Sam Amico
At first, Gwyneth Paltrow wanted no part of her role in Shakespeare in Love.
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You may remember that Paltrow went on to win an Oscar for the movie, which came out in 1998. But she was coming off a breakup with Brad Pitt when the script arrived and, it seems, was in no mood to perform.
“The movie had many iterations,” Paltrow told Variety. “Julia Roberts was going to do it for a long time, and then that version fell apart. It ended up in Miramax, and I was the first person they offered it to.”
But again, she had her doubts.
Shakespeare in Love | ‘No Juliet’
“I was in the middle of a terrible breakup…and the idea of going to England and being far from home just seemed … I didn’t even read it,” she said. “I was just like, ‘I can’t read anything right now. I’m having a really hard time.'”
Paltrow actually was engaged to Pitt, who she started dating in 1994. She eventually broke it off after saying she was not yet ready for marriage. Pitt was the first fellow celebrity she dated.
Eventually, she did indeed pick up the script for Shakespeare in Love. She apparently couldn’t get enough of it once she gave it a whirl.
“I just couldn’t put it down,” she said. “It was perfect.”
The result was her winning the Best Actress award at the 1999 Oscars. It was presented to her by Jack Nicholson. The same Nicholson who had once asked Paltrow for a date.
“Jack Nicholson gave it to me,” Paltrow told Variety. “There’s a funny story where he’d been trying to ask me out before, and I was like, ‘I have a boyfriend!'”
In 2014, Gwyneth Paltrow began dating producer Brad Falchuk after meeting on the set of Glee in 2010. They went became engaged on January 8, 2018, and married on September 29, 2018.
