Goldie Hawn

Goldie Jeanne Hawn (born November 21, 1945) is an American actress, film director, producer, and occasional singer. Hawn is known for her roles in television's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and films like Private Benjamin, Foul Play, Shampoo, Overboard, Bird on a Wire, Death Becomes Her, The First Wives Club, and Cactus Flower, for which she won the 1969 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She is the mother of actors Oliver and Kate Hudson. Hawn has maintained a relationship with actor Kurt Russell since 1983. --- Hawn was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Laura (née Steinhoff; November 27, 1913 – November 27, 1993), a jewelry shop/dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn (September 28, 1908 – June 7, 1982), a band musician who played at major events in Washington. She was named after her mother's aunt. She has a sister, Patricia; her brother, Edward, died as an infant before Goldie's birth. Through her father, Hawn is a direct descendant of Edward Rutledge, the youngest signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Hawn was raised in Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and attended Montgomery Blair High School in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland. Her father was Presbyterian and her mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Hungary; Hawn had a Jewish upbringing. Hawn began taking ballet and tap dance lessons at the age of three, and danced in the chorus of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production of The Nutcracker in 1955. She made her stage debut in 1961, playing Juliet in a Virginia Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet. By 1964, she ran and taught in a ballet school, having dropped out of American University, where she was majoring in drama. In 1964, Hawn made her professional dancing debut in a production of Can-Can at the Texas Pavilion of the New York World's Fair. She began working as a professional dancer a year later, and appeared as a go-go dancer in New York City. --- Hawn began her acting career as a cast member of the short-lived situation comedy Good Morning, World during the 1967-1968 television season, her role being that of the girlfriend of a radio disc jockey, with a stereotypical "dumb blonde" personality. Her next role, which brought her to international attention, was as one of the regular cast members on the 1968–1973 sketch comedy show, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. On the show, she would often break out into high-pitched giggles in the middle of a joke, and deliver a polished performance a moment after. Noted equally for her chipper attitude as for her bikini and painted body, Hawn was seen as something of a 1960s "It" girl. Her Laugh-In persona was parlayed into three popular film appearances in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Cactus Flower, There's a Girl in My Soup, and Butterflies Are Free. Hawn had made her feature film debut in a bit role as a giggling dancer in the 1968 film The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, in which she was billed as "Goldie Jeanne", but in her first major film role, in Cactus Flower (1969), she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Walter Matthau's suicidal fiancée. After Hawn's Academy Award win, her film career took off. She starred in a string of above average and successful comedies starting with There's a Girl in My Soup (1970), $ (1971), and Butterflies Are Free (1972). She continued proving herself in the dramatic league with the 1974 satirical dramas The Girl from Petrovka and The Sugarland Express, and Shampoo in 1975. She also hosted two television specials: Pure Goldie in 1971 and The Goldie Hawn Special in 1978. --- At the age of thirty-nine, Hawn posed for the cover of Playboy's January 1985 issue. Hawn posed in a giant martini glass wearing nothing but a white collar shirt, a loosened black tie, and a pair of red stilettos. Her last film of the 1980s was opposite partner Kurt Russell for the third time in the comedy Overboard (1987). --- Hawn's first husband was dancer (later director) Gus Trikonis, who appeared as a Shark in West Side Story; his sister Gina played Graziella, Riff's girlfriend. Her second husband was Bill Hudson, of the Hudson Brothers; the couple married in 1976 and divorced in 1980. They have two children, actor Oliver Hudson (born September 1976) and actress Kate Hudson (born April 1979). Hawn has been in a relationship with actor Kurt Russell since 1983. They had first met while filming The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (1968), but became involved only after meeting on the set of Swing Shift. They have a son, Wyatt Russell (born 1986). Hawn is the stepmother of Kurt Russell's son Boston, and she became a grandmother in 2004 when her daughter gave birth to son Ryder Russell Robinson. Her second grandson, Wilder Brooks Hudson, was born to her son Oliver and his wife, actress Erinn Bartlett, in 2007. In 2010, Oliver and his wife had another boy, whom they named Bodhi Hawn Hudson. Her daughter Kate gave birth to her fourth grandson, named Bingham Hawn Bellamy, in July 2011. Her son Oliver welcomed his first girl and Goldie's first granddaughter in July 2013, named Rio.