Posted on: Thursday, November 13, 2003
Paltrow finds new peace while grieving, growing
By Donna Freydkin
USA Today
A year ago, Gwyneth Paltrow turned 30, and life as she knew it changed forever.
She marked her 30th birthday on Sept. 28 last year, and her beloved father, producer/director Bruce Paltrow, died while celebrating his daughter's birthday Oct. 3, 2002 in Rome from pneumonia and an unexpected recurrence of throat cancer.
"It's been, in many ways, the worst year of my life and will continue to be," she said.
Two weeks after his death, Paltrow went to work on the dark drama "Sylvia," which opens tomorrow at the Art House at Restaurant Row.
The film eerily mirrors her own loss; it has Paltrow playing tortured poet Sylvia Plath, an alluring artist madly in love with her philandering husband, Ted Hughes, while still profoundly mourning the death of her father.
Paltrow can relate.
"I don't know how I got through it," she says of the 54-day shoot. "It was all sort of just right under the surface. It's literally my worst nightmare, and it came true. It's really horrible. Because he was the one person in your life that you always think, 'I'm safe because they're there, and they're so smart, and they know everything, and I can always go to them.' And then they evaporate."
Paltrow stops and tears well in her eyes.
"My father had that incredible Jewish warmth, really bolstering us (Paltrow and her brother) all the time," she says. "And when you're 9 years old and you're hearing that you are the best person, it gets in there, and you think, 'OK, I'm not going to be afraid to try things, because I'm always loved no matter what.' That kills me, when I think about it. It totally breaks my heart, how lucky I am."
Paltrow says she felt lost, unsure whether she should quit the movie. In fact, the actress says she went back in front of the camera purely because her brother, Jake, 28, a director and devoted movie buff, told her to "keep going."
Paltrow's grief fueled her portrayal of suicidal Plath but never got in the way of her work, says novice feature film director Christine Jeffs. "She was grieving and experiencing so much deep stuff, but she was very professional."
Now, Paltrow is slowly adjusting to her new fatherless reality, which includes a relationship with Coldplay singer Chris Martin. The two have been together for more than a year.
"She's incredibly happy" with Martin, says her mother, Blythe Danner, who plays her overbearing mother in "Sylvia." Danner says she and Paltrow are extremely close and relished the chance to work together. (They have teamed up before on TV and stage projects.) And her daughter is slowly coming to terms with her father's death, Danner says. "She puts one foot in front of the other, now that the shock has worn off a bit."
Despite Paltrow's intentionally low profile, she is hardly a gloomy recluse. She exudes a refined, easy elegance, a sense of being thoroughly comfortable in her own makeup-free skin.
Contrary to the reputation that dogs her, she's not standoffish — or else she hides it well. Arriving alone for her interview at a trendy cafe in SoHo, New York, she's friendly, not frosty, ordering a bran muffin, sipping tea.
"I've gotten this moniker, maybe because you have to burp on TV in order to be accessible, and I was raised not to do that," she says, casual in a white tank under a white jacket, paired with jeans and black, pointy heels. "It's weird. And it's not like my personality's changed."
She splits her time between her downtown townhouse in New York and her London pad, where she hangs out with Martin. British guys, she says, are more chivalrous than their American counterparts, but that's as much as she'll reveal where her love life is concerned.
"She's in a very good place right now. Everything is coming together. She's very happy in her personal life," says British producer Alison Owen, a close friend of Paltrow's since 1995's "Moonlight and Valentino."
The two have remained tight in large part, says Owen, because Paltrow is "the same girl she was when I first met her." They are now working on the drama "Proof," scheduled to open next year.
