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Gwyneth Paltrow has lived several lives — Oscar-winning Miramax darling, controversy-plagued wellness mogul, ski-accident victim — with each new turn continually drawing intense public interest. Now, Amy Odell is digging deeper into the actress turned guru’s varied life and career in her new biography, Gwyneth, out now. In the book’s introduction, Odell writes about how she decided on Paltrow as the subject to follow up her 2022 biography on Anna Wintour, saying, “When trying to think of another woman whose life and career had the same combination of public fascination and private complexity, I kept coming back to Gwyneth Paltrow.”
That complexity makes Paltrow a potentially difficult subject to nail down, given her aptitude for controlling public opinion and her penchant for offering up often contradictory takes — like when she famously said, “It’s what makes life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu.” Nonetheless, Odell showcases those contradictions rather than try to make sense of them, weaving a thorough portrait of her book’s inherently enigmatic subject — even without Paltrow’s involvement. She explains that despite Goop’s publicist originally signaling interest in Paltrow participating or offering up sources, she ultimately ghosted and seemed to dissuade others from talking. Even so, Odell writes that she “interviewed more than 220 people from [Paltrow’s] childhood, her inner social circle, and the entertainment world — including directors, costars, crew members — and current and former employees from Goop.” The result chronicles the star’s nepotism-tinged childhood, breakthrough as an actress, and pivot to dominating the wellness space.
Here, all the most notable, Goopiest takeaways.
Madonna serves as an odd through-line throughout Paltrow’s life, first via a note she received from the pop star as a teenager. Paltrow’s father, Bruce, a producer on St. Elsewhere, was so desperate to get his daughter to stop smoking that he asked one of the show’s directors, Leo Penn, to get a note from his son Sean’s new wife, Madonna, discouraging the habit. “Dear Gwyneth, Just to jot down my average day … I wake up, I don’t smoke … And I go home a happy healthy me. Love, Me, Madonna. P.S.: Good girls live longer,” the note read. Paltrow, naturally, brought the note to school — and framed it in her bedroom — but continued to smoke.
Madonna stepped up once more to offer support early in Paltrow’s stardom, after nude paparazzi photos of her and her then-boyfriend, Brad Pitt, were printed in the tabloids. “She’s experiencing the upsides and the downsides of being famous for the first time,” Madonna said. “That’s a lot for someone to take … So I’m happy to help her.” She advised Paltrow, “It’s your karma, where you are right now,” after she found herself in a funk after her Oscar win at 26. Whatever that means.
The pair’s friendship eventually came to an end after Madonna showed up to an island where Paltrow and Chris Martin were vacationing. “Madonna seemed to know that Gwyneth would be there, which Gwyneth seemed to find strange, a friend remembered. Madonna then insisted Gwyneth and Martin join her for a big group dinner at a long table where Madonna went off on her daughter, Lourdes. Gwyneth and Martin were disgusted by the behavior. ‘I can’t be around this woman anymore,’ Martin told Gwyneth. ‘She’s awful.’ Gwyneth agreed that Madonna was toxic and ended the friendship,” Odell writes.
“One day, Spence’s rather humorless librarian approached [Gwyneth’s adviser James] Dawson outraged that a student had drawn, on the partition of a study cubicle, an erect penis. She sent all four girls — Gwyneth among them — who had been in the library at the time to Dawson,” Odell writes. “‘Gwyneth, you drew the erect penis in the library,’ he said. ‘I’m not really sure what you’re talking about,’ she said. He presented a picture the library had given him of the masterpiece. ‘Oh, that penis,’ Gwyneth said. ‘I wasn’t sure what we were talking about.’”
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According to the book, she candidly shared details of her sex life with Ben Affleck to her makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin. “She spoke openly about how much she enjoyed their sex life — it was the ribald side of her that her friends knew well but that the public didn’t see. She told Kevyn Aucoin in his London hotel room one day after lunch that she loved when Affleck ‘tea-bagged’ her.”
“One of the publicists on [Calvin Klein]’s small team who helped Gwyneth was Carolyn Bessette (who would go on to become Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy),” Odell writes about Paltrow visiting Calvin Klein for her Sliding Doors wardrobe. “According to one person familiar with her thinking, Gwyneth irked her. When there were pictures of Gwyneth in the papers, Bessette, who viewed her as ‘little miss perfect,’ would make cutting remarks about her.” It’s unlikely any of those cutting remarks will make it into the limited series about Bessette and Kennedy that Paltrow’s husband, Brad Falchuk, is now producing.
You can’t discuss eccentric celebrity baby names without Apple popping up, but turns out Paltrow wasn’t the first to come up with the name. “After Shallow Hal wrapped in June 2001, Gwyneth spent time in Martha’s Vineyard with Peter Farrelly and his family, including a daughter named Apple. Gwyneth never mentioned this as inspiration when she chose the same name for her daughter nearly three years later, and Farrelly didn’t seem to take offense. His wife, Melinda Kocsis, just said, ‘Maybe it’ll make it easier for my Apple when she gets older.’”
When an awkward Paltrow started attending Spence in seventh grade, Odell writes that “boys from other schools started calling her ‘E.T.,’ because they said her eyes were far apart.” It’s a put-down that should have been easily deflated by the fact that Steven Spielberg is her godfather. Naturally, he gave Paltrow her first movie role, playing Young Wendy in Hook, and would go on to not only attend but film her wedding to Falchuk.
He turned to one of the film’s grips, saying the good news was he’d get to make out with Gwyneth Paltrow, and the bad news was he’d have to shave the sides of his head into a mohawk. According to Odell, “The young man did not pause: ‘I’ll do it.’”
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After Paltrow and Pitt broke up, she stayed with her friend Winona Ryder, eventually setting her up with Matt Damon. But their friendship soon took a turn. “She told friends that after Ryder and Damon had gotten in a fight, Ryder left and returned to say that she had been robbed around Gramercy Park; she went out again and said she had been robbed again. Damon consoled her, but Gwyneth and Affleck believed Ryder had fabricated the robberies as a ploy for attention (there’s no proof of this),” Odell writes. “Her friendship with Ryder would only deteriorate further, and Gwyneth gave her the nickname, one friend said, ‘Vagina Ryder.’”
Legend has long had it that Ryder was also up for Shakespeare in Love and that Paltrow had stolen the script off Ryder’s coffee table. “Gwyneth told friends that Ryder had started the rumor, and insisted she’d received the script through her agent,” Odell writes, and her sources from Miramax confirm that Ryder was interested in the role but was never seriously considered.
“As Gwyneth’s circumstances improved, so did her dogs’,” Odell writes about her two Labrador retrievers, Anca and Holden, who joined Paltrow in Paris for a film shoot. “After their stay in Paris, Anca started responding only to French. ‘Say ‘come’ or ‘sit’ in English and she ignores you,’ Gwyneth said. ‘It’s so pretentious.’”
Much like Tyra Banks once did on her talk show, Paltrow took it upon herself to do a social experiment and walked through life in her Shallow Hal costume. According to Odell, “It came in six pieces — one that zipped over her torso, one that slipped over her legs like shorts, two calf pieces, and two gloves — plus a face that was essentially glued to hers, and was meant to make her look like she weighed 350 pounds. She planned to walk around downtown Charlotte, without an entourage or full camera crew, to experience what her high school yearbook had called her ‘worst fear’ — obesity.”
After dipping her toe into music with her role as Holly Holliday on Glee and later in the film Country Strong, Paltrow flirted with the idea of making an album. “Beyoncé and Jay-Z gave her more music advice than [Chris] Martin when she was considering doing her own album: ‘Beyoncé and Jay — they think that I should just go do it by myself. That I should go … in a studio and see what happens. And if it’s good, do it. And if it’s not, don’t. So that’s probably what I’ll do.’ An album never materialized, nor did a singing career,” Odell writes. Thankfully, her Glee cover of “Forget You” is still available on streaming.
New Goop hires would find themselves chastised by colleagues for mispronouncing their famous boss’s name. Odell writes, “Gwyneth made clear to new staff that her name was pronounced ‘Gwyn’ like ‘pin’ instead of ‘Gwen’ like ‘pen.’”
Much of Paltrow’s experience with Harvey Weinstein has already been well documented, most notably his sexual harassment of her in a hotel suite, which her then-boyfriend, Pitt, later confronted him about: “Pitt knew how terrified Gwyneth had been after her encounter with Weinstein at the Peninsula. He also knew she had signed on to do two movies for him … He told Weinstein something to the effect of ‘If you ever make her feel uncomfortable again, I’ll kill you.’”
In 2017, Paltrow took a call from Jodi Kantor, an investigative reporter at the New York Times, who was working on a story about Weinstein’s abuse. A year prior, Paltrow refused to talk to New York Magazine about a similar story after Weinstein dissuaded her, telling her, “I just really want to protect the people who did say yes.” According to Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book, She Said, Paltrow was reluctant to speak on the record, fearing that a sensational story would just add to the controversies plaguing Goop at the time, but “she decided to tap her Hollywood network to see if she could find other women who would come forward, so that her account could be part of a larger story.”
When Paltrow and Pitt stayed at London’s Berkeley Hotel during the filming of Emma, there was one condition to the accommodations: The pair had to vacate their swanky suite for one night, but they weren’t told why. “That night, [producer Steven] Haft escorted them to a spot near the side entrance of the hotel. ‘Just watch,’ he said. Within minutes, three Rolls-Royces pulled up, and out of one stepped Queen Elizabeth and the queen mother, who made their way inside to the balcony suite, where, Haft had been told, they planned to dine. After Their Royal Highnesses cleared out, the production crew moved Gwyneth and Pitt back in,” Odell writes.
As Goop’s reach grew, so did the negative attention and parodies. “Goop’s staff tuned in sometimes to a podcast called Poog, where comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak discussed overwrought wellness trends,” Odell reveals.
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When Goop teamed up with Condé Nast in 2017 to launch a print magazine, the effort proved to be a “disaster,” particularly owing to the two entities’ vastly different fact-checking standards. “Wintour told her team that Goop in print needed to be fact-checked at the same standard as all other Condé Nast titles,” Odell writes. “Condé staff would try to chase down the writers of the old Goop stories and ask for their sources and research materials, often about some scientifically dubious process like lymphatic drainage massage or pet psychics. This was a typical magazine fact-checking process, but it seemed new to Goop. Condé’s editors felt like they were making good-faith efforts to substantiate the stories only to find them falling apart under scrutiny.” On top of that, there was confusion over who was in charge of the magazine, Paltrow or Wintour, and Condé struggled to sell ads given that Goop wanted to use the magazine to promote its own products. The partnership fell apart after the second issue.
“Sanderson said in a 2025 interview for this book that ‘there was no reaching out, no contact, no efforts by attorneys to resolve’ the case out of court. ‘I think it was just her time to stand up to something.’”
It wouldn’t be a biography of Gwyneth Paltrow without covering her then-friend Derek Blasberg reportedly shitting the bed at her home. “While staying at her Montecito home, Blasberg suffered what was alleged to have been Ozempic-induced (a detail that was later called into question by the Daily Mail) diarrhea in the bed of the guesthouse, then fled without telling her, leaving her housekeeper to clean it up. Gwyneth was appalled,” Odell writes, saying that Paltrow was so offended that he hadn’t personally apologized that she made sure the story (much like Blasberg on that fateful night) leaked.