Some people have a weird way of measuring their success. While most of us would use money or happiness, Chris Martin uses karaoke.
He apparently said: “I’m really determined that there should be more Coldplay songs in karaoke bars. I’ve been into them and you open the lyrics book and there are a million Beatles songs. There’s dozens of ABBA, Culture Club and even Bucks Fizz, but Coldplay? There will be two or at most three.”
But Martin has a solution: “If we could just get eight in every bar worldwide I’d be happy. I would know we’ve made it. I think there are three karaoke possibilities on ‘Viva La Vida’. It surely has to be the ultimate measure of success.”
Chris, if it makes you feel better I once had a car named after you. It was yellow. It was also a pile of crap. It was also back in the day when people didn’t know who you were, and your lovely wife Gwyneth Paltrow was going to marry Brad Pitt.
I had completely forgotten that she was once engaged to the man-half of Brangelina, and for the first time Chris has spoken about what it is like to be married to a woman who used to date Brad Pitt:
Despite it all, Martin can’t stop feeling like an underdog. “You’ve got to be hungry,” he says. “If your wife went out with Brad Pitt, you’d want to prove yourself, you know what I mean?”
I think if you really thought about the fact that your wife once bedded the sexiest man alive (back when he was in his prime), it could really bother you. You might wonder how you shape up next to that shirtless wonder.
Then you’d have to get one of the world’s biggest ego boosts – my wife could have married the sexiest man alive, but she chose me.
Gwyneth Paltrow is on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, looking warm and happy and completely different to how she has recently appeared on magazine covers. Inside she talks about planning to expand her family, saying that she’d love to have at least one more child.
“I may force myself to do it one more time because the result is so worth it,” the Oscar winner says in the July issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “My mother loved each [pregnancy] to bits; she felt alive and beautiful. I wanted to throw up all the time.”
The 35-year-old mother to Apple, 4, and Moses, 2, adds that she’s “very open” to adoption, factoring in the expansion of her family with husband Chris Martin.
“I do feel we’re so fortunate, and we kind of owe it to humanity,” she says. “We have a lot of love to give and a lot of resources.”
She needs to ‘force’ herself to have another baby? She feels she ‘owes it to humanity’? Gwyneth, no one is forcing you to add another member to your family, you’ve done your duty, you’ve got two, whose names shall endlessly amuse us.
I wonder if Gwyneth is turning into Madonna - Madonna also has a daughter and a son, with odd names, and a younger child that is adopted. Gwyneth and Madonna have been pictured dressed in similar outfits together quite a bit recently, and have become firm friends. They are both Americans living in London and married to British men. Is Gwyneth suffering from that thing where your friend gets a great haircut that looks really good, and you have to go and get it cut to see if it looks good on you, a la Victoria Beckham and Katie Holmes? Unlike the haircut that you can grow out, adopting a baby is a bit more permanent. Good on Gwyneth for wanting to help out a needy child, all the same.
Gwyneth added that she still wants to make movies, saying that “It’s something within you, something that burns,” she explains. “It’s not a hobby, it’s a need.” She’s talked in the past about how hard it was to return to work after having children, Gwyneth suffered from post-natal depression and probably found it harder than most mothers, even if she could afford plenty of help. We’ve talked here before about how Gwyneth obviously has it easier than other parents returning to the workforce, but just by saying that she has a need to create, I think she shows that even for the most wealthy and successful of us still has to fight for her own identity after being lost to motherhood for several years. It is really hard to come back to such a competitive industry after 6 years away, I’m amazed that she would want to go through it all again with another baby.
Gwyneth Paltrow is shown in the header at a Two Lovers photocall in Cannes on 5/20/08. She is shown below in a still from Harper’s Bazaar.
You have to hand it to Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s managed to skirt the fine line between getting press for giving somewhat revealing comments and not telling us anything that’s incredibly personal. And in the interviews I’ve watched with her, she doesn’t look like she’s full of herself or of shit. She’s launched her comeback with the incredibly successful Iron Man, and now it’s on to a film called Two Lovers which is in competition at Cannes. As long as she able to walk those tottering shoes away from the spotlight after she’s done promoting these films, she’s poised to win back the good will of the public. If she keeps talking and showing up at every event she’s surely going to ruin it.
Gwyneth revealed last month that she suffered post partum depression after the birth of her son, Moses. She also told us that Iron Man was her first paycheck in six years. Now she’s talking about what’s really behind this press blitz - her career was floundering after she took time off to raise her two kids:
“I really did not know if there would be a place for me,” said Paltrow. “Jodie Foster was right, especially if you are a woman and especially if you are not 25. Hollywood is pretty cutthroat, and everybody has a short memory. There is always someone who is younger or hotter or prettier.”
In terms of her own career, “I was very realistic of that fact there would not be room for me,” said Paltrow. “I definitely knew I had lost my place.”
She considers Two Lovers, a romantic drama set in Brooklyn, a shot in the vocational arm.
“It has given me a lifeline, because I had taken a long time off work,” said Paltrow. “Going from being a mother at home for a long time, which was the greatest time in my life, but also feel like an artist again … that was a gift for me.”
While that’s true, her image was also suffering from comments she made on multiple occasions which were perceived as anti-American. I don’t know whether that affected her ability to get roles, and it seems like she made a conscious decision to step away from Hollywood for a while.
What Gwyneth doesn’t mention is that even if she never had another job, she had 1) earned enough at that point in her life to retire if she lived within her vast means and 2) has a husband who is among the most successful rock stars in the world. She had the option to stop working and many mothers don’t, but good for her for talking about it. She’s in a much more cutthroat business than most of us can imagine.
You can’t expect her to acknowledge how good she has it in this brief sound byte, and she has stated that she has a great nanny who helps her immensely. Somehow Gwyneth has managed to touch on yet another issue that a lot of women have trouble with and to talk about it in a way that makes her look vulnerable, but in a completely normal, non-embarrassing way.
Gwyneth Paltrow donned two fashion-forward outfits at the Cannes film festival yesterday. She wore a black Chanel deep v-neck slip dress with ribbon details to the premiere of her film Two Lovers. Later last night she was in a Grecian-style white Lanvin one-shoulder dress for a Chopard event. Gwyneth was well covered and styled compared to some of the short and low-cut outfits she’s worn recently.
Two Lovers co-stars Joaquin Phoenix and according to IMDB it’s “A Brooklyn-set romantic drama about a bachelor torn between the family friend his parents wish he would marry and his beautiful but volatile new neighbor.” Vinessa Shaw and Isabella Rossellini are also featured.
Gwyneth has a new interview in V Magazine in which she talks about her long friendship with Madonna and discusses her youth and her restricted diet. She says she wouldn’t change anything about her 20s, including the men she dated “Because ultimately all roads led me to where I am now.” As for her diet, she’s vegetarian and only eats fish and a little dairy. Gwyneth names coffee and wine among her “lovely vices.”
Photo display note: We are trying a new photo display similar to the way that Just Jared overlays photos on the page. The thumbnails link to larger images as usual. When you click on the larger images, wait a moment for the page to load and when you click them they should display on top of the page. Click anywhere off of the image to remove it. You can see the next image in the sequence with the “Next” link when you are back on the page with the larger image. Not all images will be displayed like this yet, it’s just something we’re trying out and need to automate. Thanks to WENN for these photos.
Gwyneth Paltrow appears in high end lingerie and sexy garters for a photo spread that appears in this month’s British GQ. It must have been done at least two months ago before she cut her hair, or it’s possible she’s wearing extensions. Either way, her hair looks gorgeous and it makes you wonder if she should have worked with it a little to avoid the pin-straight 60s ‘do she sported for what seems like several years.
In the accompanying article, she says she’s not a worthy target of the tabloids since she’s so tame:
“I’m not going out without my knickers, and I’m not getting drunk and I’m not on my eighth husband,” she tells writer Johnny Davis. “Sometimes they have to drum up a lot of controversy over nothing.”
The only thing we can accuse Paltrow of being is, well, boring. I mean, she’s cooking family dinners and even recites pasta recipes from memory.
Without making shit up and embellishing details about celebrities’ lives, the tabloids would have nothing to talk about. And Gwyneth realizes that if she wasn’t wearing super-short dresses and posing in lingerie for men’s magazines people wouldn’t be talking about her as much.
Gwyneth Paltrow was on the Late Show with David Letterman last night and I have to give her credit for giving a fun interview that was interesting and light. I tend to vilify the woman for comments she made years ago disparaging Americans, but she came across as down to earth, friendly and kind. She told a self-deprecating story without it being an act, and you can also tell she genuinely loves her kids.
On having a boy and a girl who fight
Paltrow has Moses, 2, and Apple, who will be 4 in May.
“It’s a very good age difference. Boys and girls are very fundamentally different, aren’t they?
“They play so differently. She’s quiet and she’s imaginative and she’s very verbal. She likes to sit with her things and build houses and hotels for her dolls, and then my son will just come and thrash the hell out of everything she’s doing. And if he can inflict pain on her while he’s thrashing then even better. Then she gets furious and says that she’s antagonizing her… but he’s very sweet… we call him our ’sensitive thug.’ It’s a line from a Jay-Z song and it fits him perfectly.
“She’s [Apple] finally starting to give it back to him, but in a very female under the radar way… I’m very proud.”
Dave: “The energy just must be great. It’s a combination of great and bedlam, but it’s a good kind of bedlam.”
“It’s the best. It just makes life worth living, you know.”
On not seeing Ironman because they wouldn’t give her a DVD
Dave: “Ironman, tremendous movie by the way. Have you seen it?”
“No, I haven’t seen it… they wouldn’t give me a DVD, because I am an Internet pirate.”
Dave: “Seems to me like you ought to have seen it though.”
“I know, and everyone seems to really like it. And I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
On breaking her knee on the set of Ironman, calls herself a “moron”
Dave joked about how director Jon Favreau was in a lot of scenes, and Gwyneth said it was great working with someone who was also an actor because he understood what they were doing.
Dave: “When you injured yourself, how did he [Favreau] handle that?”
“Well, I broke my knee, because I’m a moron and I always bash into things by accident. It’s true. I’ve broken my toes like 30 times. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
“Say there’s a coffee table that’s been there for 8 years and I know exactly where it is. One day I’ll kinda not know it’s there and break my toe.
“So in my usual stupidity I managed to bash my knee on something, and it really hurt, and I kept kind of exercising and running in the film, and it started to really expand.
“This one day I’m doing a scene where I’m running away from Iron Monger… I said to Jon ‘My knee is really really hurting I don’t know how many times I can do this’ and he was like ‘Oh my God these actresses with their… ‘ He was kind of rolling his eyes like ‘You’re fine.’
“I ended up going to the doctor and I had such a bad fracture I had to have surgery the next day, and so I felt very smug and he apologized” [laughs]
Gwyneth touches Dave’s knee and he makes silly noises
Dave asked Gwyneth what part of her knee she injured and she touched his knee to show him and he started making goofy noises. That part is 5:50 into the first video below. Gwyneth said she “fractured the tibial…” and that she had arthroscopic surgery and they put cement in there. She said it was “bone cement, not off a building site.”
As for how she’s recovered, she said her leg still doesn’t feel totally normal and that she has a weird nerve problem and her legs don’t feel the same. “If I get a leg wax, one side hurts a lot more than the other side,” she explained and was laughing with Dave about it.
Then Gwyneth talked about her role in Iron Man, in which she plays a personal assistant to Robert Downey Jr.’s character. She said she had a lot of fun with it and hopes they make a sequel.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised with her interview and have a much better opinion of her after having watched it.
Here’s part 1 of Gwyneth Paltrow on the Late Show on 4/28/08
And part 2:
Gwyneth Paltrow is shown outside The Late Show yesterday, thanks to WENN. She’s wearing wild shoes again.
Gwyneth Paltrow has denied that she snubbed a party held in her honor – but it seems that’s exactly what she did. Producers of her most recent film Iron Man had planned a big bash costing over $120,000 in Gwyneth’s honor – to thank her for her hard work on the film’s “grueling” promotion schedule. It was held after the film’s premiere in London.
Thirty of Gwyneth’s closest friends and family came to attend the swanky dinner at Cocoon restaurant – but Gwyneth never showed up. They had even arranged for a special entrance for Paltrow and husband Chris Martin, so that they wouldn’t be photographed together – one of Gwyneth’s many strict rules.
Hollywood moguls spared no expense when they threw an extravagant party in honour of their hard-working star Gwyneth Paltrow last week. They lavished about £60,000 on the private celebration at an exclusive London restaurant, inviting 30 of her closest friends and family and providing the finest champagne and cocktails, just as she’d requested.
But the studio chiefs were left disappointed when the actress failed to turn up – choosing at the last minute to go for dinner elsewhere. Instead they went for an impromptu meal with Robert Downey Jnr, Paltrow’s co-star in the new Iron Man blockbuster, and his producer wife, Susan Levin. The decision left some of Paramount Pictures’ most powerful executives making small-talk with fellow guests, including 31-year-old Mr Martin’s parents, without Miss Paltrow.
“A lot of thought and money had gone into the party. Gwyneth had specifically asked for chilled bottles of Perrier Jouet champagne and some vodka cocktails to get the party going. Everything was in place and had been arranged around her.
Gwyneth’s excuse is even lovelier – she’s claiming she never agreed to attend. Yet you would think she’d inform her friends and in-laws of that fact well ahead of time. Which makes you think that she really did stand them up. The Daily Mail says she called just minutes before she was supposed to show up and canceled instead – leaving director, Jon Favreau trying to entertain Chris Martin’s parents and siblings, along with a host of other people all there just for Gwyneth.
Miss Paltrow’s spokesman said last night: “Gwyneth was never meant to attend the after party. She was at the taping of the Jonathan Ross show which ran late and then she went home to be with her children. Everyone was told weeks ago that she would not be attending. She has said many times that she deliberately does not make public appearances with her husband.”
Well that sure sounds like an all-out lie. One would assume that if Gwyneth said she wasn’t coming to the party weeks ago, the studio wouldn’t have thrown the bash in her honor. And her in-laws and friends wouldn’t have made the trek from the all over England to come and celebrate with her. It seems likely that the mistake (and poor manners ) was probably Paltrow’s – not the thirty people who still came to congratulate her.
Here’s Gwyneth at the Iron Man premiere in London on what appears to be a very windy April 24th. Images thanks to PR Photos.
Dear Gwyneth Paltrow: you fail. You had a very good formula going with painfully fashion-forward shoes and non-hideous outfits that managed to reach at least to mid thigh. You ruined it by falling back on an old misguided habit of showing off your gorgeous legs with dresses meant for a shorter woman. Plus, those shoes are a cop out. You were supposed to wear towering studded monstrosities to your premiere to cap off a month of shoe risks. This is a disappointment, but I’m glad you no longer challenge my long held assumptions about you. Now go back to talking about how great England is and how stupid and slow-minded Americans are, and we’ll keep snickering at your foolish fashion. Those shoes were just a whim, much like our brief admiration of you.
You could have made us completely ignore this outfit if you would have showed up to the premiere with Chris, though. Now that would have been a change.
Thanks to WENN for these photos. Also pictured are Jon Favreau and his wife Joya Tillem, who gets a pass for that outfit due to non-celebrity status, and Robert Downey Jr. and his wife Susan Downey.
Gwyneth Paltrow has been wearing super impractical shoes lately, to the point where she’s had to be helped to walk to her car, and I think it’s kind of awesome. I’m a flats girl myself, I have size 10 feet (1/2 size bigger than Angelina, but a full size smaller than Paris) and don’t find many heels comfortable. I have a few pairs for nice nights out, but I don’t usually wear them during the day and could never go out in heels all the time like Posh.
Still, you can kind of appreciate how Paltrow is enjoying wearing ridiculous shoes. It’s her new thing and she gets a kick out it, if you’ll forgive the pun. A woman who used to bug the crap out of me is sort of growing on me as she goes out in shoes that look torturous and a little bit ugly. Now that she’s finally cut her long boring hair she’s breaking out of her old mold. Her skirts aren’t too short anymore, and her shoes are completely impractical. I like it.
Thanks to PRPhotos for these pictures from yesterday. Also shown are her costars Robert Downey, and Terrence Howard, and director Jon Favreau, who gained back some of the weight he lost.
Iron Man is out in the US on May 2, and comes out in the rest of the world a couple of days earlier. Here’s the trailer:
Update: The Daily Mail has compiled all the photos of her recent footwear, and she’s really pushing the envelope.
Gwyneth Paltrow is the latest celebrity mom to says she battled post-partum depression. Paltrow says she became very depressed after the birth of her second child Moses, now 2. Despite the attention post-partum depression has gotten in the media and from other famous moms like Brooke Shields, Gwyneth says she had no clue that was what was wrong with her until it was all over.
Gwyneth Paltrow reveals in the May issue of Vogue that she battled post-partum depression after welcoming her second child, son Moses, in 2006.
“I didn’t know I had it until after it was over,” the actress, 35, says. “I just didn’t know what was wrong with me.” She suspects her depression stemmed from scaling back on her usual pre-baby treatments like acupuncture.
“I felt really out of my body,” Paltrow says after giving birth. “I felt really disconnected. I felt really down … I felt pessimistic.”
At first I thought the acupuncture thing came off as kind of… “oh poor me, I have to cut back on my spa treatments.” But that’s not really the case, and it makes sense that not having any “me” time could make depression worse. Gwyneth’s always been really into alternative therapies (remember her talking about cupping on Oprah?) and often does cleanses and detoxes. It makes sense that someone who’s generally really in tune with her body could feel extra unsettled at the loss of it.
Here’s Gwyneth with Helena Christensen - wearing some crazy shoes - at the 5th Annual Can-Do Awards Dinner marking the 25th anniversary of Food Bank for New York City on April 7th 2008. Images thanks to PR Photos.
