Gwyneth Paltrow Life Story

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Gwyneth Kate Paltrow (born September 27, 1972) is an Academy Award-winning American actress.  Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, to the late Bruce Paltrow (descendant from the well-known Paltrowitch rabbinical family of Russia), a film director, and Blythe Danner (a well-known character actress); Paltrow’s father was Jewish and her mother was raised in the Quaker religion. 

Raised in Santa Monica, she attended Spence School, a selective private girls’ school in New York City, and briefly studied Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before dropping out and committing herself to acting. Paltrow has a younger brother named Jake and is a cousin of actress Katherine Moennig.

Paltrow is a descendant of the famous Rabbi David HaLevi Segal, of Cracow (1586-1667). He was known as “The Taz” after his great book Turei Zahav or “Pillars of Gold.” The descendants of Rabbi Ha-Levi were the Russian rabbinical family Paltrowitch, which produced 33 rabbis over several generations. Paltrow has said she is very proud of being Jewish.

She garnered worldwide recognition through her performance in Shakespeare in Love (1998), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, for Outstanding Lead Actress and as a member of the Outstanding Cast. Since then, Paltrow has portrayed supporting as well as lead roles in films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Shallow Hal (2001) and Proof (2005), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in Motion Picture Drama.

In 2008, she appeared in the highest grossing movie of her career, the superhero film Iron Man, and then reprised her role as Pepper Potts in its sequel, Iron Man 2 (2010). Paltrow has been the face of Estée Lauder’s Pleasures perfume since 2005.

Her debut film was Shout (1991), and later the same year she had a small role in family friend Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991). She later starred in Se7en (1995), dating her co-star Brad Pitt.

Her performance in Emma (1996) received its share of praise. She was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress two years later for her performance in Shakespeare in Love (1998), in which her then-boyfriend Ben Affleck also appeared. She has since had a steady film career, with a few notable film roles, including Proof (2005) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

In an interview with The Guardian on 27 January 2006, Paltrow admitted that she divided her career into those movies she did for love, and those “shite” films she did for money. The Royal Tenenbaums, Proof and Sylvia went into the former category, whilst View From the Top and Shallow Hal were in the latter.

In her early 20s, Paltrow was engaged for six months to Brad Pitt, whom she dated from December 1994 to May 1997. The engagement was called off, according to Paltrow, because she wasn’t ready for marriage and later felt responsible for hurting Pitt since she was “such a mess” during that time in her life.[35] Paltrow has since said that as this was her first high-profile relationship with another celebrity, it taught her the need for public discretion about her romantic life; she told Biography magazine, “I said things about being in a relationship [with Brad Pitt] that felt wrong to me even as I was saying them.”

Paltrow had an on-off three year relationship with Ben Affleck from 1997 to late 2000. They first dated from November 1997 to January 1999. Soon after their breakup, Paltrow convinced Affleck to work in the film Bounce with her; during the making of the film, which was shot in mid 1999, the couple started dating again and eventually broke up in October 2000. Paltrow has said that she stopped reading celebrity magazines in 1999. She was friends with Winona Ryder until her first breakup with Affleck in 1999.

In October 2002, Paltrow met Chris Martin of the British rock group Coldplay backstage at a gig just three weeks after the death of her father Bruce Paltrow. They married on December 5, 2003 in a ceremony at a hotel in Southern California. On 14 May 2004, the couple had their first child, a girl named Apple Blythe Alison Martin. Paltrow explained the unusual first name on Oprah, saying: “It sounded so sweet and it conjured such a lovely picture for me – you know, apples are so sweet and they’re wholesome and it’s biblical – and I just thought it sounded so lovely and … clean! And I just thought, ‘Perfect!’” The child’s godfathers are Simon Pegg and Martin’s bandmate, Jonny Buckland.

Her second child, a boy named Moses Bruce Anthony Martin, was born on 8 April 2006, in New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Her son’s first name was explained as the song, entitled “Moses”, that her husband wrote for her before their wedding. Paltrow has stated that she cut down on work after becoming a mother. She has also said that she suffered from depression after the death of her father and after the birth of her second child.

Paltrow lives in New York and Belsize Park in London, in a house bought from Kate Winslet. She practices yoga daily, works out regularly with her personal trainer Tracy Anderson, and used to follow a macrobiotic diet until the birth of her children. She told People in 2005 that, “I’m not as stringent as I was in the past. Now I’ll have cheese once in a while or white flour, but I still believe in whole grains and no sugar.” Paltrow is friends with Madonna, fashion designer Valentino and singer Beyonce.

In December 2006, Paltrow was reported on the Internet to have told Notícias Sábado, the weekend magazine supplement of Portuguese newspaper Diário de Notícias, that she thought British people were more civilized and intelligent than Americans. Paltrow denied making the statements attributed to her and told People magazine that she never gave an interview to a Portuguese publication, but instead had tried to say in Spanish, during a press conference, that Europe was an “older culture” and Americans “live to work”. Diário de Notícias said in their 6 December 2006 edition that it had obtained the quotes from English-language articles that are still referenced online, though Paltrow has insisted that she was misquoted, declaring in 2007: “I love America, and I’m an American through and through.”