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Goldie Hawn
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Goldie Jean Hawn (born November 21, 1945) is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe- winning American actress, film director and producer, best known for her 'dizzy blonde' persona in a series of popular comedies.
was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Laura (née Steinhoff), a jewelry shop/dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a band musician who played at major events in Washington.
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Encyclopedia
Goldie Jean Hawn (born November 21, 1945) is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe- winning American actress, film director and producer, best known for her 'dizzy blonde' persona in a series of popular comedies.
Biography
Early life
Hawn was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Laura (née Steinhoff), a jewelry shop/dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a band musician who played at major events in Washington. She has a sister, Patricia, and a brother, Edward, who died before she was born. She was raised in Takoma Park, Maryland. Hawn's father, a descendant of Edward Rutledge (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), was Presbyterian, and Hawn's mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Hungary; Hawn was raised in the Jewish religion.
Hawn began taking ballet and tap dance lessons at the age of three, and danced in the chorus of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production of The Nutcracker in 1955. She made her stage debut in 1961, playing Juliet in a Virginia Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet. By 1964, she ran and instructed a ballet school, having dropped out of American University, where she was majoring in drama. In 1964, Hawn, who graduated from Montgomery Blair High School (class of 1963), made her professional dancing debut in a production of Can-Can at the Texas Pavilion of the New York World's Fair. She began working as a professional dancer a year later, and appeared as a go-go dancer in New York City.
Career
1960s
Hawn began her acting career as a cast member of the short-lived situation comedy Good Morning, World during the 1967-1968 television season, her role being that of the girlfriend of a radio disc jockey, with a stereotypical "dumb blonde" personality. Her next role, which brought her to international attention, was as one of the regular cast members on the 1960s sketch comedy show, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. On the show, she would often break out into high-pitched giggles in the middle of a joke, and deliver a polished performance a moment after. Noted equally for her chipper attitude as for her bikini and painted body, Hawn personified something of a 1960s "It" girl. This persona was parlayed into three popular film appearances in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Cactus Flower, There's a Girl in My Soup and Butterflies Are Free. She made her feature film debut in the 1968 The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (she was billed as Goldie Jeanne) in a bit role as a giggling dancer. Hawn won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Cactus Flower (1969), which was her first supporting role and which co-starred Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman.
1970s
After Hawn's Academy Award win in April 1970 for Cactus Flower her film career took off. She starred in a string of above average and very successful comedies starting with There's a Girl in My Soup (1970), $ (1971), Butterflies Are Free (1972) and Shampoo (1975) as well as proving herself in the dramatic league with the satirical dramas The Girl from Petrovka and The Sugarland Express both in 1974. She also hosted two television specials: Pure Goldie in 1971 and The Goldie Hawn Special in 1978. The latter was a sort of comeback for Goldie who had been out of the spotlight for two years since the 1976 release of The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, while she was focusing on her marriage and the birth of her son. On the special she performed show tunes and comedy bits alongside comic legend George Burns, teen matinee idol Shaun Cassidy, popular television star John Ritter (during his days on Three's Company) and even the Harlem Globetrotters joined her for a montage. The special later went on to be nominated for a prime-time Emmy. This came four months before the feature film release of Foul Play (with Chevy Chase) which became a box office smash and revived Hawn's career in the film industry. The plot centred around an innocent woman in San Francisco who becomes mixed up in a murder plot. The film was noted for its use of "Hitchcock plagiarism" in that the plot was very similar to some of the late director's murder classics.
Nevertheless, Hawn's next film, Mario Monicelli's Lovers and Liars (1979), was a box office bomb.
1980s
Hawn's popularity continued into the 1980s starting with Private Benjamin (1980) a comedy which not only starred Hawn but was also her foray into producing. Private Benjamin, which also starred Eileen Brennan and Armand Assante, garnered Hawn her second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actress.
Hawn's box office success continued with an assortment of pictures, including comedies like Seems Like Old Times (1980), Protocol (1984) and Wildcats (1986) (Hawn also served as executive producer on the latter two) and dramas like Best Friends (1982) and Swing Shift (1984).
At the age of thirty-nine, Hawn posed for the cover of Playboys January 1985 issue, which went on to be one of their highest selling issues. Hawn posed in a giant martini glass wearing nothing but a white collar shirt, a loosened black tie, and a pair of red stilettos. The headline read: "A SPARKLING PLAYBOY INTERVIEW WITH GOLDIE HAWN". Her last picture of the 1980s was opposite partner Kurt Russell (for the third time) in the 1987 comedy Overboard, a critical and box office disappointment which questioned the likability and bankability of the two paired together onscreen.
1990s
Her career slowed down after 1987, but was revived somewhat in 1990 with the action comedy Bird on a Wire, a critically panned but commercially successful picture that paired Hawn with action favorite Mel Gibson. The early 90's weren't particularly good to Hawn, with little success associated with the thriller Deceived (1991) or the drama CrissCross (1992). But her success in 1992 when she appeared opposite Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep in the film Death Becomes Her garnered her much attention. Following up that was HouseSitter (1992), a screwball comedy with Steve Martin, which was a commercial and critical success. She was absent from the screen again for four years, while caring for her mother who died of cancer in 1994. She made her entry back into the film business with producing the satirical comedy Something to Talk About starring Julia Roberts and Dennis Quaid, as well as making her foray into directing with the television film Hope (1997) starring Christine Lahti and Jena Malone.
She returned to the screen again in 1996 as the aging, alcoholic actress Elise Elliot in the financially and critically successful The First Wives Club, opposite Bette Midler and Diane Keaton, with whom she covered the Lesley Gore hit "You Don't Own Me" for the film's soundtrack. Hawn also performed a cover version of the Beatles' song, "A Hard Day's Night", on George Martin's 1998 album, In My Life. She continued her tenure in the '90s with Woody Allen's musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and reuniting with Steve Martin for the comedy The Out-of-Towners (1999), a remake of the 1970 Neil Simon hit. The film was critically panned and bombed at the box office.
2000s
In 2001 Hawn was reunited with former co-stars Warren Beatty (her co-star in $ and Shampoo) and Diane Keaton for the comedy Town & Country, a critical and financial fiasco. Budgeted at an estimated US$90 million, the film opened to little notice and grossed only $7 million in its North American theatrical run.
As of 2009, her last film appearance was in the 2002 runaway hit The Banger Sisters, opposite Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush.
In 2005, Hawn's autobiography, A Lotus Grows in the Mud, was published. Hawn claims that the book is not a Hollywood tell-all, but rather a memoir and record of what she has learned in her life so far. Hawn announced in an interview with AARP's magazine that her next film project would be called Ashes to Ashes and co-star her partner Kurt Russell. The film is about a New York widow who loses her late husband's ashes in India.
Personal life
Relationships and family
Hawn married Bill Hudson, of the Hudson Brothers, but the two divorced in 1980. They have two children, Oliver Hudson (born 1976) and Kate Hudson (born 1979), both of whom are now actors.
Hawn has been in a relationship with actor Kurt Russell since 1983, when the two met again on the set of Swing Shift (they had previously met while filming 1968's The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band). The couple have a son, Wyatt Russell (born July 10, 1986), who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Hawn is stepmother to Kurt Russell's son Boston and she became a grandmother on January 7, 2004, when her daughter, Kate Hudson, gave birth to son Ryder Russell Robinson. Hawn became a grandmother for a second time when her son, Oliver Hudson and his wife, actress Erinn Bartlett had a son Wilder Brooks Hudson, on August 23, 2007.
Religion
Hawn became involved in Eastern philosophy in 1972. She was raised Jewish but is now a practising Buddhist and has raised her children in both Buddhist and Jewish traditions. She has stated on the Larry King Show that she is a Jewish Buddhist, but neither more Jewish nor more Buddhist. Even though she might have converted to Buddhism, she has said in an interview that she never had to forsake her Jewish heritage to embrace Buddhism. Hawn has also stated, in several interviews, that her Jewish religion and heritage comes before Buddhism. Hawn travels to India annually, and has visited Israel, stating that she felt a strong identification with its people. She was criticized, by pro-Palestinians, for lending out her support for Israel and for the Jewish National Fund. In 1997, she was one of a number of Hollywood stars and executives to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested the treatment of Scientologists in Germany.
Hawn founded and funds the Goldie Hawn Institute, formerly called the Bright Lights Foundation. The institute teaches the Buddhist technique of mindfulness training; where fourth through seventh graders are instructed in mindful awareness techniques and positive thinking skills, then tested for changes in behavior, social and emotional competence, and moral development. One school official reports that in one classroom, the children went from having the most behavioral problems, to having zero behavioral problems.
Hawn realizes that many parents oppose bringing Buddhist methods into public schools, and recently stated in Greater Good magazine, published by Greater Good Science Center: "There will always be people who see this as scary, or as some kind of Eastern philosophy that they don't want for their kids." Hawn adds, "Mindfulness gives kids a tool for understanding how their brain works, for having more self-control".
Filmography
External links
Interviews
- (May 4, 2005)
- (May 1, 2005)
- (January 17, 2003)
- (September, 2002)
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