Gwyneth Paltrow may be consciously uncoupled from reality.
The Oscar winning A-list actress is claiming in a new interview with Glamour that she is “completely self-made,” despite growing up a Hollywood pedigree, with two Tinseltown players as parents, the actress Blythe Danner and the late director Bruce Paltrow. Paltrow claims her parents cut her off financially at 18 years old, leaving her to navigate the movie biz on her own. The kind of person, as the saying goes in business, who was born on third base and thinks she hit a triple.
“People think, ‘She’s just a rich kid.’ Until I was 18, I was,” she told Glamour. “Then I was broke. I’ve never taken a dime off my parents. I’m completely self-made.”
At one point, she says, it got so bad she had to buy Starbucks with “scrounged quarters.” The horror.
But it seems Paltrow’s stint as a struggling actress was short lived. A childhood pal of the star says when she graduated from the posh Upper East Side Spence school, she was doing just fine, and headed off to University of California, Santa Barbara, loaded up with her parents cash and connections.
“What is she talking about? Is she confused? She was part of the Upper East Side social circle even as teenager, and her parents knew everyone,” says the former pal. “She was a queen bee. When we all went off to college, her financial status seemed fine to me. She had a credit card, and a weekly allowance. How did she eat? Her clothes were beautiful.”
By that point, Paltrow’s father, famous for executive producing the hit '80s show "St. Elsewhere," had handed his daughter her acting debut in the 1989 TV flick “High.” When she was caught smoking as a teenager, an anti-smoking letter her father persuaded Madonna to write his daughter circulated around school.
Paltrow says after dropping out of college, she did a short stint as a hostess in Santa Monica, where she generated an average income of $11 a night, which she would use to buy toilet paper.
But it was at this time she got her big break--through daddy’s close friendship with director Steven Spielberg, who just happens to be Paltrow’s Godfather. They’re so tight, she affectionately calls him “Uncle Morty.” He was listed on the dedication page in her 2011 cookbook, “My Father’s Daughter.” And he kicked the door wide open for her.
Spielberg told a different tale of a just turned 18 year old Paltrow, calling her “Gwynnie,” to Entertainment Weekly years ago.
Spielberg had taken her to see "The Silence of the Lambs,” and as things tend to go when you’re tight with “Uncle Morty,” Spielberg saw her make a cute expression on the way home, and cast her in that moment as Wendy in “Hook,” which was to start filming the next day. “She got a SAG [Screen Actors Guild] card because of it,” Spielberg said.
How fortuitous.
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