Gwyneth Paltrow calls motherhood the 'inflection point' that made her step back from acting: 'The life was a little hard and lonely for me'
Gwyneth Paltrow says parenthood was the turning point in her life that made her take a step back from the big screen.
The Goop founder, who is mom to Moses, 16, and Apple, 18, spoke to Hailey Bieber on her YouTube series Who’s In My Bathroom, where Paltrow explained the reason why she chose to start her lifestyle brand after many years as a successful actress.
“I really loved the acting part of acting, but the life was a little hard and lonely for me,” the Oscar winner explained. “And then when I had my daughter, it was a real inflection point in my life where I really reassessed everything and I just thought, I'm not sure that I want to do this full time. And so I kind of stopped for a while and then I really liked how it felt. Just kind of being home and being out of the public eye.”
Instead, Paltrow said she turned to her passion for “cooking and traveling and wellness” in order to create Goop, which eventually went from a newsletter to a website and lifestyle brand.
Paltrow isn’t the first Hollywood star to make the shift away from acting after starting a family. In August 2021, Cameron Diaz spoke to Kevin Hart on his Peacock series Hart to Heart about moving away from her big screen roles after marrying her husband, Benji Madden, in 2015. The two welcomed their daughter Raddix in 2019.
"When you do something at a really high level for a long period of time, when you're the person that's sort of delivering on this one thing, everything around you, all parts of you that isn't that, has to sort of be handed off to other people,” Diaz, who released the wine brand Avaline in 2020, explained. “Just, the management of me as a human being … Cameron Diaz is a machine. But for my personal, spiritual self, I was realizing that one part of me that functioned at a high level wasn’t enough.”
She added that now, her routine is what she can “manage to do by myself.”
“I feel full. I met my husband, we started a family,” Diaz said at the time. “All those things that I didn’t have the time for before, and not just didn’t have the time for, but didn’t have the space to make the right decisions for me at the time.”
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