‘Complex’ Gwyneth Paltrow Revealed in Bombshell New Book (Exclusive)

At just 12 days old, Gwyneth Paltrow arrived on her first Hollywood set to visit her mom, actress Blythe Danner. So began the illustrious life of the daughter of Danner and TV producer Bruce Paltrow. She quickly captivated audiences herself as she grew up, performing with her mother at the renowned Williamstown Theatre Festival at 8, winning an Oscar at 26 as the willowy, magnetic star of Shakespeare in Love, and becoming a nineties “It Girl,” though she called that “a joke” to her closest friends.  

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In 2008, the mom of two stepped into a new kind of role with the launch of Goop, a showcase for her rarefied taste that started as an email newsletter and went on to become a media empire. Each detox cleanse, exorbitantly pricey gift guide and unsubstantiated health endorsement (such as inserting a jade egg vaginally to “balance hormones”) putting her in the spotlight once again.

At 52, she’s the subject of a juicy new biography, Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell, excerpted exclusively in this week’s PEOPLE. The book, based on over 220 interviews, digs deep into why the star continues to intrigue. Says Odell, “Love her or hate her, we haven’t been able to look away.”

Below, read an exclusive excerpt from Gwyneth by Amy Odell.

In 1984 Gwyneth enrolled at the posh private school Spence in Manhattan and quickly charmed her classmates.

She had strangely potent charisma, and other Spence girls — even seniors — wanted to invest in knowing this new middle schooler. But other students seemed to feel threatened. One classmate recalled, “Not one person had a doubt that she was going to be famous.”

She excelled in theater and did well with Shakespeare but struggled with academics.

Gwyneth told friends that [James] Dawson, her adviser, had agreed to pass her in a class in which she was struggling so she could graduate. “You’re going to win the Academy Award,” Dawson told her. “I’m going to thank you when it happens,” she said. (She didn’t.)

In her senior yearbook, she borrowed her parting words from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: “Be excellent to each other and party on, dudes.” In the “Nightmare” column, other students got things [written by yearbook editors] like “AP Spanish Lang.” Gwyneth’s was “Obesity.”

She dropped out of UC Santa Barbara early on, and in 1994 she met Brad Pitt at an audition for Legends of the Fall. She didn’t get the part, but he later suggested she play his wife in the film Se7en.

However, she received another offer to appear with Keanu Reeves in Feeling Minnesota. Unsure which one to take, she consulted with a friend, who said, “Well, who do you want to date, Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves?” Gwyneth chose Se7en and Pitt, and Cameron Diaz took the Feeling Minnesota part. The Pitt-Paltrow romance didn’t stay hidden for long. The two would walk around the set holding hands, and smoked cigarettes together outside their trailers, Gwyneth holding hers like a thirties movie star.

As she began wowing directors with her charisma and talent, including her ability to quickly learn accents, she was cast in the Jane Austen adaptation Emma.

During Emma’s filming, Gwyneth expressed doubts to one crew member that Pitt was right for her, and admitted that she had a crush on Hugh Grant. “Brad and I had very different upbringings,” she told an interviewer. “So when we go to restaurants and order caviar, I have to say to Brad, ‘This is beluga and this is osetra.’ ” 

Gwyneth’s performance got rave reviews when Emma was released in 1996.

After Emma came out, Gwyneth went over to [her friend, makeup artist Kevyn] Aucoin’s place and cried about Pitt multiple times. He wanted to be with her but seemed to feel threatened by her success and all the attention she received. [Aucoin’s] advice to Gwyneth was frank, “You really need to end this.”

Gwyneth and Pitt never publicly gave a concrete reason for their [1997] breakup, though two people recalled a rumor about it stemming from Gwyneth cheating on Pitt [with costar John Hannah] while she was filming Sliding Doors. She told Howard Stern in 2015: “I wasn’t ready, and he was too good for me.”

She began dating Ben Affleck in late 1997.

Affleck was struggling with alcoholism and a gambling habit around the time he met Gwyneth, who was attracted to his intellect. Her friends had reservations about him, because he didn’t always reciprocate her affection. He at times seemed more interested in playing video games with the guys at his house than being with Gwyneth. She spoke openly about how much she enjoyed their sex life. She told Aucoin one day that she loved when Affleck [engaged in a certain sex act].  

When she got the script for Shakespeare in Love, which started filming in 1998, she first turned it down without reading the entire thing. 

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Winona Ryder’s name had also been bandied about for the role. “It was never sent to Winona as an offer, but Winona wanted to do the part and Gwyneth had recommended her for the part,” said [producer Harvey] Weinstein. After a story about Gwyneth allegedly stealing the script from Winona’s coffee table reached the media, Gwyneth told friends that Ryder had started the rumor, and insisted she’d received the script through her agent. Shakespeare in Love opened on December 11 to ravishing reviews. 

Gwyneth and Affleck broke up the next month, after a little over a year. Their physical chemistry couldn’t overcome his self-destructive impulses, which may have even included cheating on her. After they broke up, Gwyneth said, “I love men, even though they’re lying, cheating scumbags.”

She was nominated for an Oscar in 1999 and Ralph Lauren was asked to design her gown. She requested a design inspired by Grace Kelly. 

Leading up to the awards, she hadn’t been eating much and kept losing weight, necessitating extra fittings, where Gwyneth asked the Ralph Lauren team in New York to bring the neckline lower and lower. Lauren became so frustrated that he didn’t want to send the dress back to Los Angeles. But his team convinced him, and found a skilled seamstress to fit the pieces of the dress onto Gwyneth there.

The designers at Ralph Lauren noticed that something looked off when she wore it that night. The fabric was puckering, a little wrinkly, loose around her torso — as if she had instantly lost 10 pounds. They realized she hadn’t worn the inner detachable corset that came with the gown, which would have made it fit more snugly. Lauren was not happy about the fit.

After she won the Oscar, she stayed in bed for 10 days, overwhelmed. She reunited with Affleck that fall and focused on her health.

Affleck’s addiction issues resurfaced, and he and Gwyneth broke up for good in October 2000. While he had been turning to alcohol, she was practicing Ashtanga yoga six times a week, meditating daily, and watching her diet. 

Hoping to change up her serious image, in 2001, she played an overweight woman in the Farrelly Brothers comedy, Shallow Hal. 

Before filming began, 120-pound Gwyneth slipped into a rubbery, 25-pound fat suit [that] was meant to make her look like she weighed 350 pounds. She planned to walk around downtown Charlotte. Barry Teague, a producer, had been instructed to keep enough of a distance so that she felt like she was alone. Teague, who weighed 325 pounds himself, felt pained as he watched two middle-aged men hurry around her like she was a trash can. Even by the relatively permissive standards of 2002, Shallow Hal generated controversy for using fatness as a punch line. Gwyneth told friends that she felt like the film could bring attention to what would later be widely termed fat-shaming. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, [Gwyneth] said, “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.”

Devastated by her father’s death from oral cancer in 2002, she found solace in dating Coldplay rock star Chris Martin and hoped to start a family.

Both aspired to some kind of soulful, intellectual seriousness at a moment when their work was pulling them toward mass appeal and triviality. Yet her friends felt like something didn’t quite click. Martin was an introvert who could be socially awkward. But he was incredible onstage, and Gwyneth, who was ready to settle down, was seduced by his persona. 

They married on Dec. 5, 2003 and had daughter Apple in 2004, followed by son Moses in 2006. A few years later, Gwyneth’s friendship with longtime pal Madonna crumbled.

Their relationship reached a breaking point when Madonna showed up to an island where Gwyneth and Martin were vacationing. Madonna seemed to know that Gwyneth would be there, which Gwyneth seemed to find strange, a friend remembered.

Madonna then insisted Gwyneth and Martin join her for a big group dinner at a long table where Madonna went off on her daughter, Lourdes. Gwyneth and Martin were disgusted by the behavior. “I can’t be around this woman anymore,” Martin told Gwyneth. “She’s awful.” Gwyneth agreed that Madonna was toxic and ended the friendship.

Gwyneth launched Goop in 2008 and wrote four bestselling cookbooks focused on wellness. In the second, It’s All Good, she shared a 2011 scare when she thought she’d had a stroke — which, along with her father’s cancer, led her to seek answers from various health gurus.

She went to see a host of doctors (she referred to them as “doctors,” but not all of them were medical doctors.) She was convinced something was wrong with her. They suggested it was a migraine headache coupled with a panic attack. Gwyneth presumed this was her body reacting to her busy schedule and the accompanying air travel, stress, and adrenaline. Plus, she had recently been drinking wine and eating french fries. At this point, Gwyneth had been trying to optimize her life for years, overriding ordinary emotional pain — anxiety, grief, anger — through physical interventions like intense exercise and radical changes in diet.  

One of her doctors, Alejandro Junger, advised an “elimination diet.”

Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, public health, and food studies at New York University, said, “Some people might feel better not eating these things [that Junger recommended banning], but for most people it won’t make much difference.”

Junger’s plan forbade coffee, alcohol, dairy, eggs, sugar, shellfish, deepwater fish, potatoes, tomatoes, bell pepper, eggplant, corn, wheat, meat, soy, and anything processed. Gwyneth built a diet out of whatever was left.

On March 25, 2014, she shared on Goop that she and Martin were “consciously uncoupling.” Readership was so huge, the site crashed. 

While she privately struggled to generate optimism about the separation, she found a way to do it publicly, to turn this painful, confusing failure into a project that might inspire and illuminate — and maybe boost the brand. While some of Gwyneth’s old friends were shocked by her divorce, she told them they had separated a year earlier, and that she had come to terms with it.

She turned Goop into a powerhouse platform — but could still laugh at herself. 

During leadership team meetings, Gwyneth sometimes brought in one of her gurus to hold a self-improvement workshop. At one such meeting, a facilitator asked the executives to take turns saying one thing they believed to be true about themselves but wasn’t true of anybody else in the room. When it was Gwyneth’s turn, she said with a smile, “I won an Oscar.” Her team’s reaction amounted to a playful “Gwyneth, f— off.”

Gwyneth was committed to covering products and experiences that translated her own tastes for her audience — however bizarre or inaccessible they might be. The Tikkun spa in Santa Monica was featured in early 2015 in Goop’s Santa Monica city guide, with a focus on its vaginal steaming treatment. It went up quietly at first—then the internet swarmed. The spa’s owner Niki Schwarz recalled Gwyneth coming in to do the steam with celebrity friends, and telling her that the treatment “changed her life.” 

Medical experts scoffed — and warned the steaming, like some of Goop’s other alternative-health recommendations, could be dangerous. Meanwhile, underneath the company’s glossy surface, office dynamics were sometimes difficult. 

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Executives struggled to navigate Gwyneth’s impatience and perfectionism. They seemed threatened by each other, based on whom Gwyneth was favoring in a given moment (and she made it clear). Employees who worked up the nerve to go into her office were often met with impatience, an attitude of “What do you want? Get it over with.” 

Goop weathered numerous controversies and lawsuits but the attention only drove more traffic to the site. In 2017, she hosted a health forum.

Attendees traveled from all over for the summit, where they could start the day with a saline IV (Gwyneth loved IVs and sometimes had them administered during meetings in the office). Guests could then try out “sound bath meditation,” as well as a “10-minute facelift” during which an organic sugar thread was inserted into the cheek. (Gwyneth told her staff she subscribed to this, along with a little filler, though she was open about disliking Botox, saying that it made her look “crazy” and “like Joan Rivers.”)

Wed to producer Brad Falchuk since 2018, Gwyneth became an empty-nester in 2024 and returned to acting opposite Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme, slated to open this Dec. 25. Goop has struggled to turn a profit, but she remains a coveted face for luxe brands like Saint Laurent.

Gwyneth had told staff that she wanted to build a business she could pass down to Apple, who one person said had “genuine interest” in Goop. Whatever direction she chooses, said [her agent and close friend] CAA’s Richard Lovett, “She’s not going to be the next [Gwyneth], but she will be the original Apple.”

As it stands now, Gwyneth will probably be remembered less for her film work than what she chose to do with it outside of Hollywood. Her greatest cultural impact isn’t popularizing Calvin Klein fashion or jade eggs — it’s showing the world just how much consumers will spend for the luxury of being well, no matter what science tells us. Whatever happens with Goop, Gwyneth will be fine. 

From Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell. Copyright © 2025 by Amy Odell. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Gwyneth: The Biography hits shelves on July 29 and is available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.