Goldie Hawn

• 1. Introduction

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  Goldie Hawn was born on the 21st of November 1945, and her first major film role won her an Academy Award. That is a startling debut for a performer who, only a short time earlier, had been known for giggling her way through a television sketch show. Over six decades she acted, danced, sang, produced and directed, and she collected an Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe along the way.

  Why did audiences fall for an actress whose trademark was a high-pitched laugh? How did she turn that image into a career that outlasted it? And what did she choose to build once the cameras were off?

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• 2. A Dancer First

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  Goldie Jeanne Hawn was born in Washington, D.C., to Laura, who owned a jewellery shop and a dance school, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a musician and conductor. Her father was a descendant of Edward Rutledge, the youngest signatory of the Declaration of Independence. She was named after her mother's aunt.

  A family secret hung over the household. Hawn has one sister, the publicist Patti Hawn, but a brother named Edward Jr. had died in infancy before Patti was conceived. The two girls grew up without knowing he had existed.

  Her father was a Presbyterian of German and English descent, while her mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Hungary. Hawn was raised Jewish in Takoma Park, Maryland. She attended Montgomery Blair High School in nearby Silver Spring.

  Dance came before acting. At the age of three she began ballet and tap lessons. In 1955 she danced in the corps de ballet of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo production of The Nutcracker.

  In 1964 she made her stage debut as Juliet in a Virginia Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet. That same year she dropped out of American University, where she had been studying drama, and ran and taught in a ballet school. Her professional dancing debut came in Can-Can at the Texas Pavilion of the New York World's Fair.

  A year later she was working as a professional dancer in earnest, including stints as a go-go dancer in New York City and at the Peppermint Box in New Jersey. Then she headed west. In the summer of 1966 she joined the chorus of Pal Joey and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at Melodyland Theatre, a theater in the round across from Disneyland.

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• 3. The Giggle

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  Good Morning World, a short-lived sitcom from the 1967-68 television season, gave Hawn her first acting job. She played Sandy Kramer, the girlfriend of a radio disc jockey. The part leaned on the stereotype of the dumb blonde.

  Her next role carried the same label but changed everything. As a regular on the sketch comedy show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, which began in 1968, she brought the character to international attention. She would break into high-pitched giggles in the middle of a joke, then deliver the next line with polish a moment later.

  Audiences noticed her cheerful attitude, and they noticed her bikini and painted body just as much. In the 1960s she was treated as an "It" girl. The persona was so popular that it was parlayed into three well-liked films in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  Her screen debut had come in 1968, in the western comedy The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. She played a giggling dancer in a bit role and was billed as "Goldie Jeanne". Later in 1969 she appeared in The Spring Thing, a television special hosted by Bobbie Gentry and Noel Harrison, with Shirley Bassey among the guests.

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• 4. Seventies Stardom

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  Walter Matthau's suicidal fiancée in Cactus Flower, a character named Toni Simmons, opened the door to a run of successful comedies. There's a Girl in My Soup followed in 1970, then $ in 1971 and Butterflies Are Free in 1972. Warren Beatty appeared opposite her in $ and again in Shampoo.

  In 1974 she showed she could handle drama as well. That year brought two satirical dramas, The Girl from Petrovka and The Sugarland Express, which was Steven Spielberg's theatrical debut. In 1975 she co-starred in Hal Ashby's satire Shampoo.

  Music ran alongside the movies. In 1972 she recorded a solo country album for Warner Brothers called Goldie, with help from Dolly Parton and Buck Owens. A review on AllMusic called it a "sweetly endearing country-tinged middle of the road pop record". The single "Pitta Patta" came out the same year.

  Television stayed in the mix too. She hosted a special called Pure Goldie in 1971. After The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox in 1976, she then stepped back from public life for two years to focus on her marriage and the birth of her son.

  The Goldie Hawn Special in 1978 worked as a comeback. She performed show tunes and comedy bits with the comic legend George Burns, the teen idol Shaun Cassidy and John Ritter of Three's Company. Even the Harlem Globetrotters joined her for a montage, and the special was later nominated for a primetime Emmy.

  Four months afterward came Foul Play, with Chevy Chase, about an innocent woman in San Francisco who is pulled into an assassination plot. It was a box office smash and revived her film career. Her next picture, Mario Monicelli's Lovers and Liars in 1979, was a box office bomb.

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• 5. Private Benjamin

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  Nancy Meyers, who co-wrote the script for Private Benjamin, remembered the moment Hawn first heard the story pitched. Meyers said: "It was like watching the greatest audience I've ever seen. She laughed and then she got real emotional and her eyes would fill up with tears. She loved the image of herself in an Army uniform and she loved what the movie had to say."

  Hawn took the lead in the 1980 comedy, playing a woman who enlists in the army, and she co-produced it with her friend Meyers. Eileen Brennan and Armand Assante also starred. The film earned Hawn her second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actress.

  That same year Hawn shared a primetime variety special with Liza Minnelli, Goldie and Liza Together, which was nominated for four Emmy Awards. Her box office run continued with Seems Like Old Times, written by Neil Simon, and Best Friends in 1982, written by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson.

  In 1984 she made Protocol, which Meyers co-wrote, and the World War II romantic drama Swing Shift. Wildcats followed in 1986. She served as executive producer on both Protocol and Wildcats, so her influence now reached behind the camera as well as in front of it.

  At thirty-nine she posed for the cover of the January 1985 issue of Playboy and was the subject of the magazine's interview. Her last film of the decade was Overboard, released in 1987. It was the third time she had starred opposite her partner Kurt Russell.

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• 6. Hits, Flops and Hiatus

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  Bird on a Wire, the 1990 action comedy that paired Hawn with Mel Gibson, was panned by critics but did well at the box office. The early 1990s were mixed for her. The thriller Deceived arrived in 1991, followed in 1992 by the drama CrissCross and by Death Becomes Her, in which she appeared with Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep.

  That year she also starred with Steve Martin in the screwball comedy Housesitter, a commercial success. Then she left the screen for four years to care for her mother, who died of cancer in 1994.

  Her return began behind the camera. She produced the satirical comedy Something to Talk About, starring Julia Roberts and Dennis Quaid. In 1997 she made her directorial debut with the television film Hope, starring Christine Lahti and Jena Malone.

  In 1996 she was back on screen as Elise Elliot, an aging and alcoholic actress, in The First Wives Club. The film was a critical and financial success. Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton recorded a cover of the Lesley Gore hit "You Don't Own Me" for its soundtrack, and in 1997 the three received the Women in Film Crystal Awards.

  Other singing credits followed. She covered the Beatles song "A Hard Day's Night" for George Martin's 1998 album In My Life. She also starred in Woody Allen's musical Everyone Says I Love You in 1996.

  Not every project landed. The Out-of-Towners, a 1999 remake of a 1970 Neil Simon hit, reunited her with Steve Martin but was panned and failed at the box office. In 1999 she was named Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year.

  Town & Country in 2001 was worse. Hawn joined former co-stars Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton for a comedy with an estimated budget of US$90 million, and it grossed only $7 million in North America. In 2002 she starred in The Banger Sisters with Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush, her last live action film for fifteen years.

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• 7. Love and Family

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  On the 16th of May 1969, Hawn married the dancer Gus Trikonis, who later became a director and had played a Shark gang member in West Side Story. They separated on the 9th of April 1973. She did not file for divorce until New Year's Eve 1975, after becoming engaged to the musician Bill Hudson of the Hudson Brothers.

  She had met Hudson the previous summer on a first-class flight from New York to Los Angeles. Her divorce from Trikonis was granted in June 1976, and she married Hudson on the 3rd of July in Takoma Park, Maryland, where she had grown up. Their son Oliver was born on the 7th of September 1976, and their daughter Kate on the 19th of April 1979.

  Hudson filed for divorce on the 15th of August 1980, and it was finalized in March 1982. Less than a year later, her story took its most lasting turn.

  Hawn has been in a relationship with Kurt Russell since Valentine's Day 1983. The two had first met while filming The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band in 1967. They became involved after reconnecting on the set of Swing Shift. Their son Wyatt was born on the 10th of July 1986.

  News outlets reported in 2000 and again in 2004 that the couple were close to splitting. They celebrated 40 years together in 2023. Hawn has said she has no plans to marry Russell and that she "would have been long divorced if she'd been married". She and Russell do not feel that marriage is what holds a relationship together.

  The couple own homes in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Snowmass, Colorado, and in Manhattan. In California they have homes in the Santa Ynez Valley, Brentwood and Palm Desert.

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• 8. Foundation and Return

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  In 2003 Hawn founded the Hawn Foundation, a non-profit organization offering youth education programs. Its stated aim is to improve academic performance through "life-enhancing strategies for well-being". Its program for children is called MindUP, and the foundation has supported studies by outside researchers that evaluate how well it works.

  Meditation is a long-standing interest. In 2012 Hawn described her religious beliefs as "Jewish Buddhist". Her autobiography, A Lotus Grows in the Mud, was published in 2005.

  She has also spoken on public questions. Of nations such as Nigeria that have criminalized gay people, she said: "This is man's inhumanity to man, of the first order." Politically, she endorsed Senator Ted Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic primaries and Senator Gary Hart in 1984. After those primaries she supported Walter Mondale for president.

  On screen, 2013 brought a guest spot in Phineas and Ferb, where she voiced the neighbor Peggy McGee in an episode that also featured Gordon Ramsay. In 2017 she returned to the big screen in Snatched, playing Amy Schumer's mother. That year she also received the 2,609th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  The Netflix film The Christmas Chronicles in 2018 gave her a cameo as Mrs. Claus. She played the part again, this time in a leading role, in the 2020 sequel The Christmas Chronicles 2.

  Her filmography now lists a 2026 documentary, I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not, directed by Marina Zenovich, in which she appears as herself. It brings her back to the co-star from Foul Play, four decades after that comedy revived her career.

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