Gwyneth Kate Paltrow (born September 27, 1972 in Los Angeles, California) is an American actor, singer, and entrepreneur. The daughter of actor Blythe Danner and the late director Bruce Paltrow, she made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991. After appearing in several films throughout the decade, she gained early notice for her work in films such as Se7en and Emma (in which she played the title role).
Following the films Sliding Doors and A Perfect Murder , she garnered worldwide recognition through her performance in Shakespeare in Love, for which she won an 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. She also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2011 for her role as Holly Holliday on the Fox hit TV show Glee in the episode "The Substitute".
Paltrow has portrayed supporting, as well as, lead roles, in films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Royal Tenenbaums, Shallow Hal, and Proof, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in Motion Picture—Drama. Since 2008 she has portrayed Pepper Potts, the Love Interest of Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, particularly the Iron Man and Avengers films.
She has had two children, Apple and Moses, with Coldplay lead vocalist Chris Martin, whom she was married to from 2003 until they separated (or, as she put it, "consciously uncoupled") in early 2014. She met her second husband, Brad Falchuk, on the set of Glee. Since the mid-2010s, Paltrow has stepped back from acting to focus on her lifestyle company Goop and other projects like authoring cookbooks.
Filmography
Film
- Hook (1991) as young Wendy Darling
- Malice (1993) as Paula Bell
- Higher Learning (1995) as Student
- Se7en (1995) as Tracy Mills
- Hard Eight (1996) as Clementine
- Emma (1996) as Emma Woodhouse
- Sliding Doors (1998) as Helen Quilley
- Great Expectations (1998) as Estella Havisham
- Hush (1998) as Helen Baring
- A Perfect Murder (1998) as Emily Bradford Taylor
- Shakespeare in Love (1998) as Viola De Lesseps
- The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) as Marge Sherwood
- Duets (2000) as Liv Dean
- The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) as Margot Tenenbaum
- Shallow Hal (2001) as Rosemary Shanahan
- Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) as Dixie Normous
- View from the Top (2003) as Donna Jensen
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) as Polly Perkins
- Marvel Cinematic Universe as Virginia "Pepper" Potts
- Iron Man (2008)
- Iron Man 2 (2010)
- The Avengers (2012)
- Iron Man 3 (2013)
- Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
- Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
- Avengers: Endgame (2019)
- Country Strong (2011) as Kelly Canter
- Contagion (2011) as Beth Emhoff
- Virunga (2014) as Herself
- Mortdecai (2015) as Johanna Mortdecai
Television
- Saturday Night Live (1999-2019) as Herself/Host/Various
- Clerks: The Animated Series (2000) as Herself (Voice only)
- Glee (2010-2011, 2014) as Holly Holliday
- Who Do You Think You Are? (2011) as Herself
- The New Normal (2012) as Abby
- The Politician (2019) as Georgina Hobart
Tropes associated with her works include:
- Beauty Inversion: Famously wore a fat suit for Shallow Hal, and was notably drab in her uncredited cameo in the pilot for The New Normal ("Hi, I'm Abby - a lot of people say I look like Gwyneth Paltrow...").
- The Cast Showoff: She was able to show her singing skills in Duets, View from the Top (as part of a Crowd Song), Country Strong and Glee.
- Dawson Casting: In Hook she was eighteen playing a preteen Wendy in flashback. Of course she continued to play Wendy in flashbacks to when she's a young woman too.
- Enforced Method Acting: For Shallow Hal she wore the fatsuit to a bar and discovered that people refused to make eye contact with her, and treated her rudely.
- Fake Brit: Many of her early roles were British characters. Her opening monologue in an episode of Saturday Night Live focused on her speaking in a British accent, causing her then-boyfriend Ben Affleck to step out and remind her that she's not actually British.
- Ms. Fanservice: Indulges in being this often in her films. (Out of her, Kim Kardashian and Kate Upton, Paltrow was the only one who did her ice bucket challenge wearing a bikini.)
- Pretty in Mink: When she plays a rich woman, sometimes she'll wear fur.
- Wore a leopard hat and coat in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
- Wore a mink coat in The Royal Tenenbaums.
- Wore a white rabbit jacket for the cover of the Oct 2002 UK Vogue.
- Real-Life Relative: The director of Duets was her father. This film became their only on-screen collaboration.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Pepper's absence outside of the Iron Man films was due to Gwyneth only signing a three-picture deal, apparently extended by Spider-Man: Homecoming, and not wanting Pepper to appear only as a love interest in the ensemble films.
- Snake Oil Salesman: Her controversial lifestyle brand Goop and its adjacent documentary series The Goop Lab frequently face allegations of promoting pseudomedicine, which lead to her being parodied anywhere from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to Parks and Recreation.
- Star-Making Role: She received critical acclaim in Se7en and Emma, but Shakespeare in Love solidified her A-List status.
- Statuesque Stunner: She stands at 5'9", meaning that in Iron Man (where she played the Girl Friday and once served as that page's image), Robert Downey Jr. needed a Scully Box to avoid being towered over.
- What Could Have Been:
- She was offered the role of Emma Peel in The Avengers in 1998. She turned it down, and it became a Star-Derailing Role for Uma Thurman (until Kill Bill). Ironically, she later appeared in another film titled The Avengers.
- She was to play Ava Gardner in The Aviator. She dropped out at the last minute, and it went to Kate Beckinsale.
- She was in negotiations to narrate Thomas & Friends special The Great Discovery, which would have made her the first (and only) female narrator for the show. However the role went to Pierce Brosnan instead.
