SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA

Gwyneth Kate Paltrow born September 27, 1972 is an American actress. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991.

Paltrow gained early notice for her work in films such as Se7en (1995), Emma (1996) (in which she played the title role) and Sliding Doors (1998). She garnered worldwide recognition through her performance in Shakespeare in Love (1998), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, for Outstanding Lead Actress and as a member of the Outstanding Cast. Since then, Paltrow has portrayed supporting as well as lead roles in films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Shallow Hal (2001), and Proof (2005), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in Motion Picture Drama. In 2008, she appeared in the highest grossing movie of her career, the superhero film Iron Man (2008), and then reprised her role as Pepper Potts in its sequel, Iron Man 2 (2010). Paltrow has been the face of Estée Lauder's Pleasures perfume since 2005. She is married to Chris Martin, the lead vocalist of Coldplay.

Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Blythe Danner, an actress, and Bruce Paltrow, a film and television director and producer. Paltrow's father was of Ashkenazi Russian Jewish descent; her mother is a Quaker of Pennsylvania Dutch and more distant white Barbadian ancestry.Paltrow's paternal great-great-grandfather, whose surname was "Paltrowicz", was a rabbi in Nowogród, Poland. Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a half-cousin of actress Katherine Moennig, and a second cousin of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords

Paltrow is a childhood friend of Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph. She was raised in Santa Monica, where she attended Crossroads School, before moving and enrolling in The Spence School, a private girls' school in New York City.[citation needed] Later, she briefly studied art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before dropping out to act.[citation needed] She is an "adopted daughter" of Talavera de la Reina (Spain), where at 15 she spent a year as an exchange student and learned to speak Spanish.