Editor Jeffrey Zaslow last profiled
Robert Redford for USA WEEKEND Magazine.
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THINGS TO DO IN HER 30s.
Gwyneth Paltrow turns 30 next year, and there's lots she'd like to accomplish as a thirtysomething -- perhaps marriage, a family, volunteer work. What else?
Sing backup for friend Sheryl Crow: "I'd like to go on tour with her for a while. I could be her caterer, too."
Practice a lot of yoga: One of her favorite yoga partners is Madonna. "She's better than all the teachers. She's incredibly limber and strong."
Do more Shakespeare: "I grew up with it. My whole life I've been around some of the best Shakespearean actors in the country."
Test her limits: In 1997, she spent three days alone on a deserted island near Belize, finding her own food, studying her loneliness and walking around naked. "I want to do something like that again, maybe Outward Bound."
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