From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
What could rock star Chris Robinson possibly find wanting in his bride of nearly two years, Kate Hudson? A member of Hollywood royalty whose career was cemented with an Oscar nomination at age 21 for Almost Famous, the beguilingly pretty actress, star of the just-opened Four Feathers, serves as the muse for the ex-Black Crowes front-man's songwriting and has helped wean him from an unhealthy rock and roll lifestyle. But it seems Hudson just can't make biscuits quite like Robinson's mama does. Recently, Hudson called her mother-in-law in Atlanta to make sure she had the right ingredients in her Manhattan pantry. She didn't, so the two of them improvised long-distance. Hudson got an A for effort. "She bakes pies from scratch," says Nancy Robinson, 63. "She's a real homebody."

There will surely be tougher challenges ahead for the unlikely couple—Hudson, 23, casually glamorous; Robinson, 35, glamorously scruffy—who wed on New Year's Eve, 2000 at the Colorado home of Hudson's lookalike mom, Goldie Hawn, 56, and Hawn's longtime partner, Kurt Russell, 51, after a seven-month courtship. (Hudson's father is singer-comedian Bill Hudson, Hawn's ex-husband.) But the previously married Robinson handily passed his equivalent of the biscuit test, contributing a song to Hawn's new movie The Banger Sisters. "Otherwise," he says with a laugh, "Kate might have kicked me out of the house." Hawn loved the song, "The Red Road," but more important, she says, "We love Chris. He fits in. He has a similar free-spirit, love-of-life thing we all have. He makes Kate smile, and that's all a mom can wish for."

And she makes him sing. On New Earth Mud—Robinson's first solo album to be issued during the extended hiatus of the chart-topping '90s band he formed with his brother Rich, 32, in 1984—his edgy southern rock has softened into ballads. On one of them, "Katie Dear," he waxes rhapsodic: "Watch her sleeping/With dreams in her mind/Her heart is beating/In perfect time with mine." Says musician Brit Turner, a friend from Atlanta: "This is like getting inside Chris's head. When you listen, you know he wasn't running around smashing chairs against the wall. He was feeling good about himself and life and love."

Especially love, given the synchronicity that keeps the couple on track despite two strong—and divergent—careers. After clicking at a party in New York City in May 2000, they moved in together just days later and have seldom been apart for long. "We try to, as much as we can, schedule our working life around each other," says Hudson. Because shooting commitments required her to go to England early last year for the 19th-century adventure tale The Four Feathers, that's where they spent their honeymoon. On the set, "he would just smile at her and watch," says director Shekhar Kapur. After the movie wrapped, Hudson packed up and joined the last Crowes tour. It was Robinson's turn again when Hudson shot the upcoming comedy-drama Le Divorce with Glenn Close in Paris earlier this year, nesting with her at a place they rented in the Marais district. Says his father, Stan Robinson, 62, a children's clothing salesman who was divorced from his mother in 1994: "They're like Velcro."

If the pairing of the rocker and the golden girl more than 12 years his junior has people scratching their heads, those who know them say there's a lot more than meets the eye. Despite her youth, Hudson is remarkably grounded, says Rob Reiner, her director in the romantic comedy Alex and Emma, which begins shooting Oct. 7. Aware of how hard she has to work to move out from her mother's shadow, "she has a lightness but also a serious take on the world," he says. Somehow Hudson has nudged Robinson toward a similar maturity. After a year of marriage, he announced he was going solo. And he has credited Hudson for helping him clean up. "There's been a mellowing," Stan Robinson says of his son, who signed his first record deal at 22. "Fewer drinks, fewer left-handed cigarettes [marijuana]." Now, says the singer, "I'm in such a better place as a husband, as a part of a family and a musician." The feeling is mutual, says actress Jessica Capshaw, a friend of Hudson's since childhood: "She's incredibly comfortable and really happy and settled."

The future, Hudson hopes, will bring what she has described as "millions of babies." But for now, domestic life means three dogs (Clara Bow, Bella and Dr. Zhivago) and romantic nights a deux. "I took her out in New York and she didn't know where we were going," Robinson says. "We went on a sailboat around the island and had dinner." More often, there are quiet afternoons at their homes in New York and L.A. "I cook, I knit; he watches TV, he writes," says Hudson. "We hang with each other." The biscuits can probably wait.

Tom Gliatto
Jeff Truesdell in Atlanta, Carrie Bell, Julie Jordan and Marisa Laudadio in Los Angeles and Peter Mikelbank in Paris