The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I am a business woman. It’s in my DNA’
Goldie Hawn became a film boss, then an activist. The not-so-dumb blonde talks to Horatia Harrod By her early 30s Hawn was battling directors and studio heads
People used to say that Goldie Hawn was dumb as a fox. Plucked from the chorus line, she made her name on television as a giggling, wide-eyed blonde with an endearing tendency to fluff her lines. But she used her position as America’s premier ditz to become truly powerful. 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. Her model, she said at the time, was Warren Beatty: a creative artist with an eye to the bottom line.
Fourteen years ago, as effortlessly as she fell into the movie business, Hawn fell out of it. She was in her late 50s, and wasn’t getting offered the sort of roles she wanted. It was just as Elise, the Botoxed actress she played in The First Wives Club, had warned: “There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.”
“It’s not unusual,” says Hawn, who is 71 – but Hollywood 71, which is only a few rungs down from cryogenically preserved 71. She arrives at a suite at Claridge’s with her blonde hair perfectly coiffed, her make-up immaculate, and her tiny frame encased in skin-tight jeans. “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. “I’ve studied the brain,” she says, “I’ve been a practitioner of meditation since 1972. I’m a great believer in looking at what we’re finding out in universities and starting to disseminate information to our children so that we can help them to stabilise themselves and become self-aware before they get into mental health issues. So I took the science out of the Petri dish and tried to put it into action.”
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. Hawn talks about it with the easy command of a seasoned CEO: “Let’s put it this way: it’s been, without a doubt, the most exciting thing I’ve ever produced. I’d been making people laugh for so long, and now I’m hopefully helping children laugh more. Was I longing to be back in the movies? No.”
Perhaps, then, it would be wrong to call her role in Snatched a comeback. Better to think of it as 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. It’s a broad actioncomedy in which the pair end up being kidnapped while on holiday in South America. “She’s the one who came to me,” says Hawn. “She said that as she was working on it, she was thinking of me being her mum. I thought that was sweet. And eventually it happened.”
Acting again was “like riding a bike”, says Hawn. “I mean, good heavens! It’s doing something I did for 35, 40 years. The camera’s there, the prop person is there, the script girl is there, the table with all the terrible, disgusting food is there. Well, actually, they’re getting better – they have green juice now. But it’s the same. It’s a collaboration, and it’s fun.”
Although she talks gamely about the movie, it’s clearly of a different order to the films she made in her heyday. “When I was making movies, I was producing, doing all of that,” she says. “Normally I’m much more involved. This was very different: I was hired. And I’ve never played a reactive character before, I’ve always played proactive characters. So there were times when it was – I wouldn’t call it challenging – but it definitely was quite different from anything I had done on my own.”
In her own telling, Hawn was a born entrepreneur. “When I was little, I used to play business. I’d make notes on pieces of paper and I’d pretend to be in an office cubicle and answer the phone,” she says. “At 17 I had my own dancing school. I advertised in my father’s