Detailed Biography

Goldie Jean Hawn is an American actress, film director and producer, whose career has spanned more than four decades. Hawn is perhaps best known for her roles in Private Benjamin, Foul Play, Wildcats, Overboard, Bird on a Wire, Death Becomes Her, The First Wives Club, and The Banger Sisters. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1969 film Cactus Flower. She is also the mother of actors Oliver Hudson and Kate Hudson. Hawn has maintained a relationship with her long-time boyfriend, actor Kurt Russell since 1983.

Early life

Hawn was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Laura , a jewelry shop/dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a band musician who played at major events in Washington. She was named after her mother's aunt. She has a sister, Patricia; a brother, Edward, who died before she was born. Through her father, Hawn is a direct descendant of Edward Rutledge, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Hawn was raised in Takoma Park, Maryland. Her father was Presbyterian and her mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Hungary; Hawn was raised in Judaism.

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 taught in 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 , 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.

Hawn's Laugh-In 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. Hawn had made her feature film debut in a bit role as a giggling dancer in the 1968 film The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, in which she was billed as "Goldie Jeanne", but in her first supporting role, in Cactus Flower , she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

1970s

After Hawn's Academy Award win, her film career took off. She starred in a string of above average and successful comedies starting with There's a Girl in My Soup , $ , Butterflies Are Free and Shampoo 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 Hawn, 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 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 , which became a box office smash and revived Hawn's career in the film industry. The plot centered around an innocent woman in San Francisco who becomes mixed up in a murder plot. Hawn's next film, Mario Monicelli's Lovers and Liars , was a box office bomb. In 1972 Hawn recorded and released a solo country LP for Warner Brothers, titled Goldie. It was recorded with the help of Dolly Parton and Buck Owens. Allmusic gives the album a favorable review, calling it a "sweetly endearing country-tinged middle of the road pop record".

1980s

Hawn's popularity continued into the 1980s, starting with Private Benjamin , 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 , Protocol and Wildcats and dramas like Best Friends and Swing Shift .

At the age of thirty-nine, Hawn posed for the cover of Playboy's 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 film of the 1980s was opposite partner Kurt Russell in the 1987 comedy Overboard, a critical and box office disappointment which questioned the likability and bankability of the two paired together onscreen.

1990s

Hawn's 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. Hawn had mixed success in the early 1990s, with the thriller Deceived and the drama CrissCross . But her role opposite Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep in 1992's film Death Becomes Her garnered her much attention. Earlier that year, she starred in HouseSitter , a screwball comedy with Steve Martin, which was a commercial and critical success. Hawn was absent from the screen again for four years, while caring for her mother who died of cancer in 1994. Hawn 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 starring Christine Lahti and Jena Malone.

Hawn 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 and reuniting with Steve Martin for the comedy The Out-of-Towners , a remake of the 1970 Neil Simon hit. The film was critically panned and was not successful at the box office.

2000s

In 2001, Hawn was reunited with former co-stars Warren Beatty 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 Banger Sisters , opposite Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush.

In 2005, Hawn's autobiography, A Lotus Grows in the Mud, was published. Hawn has said 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's first husband was dancer Gus Trikonis, who appeared as a Shark in West Side Story; his sister Gina played Graciella, Riff's girlfriend. Her second husband was Bill Hudson, of the Hudson Brothers, but the two divorced in 1980. They have two children, Oliver Hudson and Kate Hudson , 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 . The couple have a son, Wyatt Russell , 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 is a practicing Buddhist and has raised her children in both Buddhist and Jewish traditions. She stated on the Larry King Show that she is a Jewish Buddhist, but neither more Jewish nor more Buddhist; in interviews, she also detailed that she never had to forsake her Jewish heritage to embrace Buddhism and that her Jewish religion and heritage come before Buddhism. Hawn travels to India annually, and has visited Israel, stating that she felt a strong identification with its people. She has been criticized 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 The Hawn Foundation, which 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. A study indicated that children who participated in the Program increased significantly in the areas of optimism, positive and negative emotions.

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."