Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar win wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be, the actress said in a new interview with Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast.
Paltrow opened up about how, despite what most people would assume, she had a really hard time after winning the Oscar for best actress in 1999 for her performance as Viola de Lesseps in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love.
The actress and Goop founder told Alex Cooper this week on the Call Her Daddy podcast that the experience was actually “really unhealthy” for her.
How Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar Win Affected Her Emotionally
“Once I won the Oscar, it put me into a bit of an identity crisis because if you win the biggest prize, like, what are you supposed to do? And where are you supposed to go?” Paltrow said.
“It was hard the amount of attention that you receive on a night like that and the weeks following, it’s so disorienting. And frankly, really unhealthy. I was like, ‘This is crazy. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know which way is up.’ It was a lot. Not that I would give it back or anything, it was an amazing experience, but it kind of called a lot of things into question for me.”
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar win also came during a time when her father, Bruce Paltrow, was dying of cancer. She said that was part of the reason why she cried on stage while accepting the award, which got her a lot of flack in the press. Bruce Paltrow died three years later in 2002.
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“I remember I was working in England, and I remember the British press being so horrible to me because I cried. And they didn’t necessarily know that my father was dying of cancer,” she said.
“He was really debilitated. It was just this totally overwhelming moment. And, you know, I was 26. I cried and people were so mean about it and I just thought, ‘Wow there’s this big energy shift that’s happening. I think I’m going to have to learn to be less openhearted and much more protective of myself and filter people out better.’”
She added that she felt like she’d been built up so high by winning an Oscar that the media’s response was then to tear her down.
“I felt a real pivot on that night because I felt like up until that moment everybody was kind of rooting for me in a way,” Paltrow said. “And then when I won, it was like too much, and I could feel a real turn.”
Main Image: Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love (1999) Photo Credit: Miramax.
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