Never mind about the movie star part of her life. Gwyneth Paltrow is happiest talking about the apple of her eye -- Apple Blythe Alison Martin, to be specific, Paltrow's daughter with musician husband Chris Martin. Motherhood, the actress says, blissfully, "is like a drug."
Paltrow, who celebrates her 33rd birthday today, visited Toronto during the film festival to promote the movie Proof, which opens in theatres Friday. Directed by John Madden, the filmmaker who directed Paltrow in her Oscar-winning-role in Shakespeare In Love, Proof is a study of madness and mathematics, a family drama that co-stars Sir Anthony Hopkins, Hope Davis and Jake Gyllenhaal.
It's based on the play of the same name by David Auburn; Paltrow has played her role on the screen and on the stage, and was nominated for a 2002 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress for her performance at the Donmar Warehouse in England.
Paltrow calls Proof, "subtle and emotional and complicated," and it is. It's also her best performance ever, but that's not something Paltrow is likely to say, so we'll say it for her.
And that's enough about work. Having a child, says Paltrow, has changed her life completely. She says there are no words to describe it all, but comes up with a few anyway:
"She's just heaven, a miracle. I'm totally besotted with her. I love being with her and doing nothing but watching her, or interacting with her. When you have that experience, you say, 'What have I been doing all this time? I've been missing the mark!'"
Paltrow says, "I was always kind of searching and half-lonely and wondering what this was all about. And when I got my family," she says, joy and awe obvious in her voice, "things just really changed for me."
One of those changes is work-related. Paltrow has been in 30 films in a dozen years, including Bounce, Emma, Seven, A View From The Top, The Pallbearer, Jefferson In Paris, Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle, Hook, Shout, Sliding Doors, A Perfect Murder, Hush, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Possession, The Royal Tenenbaums, Shallow Hal, Great Expectations, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow and Sylvia.
Whew.
These days, she'll consider making one film a year. Maybe. "Gone are the days of back-to-back movies.
"I'm open to work," she hastens to add. "It's just that it's hard for me now. If I go back to work, that's 12, 13 hours a day, five days a week, that I'm not in my daughter's life. That means I'm not there when she wakes up in the morning and I'm not there when she goes to bed at night. And that means somebody else is doing that, and the idea is really hard for me. I know it's finite, it's only when I'm shooting, but it's hard."
As the daughter of award-winning actress Blythe Danner and the late filmmaker Bruce Paltrow, Gwyneth, and her brother Jake, grew up in the business. Once Gwyneth Paltrow began acting, avoiding the media glare was pretty well impossible -- she's smart, beautiful and hugely successful, and if that weren't enough, she dated such high wattage fellow actors as Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck.
Paltrow is hoping to shield her daughter from that sort of paparazzi scrutiny -- but she knows the rabid interest is there. How does she cope with that?
"A lot of denial," she says.
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