Gwyneth Paltrow Says Focus on Her 1999 Oscar Win Caused Her to Experience ‘Identity Crisis’

The actress sat down on the Call Her Daddy podcast to talk about her life and career. She shared a few details about the “disorienting” pressure she felt surrounding her 1999 Oscar win for Best Actress. She won the award for her role in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love.

Accomplishments

“I should start by saying, I was so driven, I was working so hard and I didn’t know exactly what I was working towards,” she told host Alex Cooper. “I just wanted to be successful and to be well-regarded. I was on this kind of on this really fast track and it all happened so quickly, which is what I think you’re alluding to. For somebody like me, who I think I was working through a lot of the harder parts of my growing up through achieving success.”

“Once I won the Oscar, it put me into a little bit of an identity crisis, because if you win the biggest prize, like what are you supposed to do?” she added. “And where are you supposed to go? It was hard, like, the amount of attention that you receive on a night like that and the weeks following is so disorienting and frankly, really unhealthy.“

She talked about how overwhelming the entire experience was, but she doesn’t regret the achievement. “Not that I would give it back or anything, it was an amazing experience, but it kind of called a lot of things into question for me.”

The actress also talked about the press coverage surrounding her emotional acceptance speech at the 1999 Oscars ceremony. She expressed her gratitude to her mom, Blythe Danner, and her late father, Bruce Paltrow. Her grandfather was battling cancer at the time of her Oscar win.

An Unwelcome Shift

“I felt a real pivot on that night, because I felt like up until that moment everybody was kind of rooting for me in a way,” Paltrow shared. “And then when I won, it was like too much, and I could feel a real turn.”

“I remember the British press being so horrible to me because I cried,” she continued. “They didn’t necessarily know that my grandfather was dying of cancer, my dad who was in the audience with me had had all this crazy cancer treatment and he was really debilitated. It was just this totally overwhelming moment, and, you know, I was 26.”

“I cried and people were so mean about it and I just thought, ‘Wow, there’s this big energy shift that’s happening,’ ” Gwyneth shared. “I think I’m going to have to learn to be less openhearted and much more protective of myself and filter people out better.’ It was like this big reckoning, in a way.”

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