Biography charts Gwyneth Paltrow’s climb from actor to empire
Gwyneth Paltrow, once known as an Oscar-winning actress, is perhaps our finest unrelatable relatable. Since 2008, she has promoted the aspirational absurdity that, with an abundance of time and capital, women can improve themselves, becoming a tad more like, well, her.
Amy Odell’s dishy, often delicious “Gwyneth: The Biography” charts how Paltrow grew from winsome ingenue to influencer executrix: daughter of actress Blythe Danner and television producer and director Bruce Paltrow, best actress Academy Award winner (at age 26, for “Shakespeare in Love”), first lady of Miramax, fashion muse, It girl, girlfriend of GQ cover-worthy swains (Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Luke Wilson), wife and ex of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, mogul. She’s the woman who appears to have everything, much of it in navy and beige.
Paltrow did not speak to Odell for this book, and Odell’s take on Paltrow’s early years is thin, reliant on tenuous sources. There’s a buffet of mean-girl quotes about a woman who has been beautiful, tall, thin, rich and famous for most of her 52 years, inducing envy from those excised from her inner sanctum.
Paltrow’s early films, like “Sliding Doors” and “Hook,” were either charming indies or bigger productions that made small use of her. For better and worse, Harvey Weinstein changed all that. After “Shakespeare in Love,” the Miramax honcho used Paltrow’s success as bait to prey on other women. Paltrow was one of the first stars to speak out about Weinstein’s harassment. The trauma of working for him, she is quoted saying here, is one of the reasons she quit acting so young. Though she has two upcoming movies, including one with Timothée Chalamet.
The book is strongest on the Goop era: the company’s volatile financial history, and Paltrow’s central role in the factually fungible, potentially dangerous wellness market.
Paltrow has long been her best product, and selling herself has increasingly overshadowed her considerable acting chops. “Gwyneth has spent her career manipulating her own coverage, and she applied the same savvy to Goop, beating her competitors at their own game,” Odell writes.
As for dish, there’s plenty: Paltrow dumped former pal Madonna after the singer “went off on her daughter, Lourdes” at a large gathering, behavior that disgusted Paltrow and Martin, her then husband. Madge also seemed a bit stalky, showing up without prior notice on the island where they were vacationing. Paltrow told friends that Pitt — her former fiancée — “has terrible taste in women.”
She has long been insulated from anything resembling a normal life. Perhaps that’s why she created a consumer one of her own.
By her own admission, Paltrow “basically stopped making money from acting in 2002.” She lives extravagantly, often fueled by the generosity of sponsors. She is the ambassador and the product.
Paltrow’s well-publicized second nuptials to television producer Brad Falchuk, in 2018, featured a bouquet of donated goods and services, documented in a “sourcebook” and promoted in an article on the Goop website. She asked the bathroom firm Waterworks to help outfit a $10 million home with Martin, Odell reports, and Restoration Hardware to furnish her offices and be featured in a six-year rebuild of her latest Montecito home with Falchuk; the design accents are available on the Goop website.
While Paltrow projects intelligence as an actress and has appeared in some cinematic gems (“Shakespeare,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”), she’s made some wretched choices as well, appearing in a string of critical and box-office duds (“Shallow Hal,” “View from the Top”).
For all her style and seeming grace, Paltrow has also made some inane utterances, many of them cataloged here. On the benefits of wearing a fat suit in “Shallow Hal”: “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.” At one Goop leadership meeting, when everyone was asked to share something that wasn’t true of the rest, Paltrow responded, “I won an Oscar.”
At Goop, Odell reports, Paltrow repeatedly failed to put in the hard work, or get others to do it for her, including research into dubious wellness claims of products on the website. Despite constant criticism from experts, items promoted with unsubstantiated promises long remained on the website.
Paltrow’s gift is selling, but she’s not adept at managing, Odell writes. She won’t delegate, creating an unhealthy work environment marked by frequent churn. Paltrow has a tendency to avoid conflict while rarely hearing anyone tell her no.
Her greatest cultural impact, Odell writes, is “showing the world just how much consumers will spend and how much effort they would undertake for the luxury of being well, no matter what science tells us.”
In Goop world, “there wasn’t a lot of tolerance for imperfection,” Odell writes. Which is understandable, as perfection, that impossible, impractical, expensive ideal, is Paltrow’s brand.
This is an excerpt from a Washington Post story.