Amy Odell's biography explores Gwyneth Paltrow's journey from actress to influential wellness mogul. Photo / Getty Images
Amy Odell’s dishy biography of the actress and wellness guru examines how she became such an inspirational, aspirational and ultimately unknowable icon.
Gwyneth Paltrow, once known as an Oscar-winning actress, is perhaps our finest unrelatable relatable. Since 2008, she has promoted the aspirational absurdity that, with an abundance of time and capital (and if you’re feeling daring, a jade egg), women can improve themselves, becoming a tad more like, well, her.
Amy Odell’s dishy, often delicious Gwyneth: The Biography charts how Paltrow grew from winsome ingenue to influencer executrix: daughter of actress Blythe Danner and television producer and director Bruce Paltrow, Best Actress Academy Award winner (at age 26, for Shakespeare in Love), first lady of Miramax, fashion muse, It girl, girlfriend of GQ cover-worthy swains (Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Luke Wilson), wife and ex of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, mogul. She’s the woman who appears to have everything, much of it in navy and beige.
Odell’s previous book, Anna: The Biography (2022) about legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour, concerned another icon who has attracted near obsessive levels of fascination. While Wintour trends cool and private, an enigma in Chanel shades, Paltrow has adopted a girlfriend-y stance – an oversharing seeker of sexual bliss. And yet it was the icy Wintour, Odell writes, who provided her with sources for the previous bio, while Paltrow’s team dithered and stonewalled on this one, fortified by nondisclosure agreements and a staff fearful of retribution. Paltrow did not speak to Odell for this book.
Odell’s take on Paltrow’s early, less-documented years is thin, reliant on tenuous sources. There’s a buffet of mean-girl quotes about a woman who has been beautiful, tall, thin, rich and famous for most of her 52 years, inducing envy from those excised from her inner sanctum. In Upper East Side theatrical productions, where Paltrow attended the exclusive all-girls Spence School, “everybody from the lowliest spear-carrier to the few boys to the upperclassmen were all simultaneously terrified of her and in awe of her and wanted to be with her,” a high school friend said.
Paltrow’s early films, like Sliding Doors and Hook, were either charming indies or bigger productions that made small use of her. For better and worse, Harvey Weinstein changed all that. After Shakespeare in Love, the Miramax honcho used Paltrow’s success as bait to prey on other women. Paltrow was one of the first stars to speak out about Weinstein’s harassment. The trauma of working for him, she is quoted saying here, is one of the reasons she quit acting so young. “I had a really rough boss for most of my movie career at Miramax,” Paltrow said on a podcast during the pandemic. “So you’re like, I don’t know if this is really my calling.” (She has two upcoming movies, including one with Timothée Chalamet.)
The book is strongest on the Goop era: the company’s volatile financial history, and Paltrow’s central role in the factually fungible, potentially dangerous wellness market. (It’s also explored well in Amy Larocca’s How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.)
Paltrow has long been her best product, and selling herself has increasingly overshadowed her considerable acting chops. “Gwyneth has spent her career manipulating her own coverage, and she applied the same savvy to Goop, beating her competitors at their own game,” Odell writes. When she suggested launching a travel app called “G. Spotting,” Paltrow was prepared for the reaction and net result: “Everybody will make fun of me for being an idiot and we’ll have the ten thousand downloads we need right there.”
As for dish, there’s plenty: Paltrow dumped former pal Madonna after the singer “went off on her daughter, Lourdes” at a large gathering, behaviour that disgusted Paltrow and Martin, her then husband. The pop star also seemed a bit stalky, showing up without prior notice on the island where they were vacationing. Paltrow told friends that Pitt – her former fiance – “has terrible taste in women”.
She has long been insulated from anything resembling a normal life. Perhaps that’s why she created a consumer one of her own. For the Paris promotion of Emma, Paltrow, all of 24, requested a private plane for an entourage of 10 and the penthouse suite at the Ritz and attendant rooms, and demanded that no other guests stay on that floor. Later, she took to travelling on location with two yoga instructors.
By her own admission, Paltrow “basically stopped making money from acting in 2002”. She lives extravagantly, often fuelled by the generosity of sponsors. She is the ambassador and the product. Paltrow’s well-publicised second nuptials to television producer Brad Falchuk, in 2018, featured a bouquet of donated goods and services, documented in a “sourcebook” and promoted in an article on the Goop website: “The Wedding Party: GP x Brad Tie the Knot.” She asked the bathroom firm Waterworks to help outfit a US$10 million ($17m) home with Martin, Odell reports, and Restoration Hardware to furnish her offices and be featured in a six-year rebuild of her latest Montecito home with Falchuk; the design accents are available on the Goop website.
While Paltrow projects intelligence as an actor and has appeared in some cinematic gems (Shakespeare, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Royal Tenenbaums), she’s made some wretched choices as well, appearing in a string of critical and box-office duds (Shallow Hal, View from the Top). For all her style and seeming grace, Paltrow has also made some inane utterances, many of them catalogued here. On the benefits of wearing a fat suit in Shallow Hal: “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.” At one Goop leadership meeting, when everyone was asked to share something that wasn’t true of the rest, Paltrow responded, “I won an Oscar.”
Paltrow’s inability to read the room and her remove from lesser mortals was broadcast to the world in her 2023 Park City, Utah, ski-accident trial, where she uttered the Bartlett’s-worthy “Well, I lost a half day of skiing.” (The trial inspired not one but two musicals.)
At Goop, Odell reports, Paltrow repeatedly failed to put in the hard work, or get others to do it for her, including research into dubious wellness claims of products on the website. The quartz and jade eggs (US$55 and US$66) to be inserted in “your yoni” for “better sex,” based on absolutely nothing, sold out in three hours with thousands on the waitlist. Despite constant criticism from experts, items promoted with unsubstantiated promises long remained on the website.
Paltrow’s gift is selling, but she’s not adept at managing, Odell writes. She won’t delegate, creating an unhealthy work environment marked by frequent churn. Paltrow has a tendency to avoid conflict while rarely hearing anyone tell her no.
Her greatest cultural impact, Odell writes, is “showing the world just how much consumers will spend and how much effort they would undertake for the luxury of being well, no matter what science tells us”. In Goop world, “there wasn’t a lot of tolerance for imperfection,” Odell writes. Which is understandable, as perfection, that impossible, impractical, expensive ideal, is Paltrow’s brand.
Gwyneth: The Biography By Amy Odell is available on August 5.