The star of the Iron Man movies, health guru and red-carpet provocateur, provokes wildly differing reactions. Who is she really, this American in London?
Last week, the entertainment website Vulture posted a handy six-step guide on how not to hate Gwyneth Paltrow.
Paltrow, the 40-year-old, peachy-skinned actress who, in recent years, has attracted more column inches for munching quinoa than for actually appearing in films, is gracing the big screen again in Iron Man 3, reprising her role as the hero's love interest, Pepper Potts. Reviews suggest her performance – in what is admittedly a limited part – is extremely good. Hence the Vulture guide.
"It is normal to dislike Gwyneth Paltrow these days, it's a consensus viewpoint, basically," the writers state. "In the interest of a positive Iron Man 3 experience, Vulture has devised a six-point plan to help you put aside your Gwyneth Paltrow distaste for the length [130 minutes] of the film."
Step one is to unsubscribe from Goop, the lifestyle website founded by Paltrow in 2008. Goop, with its baffling mixture of inspiring recipes, travel tips, feelgood workout sessions and wholesome, new age aphorisms, has generated much bile since its inception. It has been slammed for its "Marie Antoinette-esque detachment from reality" and according to one columnist, even the name – cutely derived from Paltrow's initials – "makes you want to rip your face off with your bare hands".
It's easy to make fun of her airy online pronouncements from Planet Wealth: recently, Paltrow recommended a French chateau as "a nice family getaway" (price: $15,300 for seven days) and asked a former hotel butler at Claridge's about the best way to clean one's silverware.
Then there are the cookbooks. Her most recent, It's All Good, has provoked a furore because it includes recipes for gluten-free sweet potato muffins and chia-seed pudding. Paltrow's recipe for apple sauce comes complete with the admission that she has her own orchard: "We have apple trees at our house in Amagansett, New York, and in October they're bursting with fruit."
Yet if you speak to people who know Paltrow, a different side emerges. Friends says she is self-deprecating, with a wry sense of humour and a ready willingness to poke fun at herself. "She's a woman's woman," according to Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri. "She's actually very likable but for some reason it doesn't translate."
Last month, she appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show and gamely threw herself into doing impressions of Jay-Z, Kanye West and her husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin (displaying an impressive aptitude for remembering rap lyrics as she did so). When she wore a revealing Antonio Beradi dress with sheer panelling to attend the premiere of Iron Man 3 and was roundly condemned for putting too much flesh on show, she was quick to admit: "I kind of had a disaster … let's just say everyone went scrambling for a razor."
In an interview for Glamour magazine, she expressed her love for her adopted home city of London, said she took her children to parks and museums on the tube and confessed that her husband had to explain the concept of Blue Peter to her.
Why is there such a disconnect between these two facets of Paltrow's character? Her friends say Paltrow is simply being honest and refuses to pretend to be something she's not. So if she makes a lot of money and has a comfortable life with her rock star husband and their two photogenic children, Apple and Moses, then she's not going to blog about an all-inclusive deal at Butlins or how to maximise points on your Nectar card.
By contrast, her critics claim that she simply doesn't know when to stop: it's not enough for Paltrow to be an actress earning millions, she also has to be a cookbook writer, a lifestyle guru and a health freak who claims to possess "the butt of a 22-year-old stripper".
"I think Gwyneth probably could've kept this resentment at bay if she hadn't tried to connect with the fans," Eleanor Barkhorn, a senior associate editor at the Atlantic magazine, said recently. "She's trying to maintain the trappings of the A-list lifestyle while at the same time seeming relatable and it's not working."
She is a curiously polarising figure: an American in London who appears to have taken over from her friend Madonna as Most Irritating Yankee Emigre in the popular perception. But whereas Madonna's attempts to blend in consisted of wearing Dick Van Dyke flat caps and drinking pints of beer in much-ridiculed paparazzi photographs, Paltrow's unapologetic determination simply to carry on being herself has provoked a barely concealed fury.
So perhaps it was inevitable that in the week Paltrow was voted Star magazine's "Most Hated Celebrity" (above even self-confessed woman-beater Chris Brown), she was also crowned People magazine's "Most Beautiful Woman in the World". We can't make up our minds.
Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, the city in which she would later make her name and where she would eventually rise to the podium in 1999 to accept the best actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. Performing was in her genes: her mother, Blythe Danner, was an acclaimed theatre actress and continues to appear in hit movies including Meet the Parents; her father, Bruce, was a TV and film producer and director, whose credits included the long-running medical drama, St Elsewhere.
As a child, Paltrow became accustomed to her mother's frequent absences owing to work commitments. Her father became the stay-at-home parent, as Danner recalled in an interview last year: "He would walk her all night long. He did everything for her in those early days, it was wonderful … He used to say to me, 'Darling, you go to the Chekhov or the Tennessee Williams plays and I'll do the TV and get the bread on the table.' He was a rare one."
Father and daughter continued to be close even when Paltrow dropped out of an anthropology degree at the University of California to pursue an acting career. She made her stage debut in 1990 and then was cast in a number of supporting roles in big Hollywood films – she was the young Wendy in Hook (1991) and played opposite her then-fiance Brad Pitt in David Fincher's hit thriller Seven in 1995. But it was Shakespeare in Love in 1998 that catapulted her into the major league: the New York Times called her performance "breathtaking" and when she wore a pink Ralph Lauren gown to the Academy Awards a year later, she was credited with making the colour fashionable again.
A series of stellar roles followed – Sliding Doors, The Talented Mr Ripley– and she dated equally famous men – first Pitt, then Ben Affleck. But then tragedy struck. While they were on holiday in Tuscany to celebrate her 30th birthday, Paltrow's beloved father complained of chest pains. He was rushed to hospital where he later died from complications due to pneumonia and a recurrence of throat cancer.
Paltrow was distraught. She later remarked that her father was "the absolute love of my life". Three weeks after he died, Paltrow was invited backstage at a Coldplay concert and met Chris Martin. The couple married a year later, after Martin penned one of the band's most famous hits, Fix You, about Paltrow's grief.
After her father's death, Paltrow took on a clutch of lower budget, indie roles (Margot in The Royal Tenenbaums, the depressed daughter of a brilliant mathematician in Proof) and once admitted she divided the films she made into the ones she did for love and those she did for money. When Paltrow relocated to London after her marriage, she adopted a lower profile to concentrate on raising her children. But then she sought to reinvent herself as a lifestyle guru to the rich and famous (she counts Jay-Z and Beyoncé among her friends) and the backlash started.
It was Robert Downey Jr who persuaded Paltrow to sign up for the Iron Man franchise. Paltrow recalled: "He said to me, 'Don't you want to be in a movie that people see?' And I was like, 'Whoa! What would that feel like?'"
Iron Man has brought Paltrow to the attention of a new generation Like her or loathe her, there's no denying that she has talent. Besides which, you can't escape the sneaking suspicion that her detractors rather enjoy the act of disliking Paltrow. It's a very British pastime: poking fun at the perfect-looking American girl with a new age philosophy on the joys of kale juice, while all the time secretly wishing we had her life. Because if Gwyneth Paltrow didn't exist, we'd probably have to invent her.