Celebrity Galore

Gwyneth Kate Paltrow (born September 27, 1972) is an Academy Award, Golden Globe and double Screen Actors Guild Award

winning American actress. She is married to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Blythe Danner, an actress, and the late Bruce Paltrow, a film and television director, writer, and producer. Paltrow’s father was of Ashkenazi Russian Jewish descent and her mother is a Quaker of part Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. Paltrow was raised in Santa Monica, she attended Crossroads School before moving and attending Spence School, a private girls’ school in New York City which was also attended by Emmy Rossum, Kerry Washington and Sally Pressman. Later she briefly studied art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before discontinuing her degree and committing herself to acting. Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a cousin of actress Katherine Moennig, who is best known for her roles as Jacqueline “Jake” Pratt in Young Americans and Shane McCutcheon in The L Word. She is an “adopted daughter” of Talavera de la Reina (Spain), where at age 15 she spent a month as an exchange student and learned Spanish. Paltrow was childhood friends with Saturday Night Live’s Maya Rudolph.

Paltrow made her professional stage debut in 1990. Her most recent stage appearance was in Proof at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Her debut film was Shout (1991). She also appeared in Hook (1991), Malice (1993), and Flesh and Bone (1993).

Paltrow starred in Se7en (1995), opposite Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. The film was hugely successful commercially and critically. Then in 1996 she starred in Emma, where she received strongly positive critical acclaim, particularly in the UK for her impressive English accent, as well as in Europe and Asia.

Two years later, Paltrow starred in Shakespeare in Love, in which she portrayed the fictional love interest of William Shakespeare, portrayed by Joseph Fiennes. It earned more than US$100 million in domestic box office receipts, and received numerous awards. Shakespeare in Love won the Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy and Best Screenplay, as well as the Academy Award for Best Picture. Paltrow also won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role from the Screen Actors Guild. Later that year, Paltrow won the Academy Award for Best Actress. The next year Paltrow starred in other movie roles such as A Perfect Murder. In 1999 Paltrow starred in The Talented Mr. Ripley which earned over $80 million domestically, and received positive reviews.

Since winning the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, Paltrow’s film success has been less noteworthy. She said she was unequipped to cope with the pressure, leading her to make several bad movie choices, agreeing with peers who believe the win is a curse. She has also made several cameo roles, such as her appearance in the Brittany Murphy film Love and Other Disasters, and several smaller roles, such as her role in Running With Scissors and Infamous, in which she sang Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?”.

In 2008, she appeared in Iron Man as Pepper Potts, her first blockbuster film in several years. Paltrow told an interviewer that initially she was hesitant to appear in a big blockbuster film, but that she was won over by Robert Downey Jr., the star of the film, and director Jon Favreau. Paltrow recalled a conversation with Downey Jr., saying:

“     Robert called me and he said, ‘This is gonna be fun, and this is gonna be good.’ And then he said to me, ‘Don’t you want to be in a movie that people see?’ And I was like, ‘Whoa! What would that feel like?’ And he’s right. Moviemaking is not supposed to be a masturbatory exercise; it’s supposed to be shared by other people.

Source [ Wikipedia ]