The Perils of Fame
- Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow recently talked about the perils of fame, and how her late father helped her to be more grounded.
- The late director Bruce Paltrow died from throat cancer in 2002 at 58, and Gwyneth reflected on his stellar parenting skills in the interview.
- A leading expert tells SurvivorNet that throat cancer can be caused by HPV, which affects both women and men.
The daughter of actress Blythe Danner, 78, and late director Bruce Paltrow, joined Scary Movie star Anna Farris on her Unqualified podcast to talk celebrity, personal growth, and shared memories of her father, who died from throat cancer in 2002 at 58.
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“I think our culture idealizes fame so much, and I actually think it’s [a] pretty terrible thing to be famous, if our purpose on the planet is for human development and to really become the truest, best version of ourselves,” she shared. “I think fame is a huge impediment to that, and I've had to work really hard to separate the fame from who I am.”
Paltrow explained how she wished she would have known how to separate herself from the fame back in her 20s when she was getting faxed different press clippings from her publicist and letting Us Weekly or The New York Times determine whether or not she would feel good that day.
“And literally six months into it, I said, ‘I have to stop this. This is not healthy. This has nothing to do with me. I’m getting, like, excited if somebody writes something good. I’m getting depressed if somebody writes something bad. This is none of my business.'” These days, she is not letting outside opinions get to her.
The natural beauty, who was married to Coldplay singer Chris Martin, the father of their two children, Apple, 16, and Moses Martin, 14, has toned down the film work, but recently starred in The Politician series in 2020. She reminisced about working with her dad.
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“I was doing a movie in Vancouver. My dad was directing, and he was recovering from this crazy cancer surgery at the time, and I’m so glad that I was focusing on him,” she said. “My whole family was there, my brother [director Jake Paltrow] and my mom, we were just kind of like all banded together as a family to get my dad through this movie, which was really hard. And thank god I had that to focus on, because it was the weirdest, most surreal time.”
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Paltrow commended her father’s parenting. He really stressed the importance of his kids earning their own money and said they weren’t entitled to his earnings.
“And so he said, ‘You can enjoy this while you’re here, and I love you, and I’m gonna share this with you while you live with me, but when you’re done, you’re done.’ Like, ‘I’m not giving you a penny, I will never help you,’ and he stuck to it,” Paltrow recalled. “So, you know, we had jobs after school. My brother worked at the deli on the corner. I worked at a toy store. I worked at a ski store. I worked summer jobs. I worked. He’s like, ‘If you want money, you have to work for the money.’ So I think what that did was really instill in me this work ethic but also, at the same time, like, yeah, I was growing up in a beautiful, you know, townhouse in Manhattan. So it was a funny juxtaposition. It was a very valuable parenting lesson.”
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Paltrow, who is now married to writer Brad Falchuk, 50, is earning much heftier paychecks compared to her toy store days. She talked about winning an Oscar in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love and how weird it felt to get to that next level of status in her career.
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“When you have that much attention on you and that much kind of energy, it was really, really overwhelming,” she said. “I remember I was staying with my parents at their house in Santa Monica, and I just kinda, like, hid for three weeks afterwards. It was so intense, and I felt so … lonely’s the right word. It was really strange.”
Losing a Parent to Cancer
In a 2019 interview, Paltrow shared that her father had started feeling sick on a trip to Italy. He got double pneumonia and died on Oct. 3, 2002, the same week as her birthday. The Contagion star admitted that her father’s memory has helped her overcome the depressing time, especially around her birthday.
"For years, I would go into kind of the deepest depression of all time around my birthday and then I thought: 'I've got to reframe this somehow. My father would not want this for me,'" she said on the Armchair Experts podcast. The star even got married to her current husband close to where her father’s ashes are buried in the Hamptons so that he could be there in spirit.
Related: Having Oral Sex With Multiple Partners Can Increase Risk for Throat Cancer, Says New Study
"I still have a hard time with it," Paltrow confessed. "He was such an intentional father, and he was so observant and so deeply supportive and set us up to win all the time. And now … [I have kids] I'm like, 'F, I need to call my dad. I need to talk to my dad.' And I don't have that person. I have incredible people in my life, but I don't have their grandfather, who was also the greatest father in the world."
Turning Loss into Something Beautiful
Camila lost her mother when she was 23, but she filled the void with creativity, which comforted her since she felt like her mother was with her. “I actually took this sadness and let it motivate me,” she tells SurvivorNet. “I learned that it’s OK to be sad sometimes.”
Camila says that it makes you who you are and helps you teach other people to cope with their sadness.
“My mom was a very creative person. So I was actually able to take this very creative part of her and use that to define me, instead of just her death,” she said. “My outlet for it became writing and writing for my school magazine and publishing creative works about what had happened to me. I’ve learned to have it impact me in a positive way.”
Like Camila, Gwyneth carrying on in her father’s footsteps continues to connect her with his energy creatively.
The Loss of a Parent Fueled this Survivor’s Creativity
Throat Cancer Causes
Although it is not known what caused Bruce Paltrow’s throat cancer, it is important to stay educated on the risk factors.
Throat cancer can sometimes be caused by tobacco and alcohol use, and also by the human papilloma virus, or HPV, which is usually associated with women and can be a cause of cervical cancer. However, this sexually transmitted infection can also affect men, and the virus has been proven to cause throat cancer.
Dr. Jessica Geiger of the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center previously told SurvivorNet that both men and women can get cancer from HPV. "The strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer are the same strains of HPV that cause throat cancer,” she said. “The average patient with HPV-related throat cancer tends to be males in their 40s or 50s, who were never a smoker, or just a very light tobacco user."
Get the Facts: HPV Can Cause Cancer in Men Too
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