One of a relative handful of powerful female stars of the late 1970s and 1980s who has produced some of her own movies. Goldie Hawn combines a ditzy manner with an endearing vulnerability, which has resulted in her consistent personal popularity despite an uneven film career. Born to a musically inclined family - her father was a musician and her mother a dancing teacher - Goldie Hawn pursued a show-business career from an early age. Though she acted on stage as early as 1961 in a Virginia Stage Company presentation of Romeo and Juliet (she was Juliet), her passion was dancing.
At the age of 18 she arrived in New York and worked at the World's Fair and then danced as a go-go girl in a New Jersey strip joint. Not long after, she became a chorus girl in Las Vegas but was so fed up with her life that she gave herself two weeks to get a break or she was going home to Maryland. She got the break, being cast in a small role in an Andy Griffith TV special. Noticed on the air by an agent, she was offered a three-week stint on the new Laugh-In TV show, and her career quickly took off from there.
Though she had a short, unhappy run in the TV series "Good Morning World" in 1967, her early show-business persona was formed on the enormously popular Laugh-In, where she played a goofy, childlike airhead who giggled incessantly. Audiences loved her. So did film director BILLY WILDER, who saw her on the show and thought she would be just right for his film Cactus Flower (1969). Goldie Hawn was cast in the movie and came away with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. In an interview with Rex Reed, she candidly admitted, "My greatest regret is that I won an Oscar before I learned how to act."
Before hitting it big in the movies with Cactus Flower, Goldie Hawn could have been seen in a bit role in the Disney production of The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band (1968). After Cactus Flower, she worked steadily in the movies as a comedienne in such films as There's a Girl in My Soup (1970), Dollars (1971), and Butterflies Are Free (1972), all of which traded on Goldie Hawn's kooky image. In 1974, however, the actress surprised filmgoers by starring in The Sugarland Express, a stark drama directed by the then unknown STEVEN SPIELBERG. The film and Goldie Hawn received a shower of praise from the critics, but her fans seemed hesitant to accept her as a dramatic actress.
Goldie Hawn turned back to light comedy in such films as The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Shampoo (1975), and The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976). She entered her most successful period when she joined with CHEVY CHASE in Foul Play (1978). After stumbling with Travels with Anita (1979), she produced and starred in Private Benjamin (1980), a film that earned more than $100 million and vaulted her into the top echelon of female movie stars.
The hits kept coming. Seems Like Old Times (1981) reunited her with Chevy Chase, and Best Friends (1982) was a favorite of the critics. Subsequent efforts in the mid- to late 1980s, however, have been less well received. Her production of Swing Shift (1984) was a box-office disappointment, and Protocol (1984) was a pallid imitation of Private Benjamin.
She appeared on screen with less frequency in the late 1980s, making little impact in such light comic fare as Overboard (1987), in which she starred with boyfriend Kurt Russell. A sparkling talent of the 1980s, Goldie Hawn continued to work into the next decade but not so frequently, probably because the roles just were not there.
She was lamely on the lam with MEL GIBSON in Bird on a Wire (1990), then on a quest to determine the true identity of her deceased husband in Deceived (1991), before dishing it out as a waitress and letting it all hang out in Crisscross (1992). In Death Becomes Her (1992), she was more fortunate because she was cast with the popular MERYL STREEP. In this film, an in-shape Goldie Hawn is in competition with a chubby Streep in a satire on Hollywood's obsession with youth and fitness The First Wives Club (1996) demonstrated that Goldie Hawn could get along with "sisters" DIANE KEATON and Bette Midler as the trio seek revenge on their ex-husbands and unite to help other women.
Like many other stars, she finally appeared in a WOODY ALLEN film Everyone Says I Love You (1996). In a remake of NEIL SIMON's The Out-of-Towners (1999), she worked well with STEVE MARTIN, matching comic wits with him. After appearing in the disastrous Town and Country (2001), she starred with SUSAN SARANDON in the somewhat well-received comedy The Banger Sisters (2002).
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