Goldie Hawn’s Hollywood comeback
People used to say that Goldie Hawn was dumb as a fox.
Plucked from the chorus line, she made her name on television as a giggling, wide-eyed blonde with an endearing tendency to fluff her lines. But she used her position as America's premier ditz to become truly powerful.
By her early 30s, she was producing her own movies – her first credit was on Private Benjamin, for which she was nominated for an Oscar – and doing battle with writers, directors and studio heads alike. Her model, she said at the time, was Warren Beatty: a creative artist with an eye to the bottom line.
Fourteen years ago, as effortlessly as she fell into the movie business, Hawn fell out of it. She was in her late 50s, and wasn't getting offered the sort of roles she wanted. It was just as Elise, the Botoxed actress she played in The First Wives Club, had warned: "There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy."
"It's not unusual," says Hawn, who is 71 – but Hollywood 71, which is only a few rungs down from cryogenically preserved 71.
She arrives at a suite at Claridge's in London with her blonde hair perfectly coiffed, her make-up immaculate, and her tiny frame encased in skin-tight jeans. "Unless you want to keep working on stage, which is absolutely an option, or even in television, a great option. But I looked at myself and I said, what else am I going to do with my life? I'm just built that way. That's when I took off in this other direction."
Rallying a phalanx of Ivy League professors to her cause, she began developing a programme to teach mindfulness in schools. "I've studied the brain," she says, "I've been a practitioner of meditation since 1972. I'm a great believer in looking at what we're finding out in universities and starting to disseminate information to our children so that we can help them to stabilise themselves and become self-aware before they get into mental health issues. So I took the science out of the Petri dish and tried to put it into action."
MindUP launched in 2007 and there are now two million children signed on to the programme, which is about to roll out to countries throughout the Middle East. Hawn talks about it with the easy command of a seasoned CEO: "Let's put it this way: it's been, without a doubt, the most exciting thing I've ever produced. I'd been making people laugh for so long, and now I'm hopefully helping children laugh more. Was I longing to be back in the movies? No."
Goldie Hawn and Amy Schumer's characters attempt to take control of the situation, in Snatched.
Perhaps, then, it would be wrong to call her role in Snatched a comeback. Better to think of it as an encore, in which she was persuaded back on to the stage by Amy Schumer, who co-wrote the script and plays her daughter in the film. It's a broad action-comedy in which the pair end up being kidnapped while on holiday in South America. "She's the one who came to me," says Hawn. "She said that as she was working on it, she was thinking of me being her mum. I thought that was sweet. And eventually it happened."
Acting again was "like riding a bike", says Hawn. "I mean, good heavens! It's doing something I did for 35, 40 years. The camera's there, the prop person is there, the script girl is there, the table with all the terrible, disgusting food is there. Well, actually, they're getting better – they have green juice now. But it's the same. It's a collaboration, and it's fun."
Although she talks gamely about the movie, it's clearly of a different order to the films she made in her heyday. "When I was making movies, I was producing, doing all of that," she says. "Normally I'm much more involved. This was very different: I was hired. And I've never played a reactive character before, I've always played proactive characters. So there were times when it was – I wouldn't call it challenging – but it definitely was quite different from anything I had done on my own."
In her own telling, Hawn was a born entrepreneur. "When I was little, I used to play business. I'd make notes on pieces of paper and I'd pretend to be in an office cubicle and answer the phone," she says. "At 17, I had my own dancing school. I advertised in my father's store and I got a room across from him, and I put up posters in all the recreation halls in Washington [DC]. Maybe it's because my mum and dad had stores, maybe it's in my DNA. It's who I am."
Fame wasn't part of her plan: she was going to be a dancer, maybe appear in a few advertisements, earn some money, then start a family.
"When people would ask, 'what do you want to be when you grow up?', I said 'happy'. The whole aspect of becoming a star did not connote at any level with happiness, as far as I could see. When I was little it seemed all screwed up to me. I'd look at these Photoplay magazines, with these terrible things – divorce and drugs..." She smiles, with that familiar lopsided grin. It was almost by chance that she ended up on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, which, at its height, was essential viewing in a quarter of American households.
Snatched marks Goldie Hawn's first major Hollywood role since starring opposite Susan Sarandon in 2002's The Banger Sisters.
A decade ago, Hawn wrote a memoir which described, in coolly dispassionate detail, the humiliating experiences she endured as a young woman in the entertainment industry. There was the famous cartoonist who promised her a big break and threw money at her when she fled from his advances; the handsome young guy who masturbated in front of her as she worked as a go-go dancer at a seedy bar.
Does she look back and think that those were the bad old days?
"No," she says. "The book was written because I wanted to talk about how obstacles in your life actually teach you something. Some instances can be damaging, can create PTSD, I totally get that. But other times we have to shift to a more optimistic look at how we're going to go through life. What did you learn, and who are you? And how do you move forward? So those moments in my life did not scar me at all."
Never complain, never explain: that could be Hawn's mantra. She was a sort of pre-feminist, not interested in smashing the system, and wily at finding ways to succeed within it. While she came of age in the Sixties, she was never one for rallies. "When I was in Laugh-In, they were getting on me for being a dumb blonde when women were burning their bras," she says. "I'd just entered the industry, and they asked me, 'Don't you feel terrible about playing a dumb blonde, when women are out there fighting for liberation?' I said, 'I know what you mean, but I'm already liberated. Liberation comes from the inside, as far as I'm concerned'. I thought, 'Well, that wasn't a bad answer'. I had to come up with something, right?"
When she became a producer, it was because she wanted her name on the store front. She met with resistance. "It's been a constant, constant, constant thing," she says. "We've cracked our heads on the glass ceiling, and I know that I've got bumps all over the top of my head. But, you know, things change very slowly. It's really hard to be a ballsy, tough woman, and be liked by everybody, and not carry some sort of reputation or baggage before you even walk in the room. I think it's changed a bit. But it's still tough."
Hawn didn't mind being the "squeaky wheel": she did it on The First Wives Club, pushing to delay the film to allow time for script rewrites, on Wildcats, a 1986 film in which she played the coach of a male American football team, and on Jonathan Demme's 1984 film Swing Shift, which she altered at the behest of the studio after a first cut went down badly.
"Movies are miracles," she says. "They are a miracle when they get made. For every one movie that's developed, you've got at least 15 that you can't get made. If you have true integrity, and you're not just throwing out product, it's hard."
Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn have been together for more than three decades
The rewrites, reshoots and hurt feelings were partly mitigated by the presence of Hawn's co-star on Swing Shift, Kurt Russell, who has been her partner ever since.
"The idea of falling in love with an actor, on set, was not good," says Hawn, "and he felt the same. But it was really about who we were as people. We both loved children, we both had a connection to family. And it wasn't love at first sight, which I think is important. He was fun to be around, and slowly I started getting more turned on by him, by watching him behave."
Shortly before we meet, Russell gave an interview in which he told the story of their first date: how they ended up breaking into her new apartment, for which she didn't yet have the keys, and being interrupted by the police as they made love. "That's how the story goes," says Hawn. "We did – we made love on the first date. But you've got to keep in mind that we'd already worked together, so there was a lot of foreplay!"
The couple have brought up four children together, among them the actors Kate Hudson and Wyatt Russell. "I think societies actually get created because we're tribal by nature," she says. "I often wonder what it would be like to be married to a doctor or someone like that. But it is nice to be able to sit and laugh about something when you have the same sensibility. It's hard in separation, because movie sets are definitely seductive places. It's an unreal world, you are completely cloistered for three months. There's danger. So you want someone who knows not to go there."
What will Goldie do next? She hasn't yet committed to another film, she says, and is at her most animated when she talks about the future of her mindfulness programme. She speaks about it with a kind of awe.
"You can see why going backwards is never anything I've wanted to do," she says. "People said, 'You'll never teach kids about their brains and you won't get this into schools, and how do you scale it?' When people said to me, 'You'll never do that', I was like, 'I think I can'. 'I think I can' is a good way to walk into a room."
And then she kisses me on both cheeks, and leaves.
Written by Horatia Harrod. First appeared on Stuff.co.nz.