Hollywood loves stories of comeback and with Goldie Hawn, the charming, beautiful, and multi-talented actress, it has a particularly good story.
Hawn is back on the big screen next month in the jungle comedy, Snatched, her first movie since The Banger Sisters, made in 2002 with her co-star and friend, Susan Sarandon.
Hawn doesn’t look, feel, or talk like a 71 year old woman (she was born in November 1945).
For one thing, she hasn’t been just sitting idle at home for the last 15 years. In a candid chat with the Hollywood Foreign Press, she reveals why she decided to step back from Hollywood for so long.
The turning point for Margo Channing, played by the incomparable Bette Davis in the Oscar winning All About Eve was age 40, and for Hawn it was 50. She confesses: “When I turned 50, I asked some of my girlfriends, all actresses of the same age, ‘What are we going to do now?’ I wanted to go live somewhere for a while, learn archaeology, or take part in healing the world on some level. I wanted to dig deep and say, ‘Who am I now? What do I have to offer? What do I have to learn?’ I started learning about the brain, psychology. And after 9/11, I decided, ‘I know what I’m going to do.'”
You could say that as an actress, Hawn peaked early. At the very young age of 24, she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the comedy Cactus Flower, playing
Energetic and driven, she became a producer of her films as well as others. Her best known vehicle as producer an actress was the military comedy, Private Benjamin
In the 1970s, alongside Barbra Streisand (who’s older by 3 years), she was one of the few female bankable stars.
Her most frequent star was Warren Beatty, with whom she appeared in three films, $ , the popular and relevant Shampoo (1975), and the vastly disaointing Town and Country.
The decision to do something different derives from Hawn’s existential philosophy: “I believe that life is about doing. It’s about changing. It’s about transitioning. I can’t imagine, as a human being, not being able to grow.”
Over the past decade, she wr0te two books, Goldie: A Lotus Grows in the Mud in 2006 and 10 Mindful Minutes in 2012.
She is the most proud of her Hawn Foundation, and especially of MindUP, a program to teach kids “social and emotional learning skills that link cognitive neuroscience, positive psychology and mindful awareness training.” “We are now resent in nine countries, including Jordan, Serbia, the U.K., America, Canada, Hong Kong,”
“For a whole decade, I never looked back. I never wished to be acting again. I was so engaged.”
