• May 10, 1999
• Vol. 51
• No. 17

Gwyneth Paltrow: Actress

• 

From PEOPLE Magazine

Shakespeare isn't the only one. Everybody's in love with Gwyneth Paltrow. Whether she's sporting a fake mustache in Shakespeare in Love or celebrating all pink, perfect and teary at the Academy Awards, we can't get enough of the pale perfection of her skin, the promise perking in her mysteriously hooded eyes or the heat of her wide smile. Everyone has his own interpretation of the drama that is Gwyneth. For Shakespeare costar Geoffrey Rush, her grin wins. "It's generous and humble and provocative and sexy and vulnerable, all at the same time," he says. Casting director Leonard Finger finds her 5'9" figure "statuesque," and celebrity hairstylist Laurent calls the 26-year-old actress "a Grace Kelly for the '90s." Her grandfather Arnold "Buster" Paltrow always had Great Expectations. "She was beautiful from the beginning," he insists.

The daughter of actress Blythe Danner (Forces of Nature) and TV producer Bruce Paltrow (St. Elsewhere), Gwyneth has already caused much ado in the romance department, swirling from a 2½-year-long relationship with Brad Pitt to an intense passage with Shakespeare cohort Ben Affleck, which fizzled in January. Despite the amorousness—and the Oscar—Paltrow, who will next be seen with Matt Damon in the December thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, seems still in the midst of a midsummer night's dream. "Cameras were invented to photograph Gwyneth," says Great Expectations director Alfonso Cuarón. "She turns to the camera and it's like, 'Gulp!' " Which just goes to prove that love's labors are not lost.