Gwyneth Paltrow nearly didn’t go to the Coldplay concert at Wembley Arena that would change her life.
Overwhelmed by grief following the loss of her adored father, Bruce Paltrow, to cancer just three weeks before, she told her childhood friend Mary Wigmore she didn’t feel up to it.
‘We need to get you out of the house and get some air,’ replied Wigmore. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here.’ Gwyneth finally relented.
Lead singer Chris Martin‘s assistant Vicki picked out Gwyneth in the crowd that night. ‘You want to meet your boyfriend after the show?’ she joked. A story was circulating that the two were dating after Gwyneth had been seen at an earlier Coldplay concert in New York – although they had never even met.
Gwyneth, who’d turned 30 a month earlier, agreed and, after the concert, spoke to the 25-year-old, blue-eyed Martin for the first time. ‘He was like Tigger the tiger bouncing around,’ she recalled.
Gwyneth thought Martin was ‘so sweet’, his curly hair reminding her of Bruce, though she didn’t expect to date him after that encounter.
But he called and asked her to come and see his show in Ireland. She resisted initially – then a friend pointed out that she was smiling for the first time since her father’s death.
As Gwyneth’s fame had grown, her relationships with her old friends changed. ‘Gwyn went totally Hollywood,’ said one. ‘She had a big falling-out with the closest friends she grew up with and went to school with – and now we don’t speak at all.’
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin in the image they used to announce their ‘conscious uncoupling’ in 2014
Even Bruce, whose daughter could seemingly do no wrong in his eyes, had sat Gwyneth down for a talk a year or two before his death. ‘You know,’ he had told her, ‘You’re getting a little weird. You’re kind of an asshole.’
Gwyneth was ashamed – ‘devastated’, she said. ‘But it turned out to be basically the best thing that ever happened to me.
‘It’s the difference between someone who loves you more than anything in the world giving you criticism and getting it from some bitter stranger on the internet.’
When the fashion designer Valentino threw a party in Rome in 2002 to celebrate her 30th birthday, Bruce accompanied her, although he hadn’t fully recovered from his illness. Her mother Blythe was filming a television show and couldn’t attend.
For her birthday, Bruce gave his daughter a letter, which she later described as saying that ‘everything up until that point had been a dress rehearsal, and that the life I had ahead of me was going to be so rich and full of amazing things’.
After their time in Rome, Gwyneth and Bruce rented a car and set out on a road trip through Italy, beginning in Umbria, with plans to head to Tuscany.
At some point during the trip Bruce started coughing up blood, which he tried to hide from his daughter. One night in Cortona, known for its sweeping views of the Tuscan countryside, they went to dinner, and Bruce gave Gwyneth some advice about respecting herself and her ambition.
He talked about how much he loved Blythe, and how their marriage had worked because they supported each other more than anyone else. He said his only regret in life was not having had more children, since Gwyneth and her brother Jake had brought him so much joy.
It was the last meal Gwyneth would ever have with her father. Within a day she realised how ill he was and a helicopter was arranged to take them to a hospital in Rome. There they learned his cancer had returned.
Bruce didn’t make it through the night and died of complications from the cancer and pneumonia before dawn on October 3. Gwyneth’s father, the love of her life, was gone.
Blythe and Jake immediately flew to Italy to be with Gwyneth. But she reportedly felt that Blythe hadn’t taken Bruce’s illness seriously enough when his health started deteriorating on the trip, leaving Gwyneth to endure his dying alone.
She later described to someone she worked with holding on to the anger she felt toward her mother in her liver.
At Bruce’s funeral Gwyneth paid tribute to her father. She later recalled, ‘I was so traumatised by his death; one of the things that surprised me so much was how the world kept going in its complete flurry of events. I couldn’t reconcile it. I was so devastated, and my heart was so broken.’
In the aftermath of her father’s death, Gwyneth came to an important conclusion: that she wanted to start her own family. She had thought about having a baby with a previous boyfriend, Owen Wilson’s brother Luke. But according to one of Gwyneth’s friends, he didn’t seem ready to be a parent.
Her dream of motherhood was about to come true.
Chris Martin came from a middle-class family in Devon. He had graduated from University College London with a first-class degree in Classics.
As a couple, Gwyneth and Martin were two very famous people struggling to preserve a private, more mindful version of themselves. Gwyneth liked morning yoga; Martin liked a morning jog. Gwyneth rarely drank alcohol; Martin didn’t drink or do drugs, once joking to a reporter, ‘I wear a habit.’
Gwyneth Paltrow with Madonna in 2010 at a charity event in New York. Chris Martin later told his then wife that he could no longer be around the singer, and Gwyneth ended the friendship
Both aspired to some kind of soulful, intellectual seriousness at a moment when their work was pulling them toward mass appeal and triviality.
Martin’s sobriety may have cast him, to Gwyneth, as an antidote to Ben Affleck and other ex-boyfriends. Yet her friends felt like something didn’t quite click between them. While Gwyneth was extroverted and loved entertaining friends, Martin was an introvert who could be socially awkward.
He seemed to always be writing music in his head, even when they had friends over. But he was incredible on stage, and Gwyneth, who was ready to settle down, was seduced by his persona.
What’s not to like, a friend pointed out, about a rock star who adores you? By August 2003, about to turn 31 and less than a year after meeting Martin, she was pregnant.
That autumn the couple retreated to a five-star hotel in Montecito with private luxury bungalows. After an early breakfast was delivered to their room, they drove into Santa Barbara and queued for a marriage licence, paying an extra two dollars to designate it ‘confidential’ instead of becoming public record.
A judge later reportedly came to their bungalow, where they were married in secret, with no guests, not even their parents. Gwyneth, then around four months pregnant, wanted the wedding to be for her and Martin.
Apple Blythe Alison Martin was born on May 14, 2004, weighing 9lbs 11 oz, after an emergency C-section at the private private St John & St Elizabeth Hospital where other A-list celebrities such as Kate Moss and Kate Winslet had given birth.
Gwyneth and Martin were ‘900 miles over the moon’, he announced in a statement. About the name Apple, Gwyneth told TV interviewer Oprah, ‘When we were first pregnant, her daddy said, ‘If it’s a girl, I think her name should be Apple.’ It sounded so sweet, and it conjured such a lovely picture for me, you know. Apples are so sweet, and they’re wholesome, and it’s biblical.’
Gwyneth Paltrow with her trainer Tracy Anderson, celebrating the launch of the Goop founder’s cookbook My Father’s Daughter in 2011
Gwyneth Paltrow at the Goop Lab in 2020. The idea for Goop, the lifestyle website that would earn her millions, was born after she moved to Los Angeles while filming for Iron Man. She started getting into the wellness fads then gaining traction among her ritzy LA friends
The summer after their baby was born, Gwyneth and Martin bought a five-bedroom town house in London’s Belsize Park area from Kate Winslet and her then-husband, Sam Mendes. According to friends, they genuinely believed they could have a ‘normal’ life in London.
It was during this period, as her personal life became more demanding. that Gwyneth began subtly altering the balance between her public and private selves. Although she had signed up to make Iron Man, her most commercially successful movie, she was gradually withdrawing from Hollywood. She wanted work that would allow her more time at home, to make money and reach an audience, playing herself rather than a role.
On April 8, 2006, Moses Bruce Anthony Martin was born, this time in New York. Describing in an interview what it was like to now have two children, Gwyneth sought to connect her experience to that of someone ‘normal’ while stumbling to acknowledge her privilege in the same sentence.
‘I do not know how single mothers have more than one child with no help. It requires so much of my life, and I don’t have to change sheets and clean toilets, you know. My hat – no, my clothes go off to the single mother with no help.’
Stepping on to the red carpet in Leicester Square for the London premiere of Iron Man in April 2008, Gwyneth wore a slightly punk black Balmain dress so short that one magazine headlined a story, ‘Did Gwyneth Forget Her Pants?’
Her bare, toned legs were a walking advertisement for her latest guru, fitness trainer Tracy Anderson, a petite blonde woman whose signature dance-cardio sessions had another fan in Madonna.
According to Anderson, Gwyneth had found out about her through a friend and had asked if she could train with her for Iron Man.
Anderson was initially not impressed. ‘I thought she’d have a supermodel body, because she was so tiny on top,’ she said. ‘But her butt was long and lifeless, and she held on to weight in her outer thighs.’
Gwyneth introduced Anderson to Madonna, but shortly afterwards the friendship of several years between the two celebrities fell apart. It reached breaking point when Madonna turned up on an island where Gwyneth and Martin were on holiday.
Madonna seemed to know that they would be there, which Gwyneth appeared to find strange, a friend remembered.
Madonna then insisted Gwyneth and Martin join her for a big group dinner at a long table where she started berating her daughter, Lourdes, in front of everybody. Gwyneth and Martin were disgusted by her behaviour.
‘I can’t be around this woman any more,’ Martin told Gwyneth. ‘She’s awful.’ Gwyneth agreed that Madonna was toxic and ended the friendship. Anderson later said that Madonna being demanding along with her lack of ‘consistency’ was ultimately why she stopped training her.
During the filming of Iron Man, Gwyneth moved her family to a rented house in Los Angeles and enrolled Apple in the same nursery she herself had attended. She set up a daily routine with Anderson, who had become a friend, and hired an assistant who ensured that the house was stocked with precut coconuts (she drank the water).
She started getting seriously into the wellness fads then gaining traction among her ritzy Los Angeles friends. Everything in her that felt unmoored after her father’s death, including the ‘asshole’ behaviour he had warned her about, found a corrective outlet in personal growth and improvement.
Gwyneth’s newfound commitment to wellness began to inform her public stance. After spotting an instant soup packet on the set of a short film she was directing in New York, she said, ‘I would rather die than let my kid eat Cup-a-Soup.’
She told an Italian newspaper, ‘Cancer has been the curse of my family. I am challenging these evil genes by natural means. I am convinced that by eating biological foods it is possible to avoid the growth of tumours. Today in my home we are all vegetarians and we only use organic soap and cleaners.’
The experts were up in arms. ‘Diet cannot prevent cancer,’ Ursula Arens, dietician at the British Dietetic Association, told one newspaper. ‘It is reasonable that the risks of some of them can be reduced with certain diets, but some cancers, alas, show no link to dietary factors.’
In early 2008, research group Sense About Science called out Gwyneth in a report on celebrities who made bogus health claims.
But Gwyneth was undaunted. With a guarantee of more Iron Man movies to come, and a huge payday to go with it, she sat at her kitchen table in London and began typing out a pet project she’d been kicking around for the past few months – a newsletter filled with her own personal recommendations for restaurants, travel, and more.
The idea for Goop, the lifestyle website that would earn her millions, had been born.
Gwyneth and Martin had been together nearly eight years when they spent her 38th birthday in Italy, going for long walks in the countryside, lazing around their rented cottage, holding hands, and drinking Barolo wine.
The kitchen table overflowing with tomatoes from the vine, peaches, basil, and eggs from a local farm: all the trappings of a lifestyle influencer’s getaway. And yet a revelation was asserting itself amid the autumn hillsides and fragrant evenings: the uncoupling had begun.
Gwyneth tried to ignore the feeling, a sense that despite their friendship and their shared sense of humour and taste in music and yoga, they ‘had never fully settled into being a couple’. As she put it later, ‘We just didn’t quite fit together. There was always a bit of unease and unrest.’
Her friends weren’t all that surprised. Gwyneth and Martin’s relationship seemed to grow from convenient timing more than anything else. After the honeymoon phase wore off, Gwyneth seemed to find him ‘dorky’, one friend said.
Plus, unlike his wife, Martin was an introvert whose mind always seemed to be on his music, which made for a household dynamic that guests found stilted and uncomfortable. The pair didn’t seem to have real chemistry, and friends wondered if she was ever really in love with him, or if the romance stemmed from extraordinary circumstances: Gwyneth devastated after losing her father, Martin presenting himself to help her pick up the pieces, singing his heart out to her at concerts in front of the tens of thousands in the stands.
Being in a relationship with a touring musician was innately difficult. After Martin married Gwyneth, Coldplay went on three world tours between 2005 and 2012, performing a total of 381 shows. Martin was worshipped by fans night after night.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin pictured in New York in 2003 – the year that they married
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin at the Sean Penn and Friends Help Haiti Home Gala in 2014
One person who knew the couple speculated that a rock star like Martin – though a wonderful father – would have had little room in his life for much else, which must have made parenting challenging. In addition to which Gwyneth herself was now involved with Goop, which she had set up in September 2008.
But she was, friends said, an incredible mother who loved her kids more than anything else and was happy to work less herself and take on a bigger share of the childcare. Unlike many celebrities, she hadn’t had a nanny for the first 14 months of her baby’s life. ‘When I had Apple, I just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her,’ she said.
By the time Gwyneth reached her fortieth birthday in 2012 she was hinting in interviews that the marriage was strained. ‘Sometimes it’s hard being with someone for a long time,’ she told Elle magazine. ‘We go through periods that aren’t all rosy. I always say, life is long and you never know what’s going to happen. If, God forbid, we were ever not to be together, I respect him so much as the father of my children.’
Around a year before they announced their break-up, Gwyneth later told a friend, she and Martin decided to see other people.
In the end a statement announcing the split was made on Goop’s website, beneath a headline that would become the most famous in the company’s history.
Gwyneth and Martin had worked on the story together. On March 25, 2014 Elise Loehnen, the head of content at Goop, waited for the phone call from her boss to tell her to hit send on a deeply personal story. On the other end, Gwyneth was trembling.
‘We have been working hard for well over a year, some of it together, some of it separated, to see what might have been possible between us, and we have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much we will remain separate,’ said the statement.
‘We are, however, and always will be a family, and in many ways, we are closer than we have ever been. We are parents first and foremost, to two incredibly wonderful children and we ask for their and our space and privacy to be respected at this difficult time.
‘We have always conducted our relationship privately, and we hope that as we consciously uncouple and co-parent, we will be able to continue in the same manner.’
It ended ‘Love, Gwyneth & Chris.’ The story was headlined ‘Conscious Uncoupling’.
The site got so much traffic it crashed.
Gwyneth said she saw her divorce as a failure. Her parents had stayed married in an industry where many couples split up.
Her childhood friends had married the college boyfriends they’d met when she was dating Brad Pitt. While she privately struggled to generate optimism about the separation, she found a way to do it publicly, to turn this painful, confusing failure into a project that might inspire and illuminate—and maybe boost the brand.
Gwyneth had heard about the concept of ‘conscious uncoupling’ from one of her gurus Habib Sadeghi, an integrative physician; he seemed to have heard of it from marriage and family therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas, who had coined the term in a 2004 book. Gwyneth liked the idea that even if she and Martin were no longer a couple, they could remain a family.
Martin was a little more candid: ‘[I]t was a very difficult period for about a year or so of feeling completely worthless and nothing to anybody.’ He had approved the newsletter and had been with Gwyneth when it went out, describing himself as ‘a mess’.
Explaining the break-up later, Gwyneth said: ‘There was nothing dramatic or anything. I had built my life on trying to be all things to all people, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I really had the sense that I wasn’t allowed to have needs. I just sort of hit a wall.’
She recalled that something had clicked for her after her fortieth birthday. ‘When I turned 40, I felt like I got this free software upgrade that I wasn’t expecting. It just happened. Suddenly I was like, ‘Oh, this is fantastic: I don’t care! I like myself, and I’m just going to live my life’.’
She said that she stopped worrying about being alone, or about disappointing people. ‘I chose myself,’ she said.
Adapted from Gwyneth by Amy Odell (Atlantic Books, £20), to be published July 31. © Amy Odell 2025. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 09/08/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
