Nearly 25 years after losing her father, Gwyneth Paltrow is opening up about how his death pushed her into depression.
On a recent episode of the goop podcast — since removed from YouTube but still available in audio — Paltrow sat with actress Kelly Rutherford to talk about grief and healing.
Her father, filmmaker Bruce Paltrow, passed away in October 2002 at age 58 after a battle with oral cancer. He had been married to Paltrow’s mother, Blythe Danner, since 1969.
“My father died kind of suddenly when I was 30. And about two weeks later, I was on the set of a film, and luckily I was playing Sylvia Plath,” Paltrow recalled of filming the 2003 biopic Sylvia. “My depression definitely aided me in my work. If I had had to do something where I wasn’t letting myself be completely swallowed in pain, there’s just no way I could have… I don’t think I could have done it.”
In the film, Paltrow portrayed Plath, the acclaimed poet and novelist who battled depression and mental illness before her death by suicide at 30 in 1963.
Paltrow said that art became her outlet for coping. “We all have go through and pain and trauma of our own kinds. And that was the thing about being an artist,” she explained. “I mean, I barely do it now, but the thing about about being an actor that I think was really healthy for me, was to transmute the human experience and my own pain, and mix it around in there like a centrifuge, and then have it come out in a part.”
When Paltrow lost her father, she leaned on then-husband Chris Martin for support. The Coldplay frontman even penned the band’s 2005 hit “Fix You” as a tribute to her grief. The couple eventually split in 2016 after 13 years of marriage.
