'Her acid tongue is usually in her cheek': How Gwyneth Paltrow became a divisive, defiant icon

Gwyneth Paltrow is hardly an enigma. From crystal "healing" eggs to vagina-themed candles, we might feel that we know the actress and businesswoman intimately. And yet, we really only know her through headlines – most recently, she starred in US tech firm Astronomer's "clever PR move". For more than 30 years, through stories about her boyfriends, her "conscious uncoupling" from Chris Martin, crying at the Oscars, narrowly escaping Harvey Weinstein's advances, and in the very public 2023 ski-crash trial, the public has come to both love and loathe her. Now a new book, Gwyneth: The Biography, explores Paltrow's life and divisive public persona.

In her clever, deadpan style, Paltrow nails the butter-wouldn't-melt persona the Astronomer ad calls for

The woman who admits she "can't possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year", and laments that an accident on the slopes she was (wrongly) blamed for caused her to lose a day of skiing, seems to thrive in her own divisiveness. Her acid tongue is usually in her cheek, we have to imagine, when she says these things. It's as if she's winking and nudging in an "if you know, you know" fashion.  

"Gwyneth has, to her extraordinary credit, found a way to be even more annoying," the Guardian wrote upon the launch of Goop in 2008. Paltrow's wellness empire catapulted her into a whole new stratosphere of celebrity. And experts in health have been scathing about some of the claims made by Goop and Paltrow. In January 2020, NHS chief Simon Stevens claimed that the Goop brand championed the views of "quacks, charlatans and cranks". His comments followed the Netflix airing of The Goop Lab, a behind-the-scenes view of Paltrow's business.

In an interview Paltrow brushed off criticism with a blithe side swipe at naysayers. "I will never understand the level of fascination and projection. But we don't want to not change the conversation just to please everybody," she said, following up with the assertion that despite a lack of scientific basis for Goop products, unqualified health measures had been around for "thousands of years".

And yet, Paltrow is fully aware of her saleability. Last week, following the drama in which a couple at a Coldplay concert – later revealed to be colleagues from AI company Astronomer – dived to get out of view of the camera, Paltrow was recruited to front a PR campaign for the organisation. SmartCompany labelled it "an iconic PR turnaround". In her clever, deadpan style (which she demonstrated in the ski court trial), Paltrow nails the butter-wouldn't-melt persona the ad calls for.

Larger than life

In the new book by journalist and author Amy Odell, Paltrow is described as "one of the most resented celebrities in the world". While Gwyneth herself didn't participate in the book, Odell interviewed more than 220 friends, colleagues and industry insiders to create a narrative of how this waifish blonde actress morphed from Brad Pitt's girlfriend to a single, unmistakable name. It follows Odell's last book, Anna: The Biography, which was published in 2022, about Vogue fashion doyenne Anna Wintour. There are parallels between the two women's lives and personas that are undeniable, both are ambitious, larger-than-life figures, and it's easy to see why Odell was transfixed by them.

The scale of ambition displayed by both of these women is something that interested the author. "I think ambition is a great thing, and that's a trait I admire greatly in both of them," Odell tells the BBC. "Women's ambition is not always viewed positively, and I wondered if that's why Gwyneth downplayed her ambition early in her career," says Odell. "I also am interested in people who have had cultural impact, and ambition probably helps explain why both were able to accomplish things that truly did impact culture."

And there's no denying the scale of Paltrow's goals, says the author. "With Gwyneth, we see her ambition in the breadth of Goop – she wanted Goop to do everything, and to execute it all perfectly. That's how Goop ended up as a newsletter, a publishing imprint, a live events business, a beauty line, a fashion line, and more." 

Paltrow may have been portrayed as an ice queen, however, her friends refute this. On an episode of Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef, Paltrow's friend Shaman Durek claimed the ice queen label was "all lies". He said, "She will give you the shirt off her back. She doesn't get angry. It takes her a lot to get angry. And even when she gets angry, she feels sad about being angry because she doesn't want to be angry." He added, "Gwyneth is the most loving person."

She has also been underestimated. For all her acting talent, Paltrow's love life – and the famous men she has often been attached to – has inspired sensationalist tabloid speculation. Even leading up to the publication of this biography, tabloid magazines were hungrily republishing excerpts purely focused on former partners Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and Chris Martin.

Like father, like daughter?

Some describe Paltrow as a "nepo baby". Her father, Bruce Paltrow, was an established producer (Hill Street Blues) and her mother Blythe Danner was, and is, a noted actress (in 2000's Meet the Parents, among many other films). She was attending theatres with her mother from infancy, but she worked for her gigs: auditioning, rehearsing and spending hours on set, determined to get the take. When she won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love in 1999 at the age of 26, her teary acceptance speech made her the butt of relentless jokes. In the same year, The Guardian labelled her "Worst Actress" in its list of "Worst Winner's Speech Awards". In 2023, Paltrow told Variety that the "British press was so horrible to me".

One of the focal points of Odell's book is the close father-daughter relationship between Bruce and Gwyneth. It was Paltrow's father, the book suggests, who engendered the sense of heightened privilege and lofty expectations his daughter became accustomed to from childhood. When working on films, Bruce would fly first class with Gwyneth and her brother, Jake, even when, it is claimed, their mother Blythe was flying economy. Odell's book recounts the time Gwyneth boarded a plane with her mother and said, "You mean instead of flying first class, we're flying no class?"

"It's impossible to understand someone, as a biographer, if you don't take the time to research where a subject came from, and how their parents impacted them," Odell tells the BBC. "I always make a big effort to interview people who knew a subject's parents, and was fortunate to gain great insight into Gwyneth through those interviews. Gwyneth is a fascinating mix of both of her parents – she has her mother's extraordinary acting talent and her dad's polarising personality and excellent aesthetic taste."

When her father died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 58, she was inconsolable. Losing your father is a seismic event, says Odell. "Gwyneth lost Bruce when she was 30 years old. I lost my dad suddenly, too, when I was 27," she tells the BBC. "It was a huge, inexplicable tragedy for which I desperately wanted answers where there were none. Gwyneth went looking for answers after her dad was diagnosed with throat cancer – so I can understand the instinct to do that in a very personal way. I think Gwyneth found answers in wellness, and later started sharing her findings with the public through Goop, whether they were rooted in science or not." 

So, while attention on Paltrow has often centred on her famous partners, or her success attributed to her father's industry networking, to have built Goop into a multimillion-dollar lifestyle empire is to her credit. And despite the accusations of quackery, the fact that she has been derided for it perhaps tells us more about society's attitude to successful women than anything else. Readers will likely flock to Gwyneth: The Biography in search of gossip and insights into the charmed life of celebrities. What they'll get, in addition, is a reminder that ice queen Gwyneth is just as complicated and curious as we are.

Soon after turning 50, Paltrow said, "As a woman, you turn 50, and maybe we all give ourselves permission to be exactly who we are. And we stop trying to be what other people are expecting us to be, and you kind of exhale into this other thing." Ultimately, love her or hate her, Paltrow is always going to exist in another sphere to 99.9% of us – and whatever we expect her to be, she will probably confound those expectations.

Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell is published by Simon & Schuster

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