ALL THAT GLITTERS ISN’T GOLDIE
How the girl with the can-do attitude ditched the Hollywood lifestyle to find happiness
Goldie Hawn made her name on television as a giggling, wide-eyed blond with an endearing tendency to fluff her lines. By her early 30s she was producing her own movies — her first credit was on Private Benjamin, for which she was nominated for an Oscar — and doing battle with writers, directors and studio heads alike.
Fourteen years ago, as effortlessly as she fell into the movie business, Hawn fell out of it. “It’s not unusual,” says Hawn, who is 71 — but Hollywood 71, which is only a few rungs down from cryogenically preserved 71. “Unless you want to keep working on stage, which is absolutely an option, or even in television, a great option. But I looked at myself and I said, what else am I going to do with my life? I’m just built that way. That’s when I took off in this other direction.”
Rallying a phalanx of Ivy League professors to her cause, she began developing a programme to teach mindfulness in schools. MindUP launched in 2007 and there are now two million children signed on to the programme, which is about to roll out to countries throughout the Middle East. “... It’s been, without a doubt, the most exciting thing I’ve ever produced ... Was I longing to be back in the movies? No.”
Her role in Snatched is less a comeback and more of an encore, in which she was persuaded back on to the stage by Amy Schumer, who co-wrote the script and plays her daughter in the film.
Fame wasn’t part of her plan: she was going to be a dancer, earn some money, then start a family.
“When people would ask, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I said ‘happy.’ The whole aspect of becoming a star did not connote at any level with happiness, as far as I could see ... ”
More than a decade ago, Hawn wrote a memoir which described, the humiliating experiences she endured as a young woman in the entertainment industry. There was the famous cartoonist who promised her a big break and threw money at her when she fled from his advances; the handsome young guy who masturbated in front of her as she worked as a go-go dancer at a seedy bar.
“The book was written because I wanted to talk about how obstacles in your life actually teach you something. Some instances can be damaging, can create PTSD, I totally get that. But other times we have to shift to a more optimistic look at how we’re going to go through life. What did you learn, and who are you? And how do you move forward? So those moments in my life did not scar me at all.”
When she became a producer, she met with resistance. “It’s been a constant, constant, constant thing. We’ve cracked our heads on the glass ceiling, and I know that I’ve got bumps all over the top of my head ... I think it’s changed a bit. But it’s still tough.”
Hawn didn’t mind being the “squeaky wheel”: she did it on The First Wives Club, pushing to delay the film to allow time for script rewrites, and on Jonathan Demme’s 1984 film Swing Shift, which she altered at the behest of the studio after a first cut went down badly.
The rewrites, reshoots and hurt feelings were partly mitigated by the presence of Hawn’s co-star on Swing Shift, Kurt Russell, who has been her partner ever since.
“The idea of falling in love with an actor, on set, was not good,” says Hawn, “and he felt the same. But it was really about who we were as people.
“We both loved children, we both had a connection to family. And it wasn’t love at first sight, which I think is important. He was fun to be around, and slowly I started getting more turned on by him, by watching him behave.”
Russell has told the story of their first date: how they ended up breaking into her new apartment, for which she didn’t yet have the keys, and being interrupted by the police as they made love.
“We did — we made love on the first date,” says Hawn. “But you’ve got to keep in mind that we’d already worked together, so there was a lot of foreplay!”
What will Goldie do next? “You can see why going backwards is never anything I’ve wanted to do. People said, ‘You’ll never teach kids about their brains and you won’t get this into schools, and how do you scale it?’ When people said to me, ‘You’ll never do that,’ I was like, ‘I think I can.’ ‘I think I can,’ is a good way to walk into a room.”