Goldie Hawn (born November 21, 1945) rose to fame on the NBC sketch comedy program Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968–1970), before receiving the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cactus Flower (1969).
Hawn appeared in such films as There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970), Butterflies Are Free (1972), The Sugarland Express (1974), Shampoo (1975), Foul Play (1978), Seems Like Old Times (1980), and Private Benjamin (1980), for which she was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar.
She later starred in Overboard (1987), Bird on a Wire (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992), Housesitter (1992), The First Wives Club (1996), The Out-of-Towners (1999), and The Banger Sisters (2002).
Hawn made her return to film with roles in Snatched (2017), The Christmas Chronicles (2018), and The Christmas Chronicles 2 (2020).
Hawn is the mother of actors Oliver Hudson, Kate Hudson, and Wyatt Russell. She has been in a relationship with Kurt Russell since 1983.
In 2003, she founded The Hawn Foundation, which educates underprivileged children.
Hawn was born in Washington, D.C. to Laura (née Steinhoff), a jewelry shop-dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a musician and conductor, descendent of Edward Rutledge, the youngest signatory of the Declaration of Independence.
She was named after her mother’s aunt. She has one sister, entertainment publicist Patti Hawn; their brother, Edward Jr., died in infancy before Patti was conceived. The girls were unaware of their deceased brother’s existence growing up.
Her father was a Presbyterian of German and English descent. Her mother was Jewish, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Hungary.[6][7][8][9][10][11] Hawn was raised Jewish[4][6][12][13] in Takoma Park, Maryland,[14] and attended Montgomery Blair High School in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland.[15]
Hawn began taking ballet and tap dance lessons at the age of 3 and danced in the corps de ballet of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo production of The Nutcracker in 1955.
She made her stage debut in 1964, age 19, playing Juliet in a Virginia Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet.
In 1964, Hawn ran and taught in a ballet school, having dropped out of American University where she was majoring in drama. She 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 go-go dancer in New York and at the Peppermint Box in New Jersey.
Hawn moved to California to dance in a show at Melodyland Theatre, a theater in the round across from Disneyland, joining the chorus of Pal Joey and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying during the June 14 to September 1966 season.
Hawn began her acting career as a cast member of the short-lived sitcom 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.[4]
Her next role, which brought her to international attention, was also as a dumb blonde, as one of the regular cast members on the 1968–1973 sketch comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Hawn often broke out into high-pitched giggles in the middle of a joke, then delivered a polished performance a moment after. Noted equally for her chipper attitude as for her bikini-attired and painted body, Hawn was seen as a 1960s “It” girl.
Her 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 made her 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 major film role, in Cactus Flower (1969), she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Walter Matthau’s suicidal fiancée. The same year, she appeared in The Spring Thing, a television special hosted by Bobbie Gentry and Noel Harrison. Other guests were Meredith MacRae, Irwin C. Watson, Rod McKuen, Shirley Bassey and Harpers Bizarre.[23]
After Hawn’s Oscar win, her film career took off. She starred in a string of successful comedies starting with There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970), $ (1971), and Butterflies Are Free (1972). She continued proving herself in the dramatic league in 1974 with the satirical dramas The Girl from Petrovka and Steven Spielberg’s theatrical debut The Sugarland Express. She then co-starred in Hal Ashby’s classic satire Shampoo (1975). 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 romantic comedy western 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, television star John Ritter (during his days on Three’s Company), and even the Harlem Globetrotters joined her for a montage. The special later went on to be nominated for a primetime Emmy. Four months later the film Foul Play (with Chevy Chase), was released and became a box office smash, reviving Hawn’s film career. The plot centered around an innocent woman in San Francisco who becomes mixed up in an assassination plot. Hawn’s next film, Mario Monicelli’s Lovers and Liars (1979), 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”.[24]
Hawn’s popularity continued into the 1980s, starting with another primetime variety special alongside actress and singer Liza Minnelli, Goldie and Liza Together (1980), which was nominated for four Emmy Awards. In the same year, Hawn took the lead role in Private Benjamin, a comedy she co-produced with her friend Nancy Meyers, who co-wrote the script. Meyers recalls Hawn’s reaction when she first described the idea for the story with Hawn as its lead:
It was like watching the greatest audience I’ve ever seen. She laughed and then she got real emotional and her eyes would fill up with tears. She loved the image of herself in an Army uniform and she loved what the movie had to say.[25]
Private Benjamin also stars Eileen Brennan and Armand Assante and garnered Hawn her second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actress.[4][26] Hawn’s box office success continued with comedies like Seems Like Old Times (1980), written by Neil Simon; Best Friends (1982), written by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson; Protocol (1984), co-written by Nancy Meyers; Wildcats (1986)—Hawn also served as executive producer on the latter two; and the World War II romantic drama Swing Shift (1984).
At the age of 39, Hawn posed for the cover of Playboy’s January 1985 issue and was the subject of the Playboy Interview.
Her last film of the 1980s was opposite partner Kurt Russell, for the third time, in the comedy Overboard (1987).
In 1990, she starred in the action comedy Bird on a Wire, a critically panned but commercially successful film that paired Hawn with Mel Gibson. Hawn had mixed success in the early 1990s, with the thriller Deceived (1991), the drama CrissCross, and opposite Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her (both 1992). Earlier that year, she starred in Housesitter, a screwball comedy with Steve Martin, which was a commercial success.
Hawn was absent from the screen for four years while caring for her mother, who died of cancer in 1994.[4] Hawn made her entry back into film as producer of the satirical comedy Something to Talk About starring Julia Roberts and Dennis Quaid and made her directorial debut in the television film Hope (1997) starring Christine Lahti and Jena Malone.[4] 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 starred in Woody Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and reunited with Steve Martin for the comedy The Out-of-Towners (1999), a remake of the 1970 Neil Simon hit. The film was critically panned and was a box office failure.[28][29] In 1997, Hawn, along with her co-stars from The First Wives Club, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler, received the Women in Film Crystal Awards.[30]
In 2001, Hawn was reunited with former co-stars Warren Beatty (her co-star in $ and Shampoo) 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 release.[32] In 2002, she starred in The Banger Sisters, opposite Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush, her last live action film for fifteen years. In 2005 Hawn’s autobiography, A Lotus Grows in the Mud, was published.
In 2013, Hawn guest-starred, along with Gordon Ramsay, in an episode of Phineas and Ferb, in which she provided the voice of neighbor Peggy McGee.
In 2017, Hawn returned to the big screen for the first time since 2002, co-starring with Amy Schumer in the comedy Snatched, playing mother and daughter.
In 2018, Hawn cameoed as Mrs. Claus in the Netflix film The Christmas Chronicles.[39] She played Mrs. Claus again, in a leading role, in its 2020 sequel The Christmas Chronicles 2.
Hawn has studied meditation. In a 2012 interview, she stated, “I don’t think of myself as a Buddhist. I was born Jewish, and I consider that my religion.” She also stated, “It’s not the idea of a particular religion that’s important; it’s the development of a spiritual life.”[40]
Hawn at the Cinema Against AIDS gala in May 2011
Hawn is a supporter of the LGBT community. Speaking on nations such as Nigeria and others which have criminalized gay people, she denounced these laws, stating, “This is man’s inhumanity to man, of the first order.”[41]
Marriages and relationships
Hawn’s pre-fame boyfriends included actor Mark Goddard and singer Spiro Venduras.[42] Her first husband was dancer (later director) Gus Trikonis, who appeared as a Shark in West Side Story. They married on May 16, 1969, in Honolulu and separated on April 9, 1973.[43][44] Hawn then dated stuntman Ted Grossman,[45] Swedish actor Bruno Wintzell[45] and Italian actor Franco Nero,[46] but did not file for divorce from Trikonis until New Year’s Eve 1975, after becoming engaged to musician Bill Hudson of the Hudson Brothers, whom she’d met the previous summer on a first-class flight from New York to Los Angeles.[47] Hawn was granted a divorce in June 1976 and married Hudson on July 3 in Takoma Park, Maryland.[48] They had two children, son Oliver (born September 7, 1976) and daughter Kate (born April 19, 1979). Hudson filed for divorce on August 15, 1980.[49] Hawn subsequently had romances with French actor Yves Rénier[50] and Moroccan businessman Victor Drai.[51] The divorce from Hudson was finalized in March 1982.[52]
Hawn has been in a relationship with Kurt Russell since Valentine’s Day 1983.[53] The couple first met while filming The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band in 1967, but became involved after reconnecting on the set of Swing Shift. They have a son together, Wyatt (born July 10, 1986).[54] In 2000 and again in 2004, news outlets reported that Hawn and Russell were on the verge of breaking up.[55][56][57][58] During the alleged separations, Hawn was linked to newsman Charles Glass and Pakistani former cricketer and former Prime Minister, Imran Khan.[59][60] Hawn and Russell, who celebrated 40 years together in 2023, own homes in Vancouver,[61] Snowmass,[62] Manhattan,[63] Santa Ynez Valley,[64] Brentwood;[65] and Palm Desert.[64][66][67] Hawn has revealed that she has no plans to marry Russell, stating that she “would have been long divorced if [she’d] been married,” and that she and Russell chose to stay together and they do not feel that marriage “cements” a relationship.[68]
The Hawn Foundation
In 2003, Hawn founded the Hawn Foundation, a non-profit organization which provides youth education programs intended to improve academic performance through “life-enhancing strategies for well-being”.[69][70] The Hawn Foundation has supported research studies conducted by external researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of its educational program for children, called MindUP.[71]
Filmography
1968 The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band Giggly Girl Michael O’Herlihy
1969 The Sidehackers Spectator Gus Trikonis Uncredited
Cactus Flower Toni Simmons Gene Saks Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
1970 There’s a Girl in My Soup Marion Roy Boulting
1971 $ Dawn Divine Richard Brooks
1972 Butterflies Are Free Jill Tanner Milton Katselas
1974 The Sugarland Express Lou Jean Steven Spielberg
The Girl from Petrovka Oktyabrina Robert Ellis Miller
1975 Shampoo Jill Haynes Hal Ashby
1976 The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox Amanda Quaid / Duchess Swansbury Melvin Frank
1978 Foul Play Gloria Mundy Colin Higgins
1979 Lovers and Liars Anita Mario Monicelli
1980 Private Benjamin Judy Benjamin Howard Zieff Nominated for Academy Award for Best Actress.
Seems Like Old Times Glenda Parks Jay Sandrich
1982 Best Friends Paula McCullen Norman Jewison
1984 Swing Shift Kay Walsh Jonathan Demme
Protocol Sunny Davis Herbert Ross
1986 Wildcats Molly McGrath Michael Ritchie
1987 Overboard Joanna Stayton / Annie Proffitt Garry Marshall
1990 Bird on a Wire Marianne Graves John Badham
1991 Deceived Adrienne Saunders Damian Harris
1992 CrissCross Tracy Cross Chris Menges
Housesitter Gwen Duncle / Buckley / Phillips Frank Oz
Death Becomes Her Helen Sharp Robert Zemeckis
1996 The First Wives Club Elise Elliot Atchison Hugh Wilson
Everyone Says I Love You Steffi Dandridge Woody Allen
1999 The Out-of-Towners Nancy Clark Sam Weisman
2001 Town & Country Mona Morris Peter Chelsom
2002 The Banger Sisters Suzette Bob Dolman
2012 Hot Flash Havoc Narrator Marc Bennett Documentary
2017 Snatched Linda Middleton Jonathan Levine [72]
SPF-18 Narrator Alex Israel [73]
2018 The Christmas Chronicles Mrs. Claus Clay Kaytis Cameo [74]
2020 The Christmas Chronicles 2 Chris Columbus
