Oscar-winning actress, food writer, businesswoman and singer Gwyneth Paltrow is the daughter of the late esteemed TV producer Bruce Paltrow (“St. Elsewhere) and the Emmy and Tony-winning actress Blythe Danner. But Gwyneth was determined to carve out her own path in life and that she certainly has achieved in the movies.
Paltrow starred in the 1998 surprise Best Picture winner “Shakespeare in Love,” for which she won the Academy Award as Best Actress. She also earned a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards (for Best Actress and Best Ensemble) for that performance. She also picked up a second Globe nomination for her work playing a mathematician in 2005’s “Proof.”
Paltrow has gone on to create the successful lifestyle magazine Goop and has become a highly-respected writer on the food scene. In honor of this multi-talented lady on her big day, let’s take a tour in our photo gallery of her 12 greatest film performances, ranked from worst to best.
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12. COUNTRY STRONG (2010)
Image Credit: Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock Writer/Director: Shana Feste. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim McGraw, Garrett Hedlund, Leighton Meester.
If I was to cast the role of a country music star, Gwyneth Paltrow would probably be near the bottom of my list. But somehow she manages to carry it off in Shana Feste’s film in which she plays Kelly, a country star who has just gotten out of rehab for her alcoholism. Her life intersects wit those of aspiring country singers Beau (Garrett Hedlund) and Chiles (Leighton Meester) while trying to save her marriage to James (Tim McGraw). If the plot is a little too soap opera-like, the performances (particularly from Paltrow and McGraw) consistently draw you in.
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11. GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1998)
Image Credit: Moviestore Collection/REX/Shutterstock Director: Alfonso Cuarón. Writer: Mitch Glazer. Starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Hank Azaria, Vhris Cooper, Anne Bancroft, Robert DeNiro.
“Great Expectations” was a swing and a miss for Paltrow and now Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón (who later won for “Gravity”). But it was an effort worth making. Screenwriter Mitch Glazer’s idea was to take Charles Dickens’ fabled story and place in 1990s Manhattan — you can tell it’s contemporary because Paltrow is naked on the film’s poster. The orphan Finn (Ethan Hawke) reunites with Estella (Paltrow) whom he knew years ago in Florida, and begins a romantic fling, even though Estella’s devotion remains somewhat cloudy.
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10. SHALLOW HAL (2001)
Image Credit: Moviestore Collection/REX/Shutterstock Directors: Peter & Bobby Farrelly. Writers: Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly, Sean Moynihan. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow Jack Black, Jason Alexander.
Paltrow dipped her toe in the Farrelly Brothers’ world of raunchy comedy with “Shallow Hal,” in which she plays Rosemary, an enormously obese woman whom Hal (Jack Black), a man anxious for romance, is hypnotized into believing that a woman of Rosemary’s size is slender and an absolute knockout. But she is crushed when Hal’s hypnosis wears off, and he sees Rosemary for the large woman she is. But can Hal see past her size and appreciate her for the woman she is inside?
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9. SLIDING DOORS (1998)
Image Credit: Alex Bailey/Paramount/Miramax/Intermedia/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Writer/Director: Peter Howitt. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hannah, John Lynch, Jeanne Tripplehorn.
Peter Howitt’s “Sliding Doors” provided Paltrow with one of the most challenging film roles of her career. Paltrow plays Helen Quilley, who has just been fired from her P.R. job in London and rushes to make her train in the Underground but just misses it. At this point, Howitt’s narrative splits in two — what would Helen’s life be like if she made that train before the sliding doors closed and what is her life like now that she missed it? Paltrow really has to shift gears between the two timelines, and she manages to do it expertly.
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8. PROOF (2005)
Image Credit: Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock Director: John Madden. Writer: Rebecca Miller, based on the play by David Auburn. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hope Davis. Paltrow reunited with her “Shakespeare in Love” director John Madden for this film adaptation of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. As Catherine Llewellyn, a mathematician who is worried that she will inherit the mental illness of her dying father (Anthony Hopkins), Paltrow manages to balance her worry and her grief as she sees her father waste away. For her performance as Catherine, Paltrow earned her second Golden Globe nomination.
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7. CONTAGION (2011)
Image Credit: Warner Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Director: Steven Soderbergh. Writer: Scott Z. Burns. Starring Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet. Paltrow doesn’t last long in Steven Soderbergh’s film, but her role is key to the plot. As working mom Beth Emhoff, she is one of the first characters to come down with the fatal disease before it winds up spreading all over the world. But with Beth becoming the first victim that researchers choose to study, even in her absence she becomes a presence that permeates the entire film.
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6. EMMA (1996)
Image Credit: David Appleby/Matchmaker/Miramax/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Writer/Director: Douglas McGrath. Based on the novel by Jane Austen. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Toni Collette, Alan Cumming, Ewan McGregor, Jeremy Northam. “Emma” is not one of those Jane Austen works that come to mind immediately — I would suspect that knowledgeable film-goers know it primarily as the source material for Amy Heckerling’s brilliant 1995 film “Clueless.” Douglas McGrath, who was nominated for an Oscar for writing Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway,” has set the film in early 19th century England, and Paltrow, who seems like such a 21st century actress, fits right in as a well-meaning matchmaker determined to do well in hooking up those friends who come to her. Granted, this “Emma” is not as polished as “Clueless,” but Paltrow’s work here is impressive nonetheless.
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5. TWO LOVERS (2008)
Image Credit: 2929 Prods./Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Director: James Gray. Writers: James Gray, Richard Manello, based on the short story “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Joaquin Phoenix. To have Dostoevsky as your source material would be intimidating to anyone, but James Gray’s “Two Lovers” is enormously moving and provides Paltrow with the material to deliver one of her best screen performances. She plays Michelle, who works in a law firm and is dating someone at work but finds herself being drawn to Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), a suicide-prone mess of a guy. The scenes in which Michelle has to tell Leonard that her co-worker is probably a better fit for her than he is are among the most painful sequences in contemporary films.
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4. The MARVEL series (2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2017, 2018)
Image Credit: Marvel/Paramount/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Directors: Various. Writers: Various. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow. Virginia “Pepper” Potts is probably the one role with which moviegoers associate Paltrow. As the right-hand to bazillionaire Tony Stark [a.k.a. Iron Man] (Robert Downey, Jr.), Pepper is front and center with everything that Tony needs. Paltrow’s role in the first “Iron Man” was substantial, but as the Marvel series has gone on, her character’s appearances have become shorter to the point of becoming glorified cameos. Paltrow’s Pepper has appeared in the three “Iron Man” films (2008, 2010, 2013), as well as 2012’s “The Avengers,” 2017’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War.”
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3. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)
Image Credit: James Hamilton/Touchstone/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Director: Wes Anderson. Writers: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson. Starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller. In one of Wes Anderson’s most delightful films, Paltrow plays Margot, one of three siblings (the other two are played by Ben Stiller and Luke Wilson) who all shone with promise as adolescents but who flopped as adults. With parents such as their shady father Royal (Gene Hackman) and their mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston) who has just about had it with her husband, no wonder these kids are a mess. Paltrow in particular is a hoot as she portrays Margot as a woman who is too bored to notice that her life is going down the drain.
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2. THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999)
Image Credit: Phil Bray/Paramount/Miramax/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Writer/Director: Anthony Minghella. Starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Paltrow is terrific in Anthony Minghella’s film version of the Patricia Highsmith thriller as Marge Sherwood, the fiancée of playboy Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) and the man whom Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) has been hired to bring back to America after Dickie’s romantic galavanting all around Italy. Ripley, a con artist who worms his way into the confidences of wealthy people in order to improve his station in life and has no hesitancy to murder those who know his secret, comes down to a face-to-face with Marge, and Paltrow and Damon going one-on-one is thrilling.
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1. SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)
Image Credit: Collection/REX/Shutterstock Director: John Madden. Writers: Marc Norman, Tom Stoppard. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Judi Dench, Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, Ben Affleck. Paltrow’s artistic triumph was her performance in John Madden’s “Shakespeare in Love,” a romantic comedy that surprisingly took the Best Picture prize over the much-lauded “Saving Private Ryan.” Paltrow plays Viola de Lesseps, a young woman who wants to appear in a Shakespeare play but who must disguise herself as a man in order to audition. For her performance as Viola, Paltrow won her first Academy Award, her first Golden Globe Award, as well as her first and second Screen Actors Guild Award.
