The Full Biography
Goldie Hawn. Actress. The Takoma Park kid who made a giggle into a weapon, took an Oscar before thirty, and then built a household the town still uses as proof that a long unofficial marriage can be a life.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a bikini and a joke on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, or a soldier in Private Benjamin, or a mother who is also a punch line. What the still cannot show is Goldie Jeanne Hawn of Washington, D.C., and Takoma Park, a dance teacher’s daughter who treated timing as a trade, a producer who owned a hit before the town admitted she could, and a life with Kurt Russell that has lasted since 1983 without a license the weeklies could sell as a season.
She was born on November 21, 1945, in Washington. Her father, Edward Rutledge Hawn, was a Presbyterian band musician of German and English stock who played the events the capital still hired live music for. Her mother, Laura Steinhoff, was Jewish, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, and ran a jewelry shop and a dance school. Goldie was named for her mother’s aunt. A brother, Edward Jr., had died in infancy; a sister, Patti, became a publicist. The house was a barre and a cash register. She was raised in her mother’s religion in Takoma Park, Maryland. Ballet and tap started at three. At ten she was in the chorus of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s The Nutcracker. By nineteen she had dropped drama classes at American University and was running a ballet school of her own. The giggle the country would file as a personality was, first, a dancer’s count.
The door was not a studio test. It was chorus work and a go-go cage and then a short-lived sitcom, Good Morning, World (1967), as Sandy Kramer. Disney put her in The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (1968), a small part next to a young Kurt Russell she would not yet keep. George Schlatter put her on Laugh-In the same year: body paint, a bikini, a laugh that arrived a half-beat late and made the joke look accidental. The country decided she was the accident. She was not. She was a dancer who had learned that a room will underestimate a blonde if you let it, and that underestimation is a kind of cover. She stayed through 1970. The paint washed off. The timing did not.
Hollywood borrowed the giggle and then had to pay for the rest. Cactus Flower (1969), for Gene Saks, put her between Ingrid Bergman and Walter Matthau as Toni Simmons, a young woman who is supposed to be a plot device and becomes the reason the picture works. The performance is timing, not a tic. Best Supporting Actress, April 1970. She was twenty-four. It was her first major film role. She did not become only the girl from the paint. She became a person the town could not file as a sketch.
There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970) with Peter Sellers. $ (1971) with Warren Beatty. Butterflies Are Free (1972), from Leonard Gershe, opposite Edward Albert, a blind young man and a woman who will not be a caretaker on someone else’s terms. The Sugarland Express (1974) was Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical feature; she played a Texas mother who breaks a husband out of jail to get a child back. It is not a giggle picture. It is a woman who will wreck a highway rather than accept the state’s idea of a home. The Girl from Petrovka (1974) did not take. Shampoo (1975), for Hal Ashby, put her inside a Beverly Hills election-eve farce as Jill, a girlfriend who is also a weather. Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Lee Grant, Jack Warden. She held a corner of a satire the town still quotes. The 1970s were not a holding pattern after the Oscar. They were a star learning which rooms would take a dancer who could also play need.
Foul Play (1978) with Chevy Chase made her a San Francisco librarian in a thriller that wanted to be a date. It was a hit. She had become a person who could open a picture. Then she decided not to wait for the next offer to be the right offer. With Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer she developed Private Benjamin (1980). She produced. She starred. Judy Benjamin is a Philadelphia Jewish widow who joins the Army because grief has left her no better plan, and then discovers the plan can be hers. Eileen Brennan, Armand Assante, Robert Webber. The picture earned more than $69 million in the United States on a modest budget and got her a Best Actress nomination. The soldier is the civic object. The producing credit is the fact the stills skip. She was not a passenger in a hit. She was the shop.
The same year she did Seems Like Old Times for Neil Simon, with Chevy Chase and Charles Grodin. Best Friends (1982) with Burt Reynolds. Protocol (1984), another Meyers-Shyer construction, a cocktail waitress dropped into diplomacy. Swing Shift (1984), for Jonathan Demme, put her in a wartime aircraft plant opposite Kurt Russell. They had first shared a Disney frame in 1968. This time the set became a life. She had already married the director Gus Trikonis in 1969 and divorced him in 1976; she had married the musician Bill Hudson in 1976 and divorced him in 1982. Oliver Hudson was born in 1976. Kate Hudson was born in 1979. Russell had a son, Boston, from a previous marriage. Wyatt Russell was born in 1986. The household that the town still photographs as a dare began as a location romance the columns expected to expire. It did not expire.
Wildcats (1986) made her a football coach in an inner-city school, a physical comedy that used the dancer’s body without announcing it. Overboard (1987), for Garry Marshall, put her on a yacht as a spoiled heiress who loses her memory and wakes up in Russell’s Oregon carpentry. It is the picture the couple’s public still has to live next to. It is also a farce about class that the cassette generation filed as a love story. She was, for a stretch of the 1980s, the most complete comic actress the studios would bet a summer on: a producer’s judgment and a dancer’s attack and a face the camera still treated as weather.
Bird on a Wire (1990) with Mel Gibson. Deceived (1991), a thriller. Housesitter (1992) with Steve Martin. Death Becomes Her (1992), for Robert Zemeckis, opposite Meryl Streep and Bruce Willis, a black comedy about women who will not age on the industry’s clock. The effects were the ad. The performance is a woman who has already been told she is a body, playing a body that refuses to die. The First Wives Club (1996), with Bette Midler and Diane Keaton, made middle-aged revenge into a civic night out. It earned more than $181 million worldwide. She was fifty. The town that had typed her as a giggle now used her as proof that three women over forty could still open a weekend. The Out-of-Towners (1999) with Martin. The Banger Sisters (2002) with Susan Sarandon. Then the features thinned because she let them thin. She had a house to keep and a second job forming.
I don’t think of myself as a Buddhist. I was born Jewish, and I consider that my religion.Goldie Hawn
The turn is producing and the long household. A lot of Laugh-In faces became punch lines. She became a company and a grandmother who can still take a close-up. The pictures after 2002 are fewer on purpose. The influence is the house and a classroom program that treats children’s attention as a subject, not a photo opportunity. Both are work.
Six things most people never knew
- Takoma Park and a dance studio are the first floor. She taught. The giggle sits on a teacher’s count, not on a happy accident.
- The Oscar is 1969, before the soldier picture. Cactus Flower. Supporting. Her first major film. The town still files it as a surprise. The file treats it as a debut that was already a job.
- She produced Private Benjamin. Meyers, Shyer, a shop. Not a passenger in a hit.
- The Russell years began on a set in 1983 and never became a wedding season. Four decades. Three children in the blended house. The paper was optional.
- Kate Hudson is a public fact she has had to share and not own. A daughter who became a star. Father Presbyterian, mother Jewish; she has said she was born Jewish and considers that her religion.
- MindUP is a vocation about attention, not a fragrance. The Hawn Foundation, 2003. She has talked about her own anxiety as the door, not as a product.
Oliver, Kate, and Wyatt have had to share a mother the country still reduces to body paint. Friends from the Laugh-In years describe a professional who knew how long to let a laugh run. Colleagues from the producing years describe a woman who read a budget. Russell has said, without decoration, that they did not need a license to know what they were. The Hawn the columns wanted was a blonde who got lucky. The Hawn who showed up was a dancer who treated timing as a daily practice and a producer who kept the same partner from a wartime picture to a kitchen in Vancouver.
The later years
Home, after the soldier and the yacht, has been California and, for long stretches, Vancouver, a house that photographs as ordinary on purpose. She and Russell did not marry. They have said they did not need the paper. The town has used them as a template and as a dare for more than forty years. She has been, in interviews, frank about anxiety that arrived in the 1990s and about meditation she took up as a practice, not as a brand. In 2003 she founded the Hawn Foundation and MindUP, a classroom curriculum that teaches children to notice their own attention. The program has gone into schools in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and beyond. She wrote A Lotus Grows in the Mud (2005), a memoir that is not a souvenir book, and 10 Mindful Minutes (2011), a parents’ guide that treats a child’s brain as a subject a dancer could study. She did not become a wellness advertisement. She became a woman who had already been a climate and was now a colleague in a school hallway.
She did not vanish from a camera when the features thinned. She took the parts that were a choice. Snatched (2017) put her opposite Amy Schumer as a mother on a wrecked vacation, a physical comedy that used the old attack and did not apologize for the age on the face. She and Russell appeared together in The Christmas Chronicles (2018) and its 2020 sequel, him as Santa, her as Mrs. Claus, a joke the family could live inside. She has shown up for Kate’s premieres without turning the carpet into a transfer of title. She has kept the giggle available for a talk-show sofa and then gone home. Friends describe a professional who is sharper than the paint and more loyal than the 1968 still. She still dances in a kitchen. Russell still fishes. The town still wants a wedding. They have not provided one.
The honors arrived as furniture, not as a second career. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Women in Film Crystal Award. She has used the sofa interviews to talk about MindUP more than about a comeback. She is in her late seventies. The bikini is a clip. The shop, the house, and a curriculum that asks a child to notice a breath are the life. She has not retired in the industry’s sense. She has chosen the rooms. That is a different sentence.
What the Sunday still cannot hold is the count underneath: a Jewish household in Takoma Park, a barre, a sitcom that died, a paint job that lived, an Oscar before thirty, a soldier she owned, a man from a Disney lot she kept, three children who became public, and a foundation that treats attention as civic work. She has said the giggle was never the whole instrument. The decades after Laugh-In are the proof. The household is still the unofficial civic object. The classrooms are the unpaid rooms she chose.
After the spotlight moved
It moved to Kate and to the next dumb-blonde part that still steals the giggle and misses the Oscar. Private Benjamin still plays on a weekend. Overboard still plays when a couple wants the yacht joke. The First Wives Club still plays when three women in a theater want the night to be about them. MindUP still runs in classrooms. The household still photographs as a dare.
She came out of a dance studio, giggled on purpose, won before thirty, produced a soldier, built a house without a license, raised a star, and put attention on a curriculum. If you only remember Laugh-In, you have the still. If you remember Cactus Flower, the shop, and 1983, you have her.
Portrait: Nadja Amireh (getnoticed.de) · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons