Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Kate Paltrow ( PAL-troh; born September 27, 1972) is an American actress and businesswoman. The daughter of filmmaker Bruce Paltrow and actress Blythe Danner, she established herself as a leading lady appearing in primarily mid-budget and period films during the 1990s and early 2000s, before transitioning to blockbusters and franchises. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award.

Paltrow gained notice for her early work in films including Seven (1995), Emma (1996), Sliding Doors (1998), and A Perfect Murder (1998). She garnered wider acclaim for her role as Viola de Lesseps in the historical romance Shakespeare in Love (1998), which earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. This was followed by roles in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and Shallow Hal (2001). She made her West End debut in the David Auburn's play Proof (2003), earning a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress nomination, and reprised the role in the 2005 film of the same name.

After becoming a parent in 2004, Paltrow reduced her acting workload by making intermittent appearances in films such as Two Lovers (2008), Country Strong (2010), and Contagion (2011). Paltrow's career revived through her portrayal of Pepper Potts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019). On television, she had a recurring guest role as Holly Holliday on the Fox musical television series Glee (2010–2011), for which she received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series. After starring in the Netflix series The Politician (2019–2020), she took a break from acting, before returning with Marty Supreme (2025).

In 2005, Paltrow became a "face" of Estée Lauder Companies; she was previously the face of the American fashion brand Coach. She is the founder and CEO of the lifestyle company Goop, which has been criticized for promoting pseudoscience, and has written several cookbooks. She also received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for narrating the children's book Brown Bear and Friends (2009). She hosted the documentary series The Goop Lab for Netflix in 2020.

Early life and education

Gwyneth Kate Paltrow was born on September 27, 1972 in Los Angeles to actress Blythe Danner and film producer-director Bruce Paltrow. She has a younger brother, Jake, who is a director and screenwriter. Paltrow's father was Jewish, while her mother is Christian. She was raised celebrating "both Jewish and Christian holidays." Her brother had a traditional Bar Mitzvah when he turned 13. Her father's Ashkenazi Jewish family emigrated from Belarus and Poland, while her mother has Pennsylvania Dutch (German) as well as some Irish and English ancestry. Paltrow's paternal great-great-grandfather was a Rabbi in Nowogród, Poland, and a descendant of the well-known Paltrowicz family of rabbis from Kraków.

Paltrow is a half-cousin of actress Katherine Moennig, through her mother, and a second cousin of former U.S. Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (AZ-08) through her father (Giffords' husband is U.S. Senator and retired astronaut Mark Kelly of Arizona). Paltrow's godfather is director Steven Spielberg. Her uncle is opera singer and actor Harry Danner, whose daughter, actress Hillary Danner, is Paltrow's cousin and close friend. Paltrow recalls their family gatherings: "Hillary and I always had this in common, and to this day ... cooking for people we love, eating, hanging out as a family. It's how we were raised. It's what we do." Another cousin is Rebekah Paltrow Neumann, whose spouse is the Israeli-American billionaire Adam Neumann, founder of WeWork.

Paltrow was raised in Santa Monica, California, where she attended Crossroads School, before enrolling in the Spence School, an all-girls private school in Manhattan. At Crossroads, Paltrow befriended classmate Maya Rudolph, whose father Richard Rudolph was friends with Gwyneth's father Bruce from their time at Tulane University. Later, she studied art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before dropping out to act. She is an "adopted daughter" of Talavera de la Reina (Spain), where at 15, she spent a year as an exchange student and learned to speak Spanish. She is also conversant in French, as her family frequently traveled to the South of France throughout her childhood.

Career

1989–1995: Early work

Her career beginnings can be credited to her acting family, as her acting debut was in High (1989), a TV film her father directed, and after spending several summers watching her mother perform at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, Paltrow made her professional stage debut there in 1990. Her film debut followed with the musical romance film Shout (1991), starring John Travolta, and she was cast by her godfather Steven Spielberg in the commercially successful adventure feature Hook (1991) as the young Wendy Darling. Paltrow's next roles were in the made-for-television movies Cruel Doubt (1992) and Deadly Relations (1993).

Her first plum feature film role was in the noir drama Flesh and Bone (1993) as the much younger girlfriend of James Caan. Janet Maslin of The New York Times described Paltrow as a scene-stealer "who is Blythe Danner's daughter and has her mother's way of making a camera fall in love with her."

In 1995, she starred in the thriller Seven, as the wife of a young detective (Brad Pitt), who is partnered with the retiring William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and then tasked with tracking down a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as tropes in his murders. The seventh highest grossing film of the year, Seven earned her a nomination for the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress. She appeared in Moonlight and Valentino, as a grieving chain-smoker, and in Jefferson in Paris, portraying Martha Jefferson Randolph.

1996–2001: Breakthrough and film stardom

In 1996, Paltrow played the title character in the period film adaptation Emma, based on the 1815 novel of the same name by Jane Austen. Director Douglas McGrath decided to bring in Paltrow to audition for the part of Emma Woodhouse, after a suggestion from his agent and after seeing her performance in Flesh and Bone. On his decision to cast the actress, McGrath revealed: "The thing that actually sold me on her playing a young English girl was that she did a perfect Texas accent. I know that wouldn't recommend her to most people ... I knew she had theater training, so she could carry herself. We had many actresses, big and small, who wanted to play this part. The minute she started the read-through, the very first line, I thought, 'Everything is going to be fine; she's going to be brilliant.'" While she recovered from wisdom-tooth surgery, Paltrow had a month to herself to do research for the part; she studied horsemanship, dancing, singing, archery and the "highly stylized" manners and dialect during a 3-week rehearsal period. The film was released to critical acclaim and commercial success through arthouse cinemas. Variety proclaimed: "Gwyneth Paltrow shines brightly as Jane Austen's most endearing character, the disastrously self-assured matchmaker Emma Woodhouse. A fine cast, speedy pacing, and playful direction make this a solid contender for the Austen sweepstakes." Paltrow starred in the crime film Hard Eight.

1998 marked a turning point in Paltrow's career as she took on leading roles in five high-profile film releases in the year—Great Expectations, Sliding Doors, Hush, A Perfect Murder and Shakespeare in Love. In the adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, also starring Ethan Hawke, Robert De Niro, Anne Bancroft and Chris Cooper, she played the unrequited and haughty childhood love of a New York City painter. The British drama Sliding Doors saw her star as a woman whose life could take two central paths depending on whether or not she catches a train, causing different outcomes. Great Expectations and Sliding Doors both grossed over $55 million worldwide. Paltrow starred opposite Jessica Lange in the thriller Hush, as an unsuspecting woman living with her psychotic mother-in-law. The film made $13.5 million domestically and was generally panned by critics. In another thriller, A Perfect Murder, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film, Dial M for Murder, Paltrow starred alongside Michael Douglas, playing Emily Taylor, who was based on Grace Kelly's character from the original film. Despite a mixed critical response towards A Perfect Murder, the film grossed $128 million globally. She was also considered for the role of Rose DeWitt Bukater in the 1997 film Titanic.