Goldie Hawn turned a 'dumb blonde' giggle into an Oscar on her first major film
Goldie Hawn trained as a dancer from the age of three and was working as a go-go dancer in New York before television found her. Cast as a scatterbrained blonde on Laugh-In, she used that persona to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress with Cactus Flower, her first big screen role.
Born in Washington, D.C., on November 21, 1945, Hawn grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, in a Jewish household; her father was a musician and conductor descended from Edward Rutledge, the youngest man to sign the Declaration of Independence. In 1955 she danced in the corps of a Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo Nutcracker, and in 1964 she played Juliet at a Virginia Shakespeare festival after leaving a drama degree at American University.
Her first sitcom, Good Morning World, cast her as a disc jockey's airheaded girlfriend. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In repeated the type but made her famous: she would dissolve into squeaky laughter mid-joke and then land the line cleanly seconds later. Cactus Flower (1969), in which she played Walter Matthau's suicidal fiancée, earned her the Oscar, and comedies such as Shampoo followed.
She learned to run the business side too. For Private Benjamin (1980), the story of a woman who joins the army, she worked as co-producer alongside her friend Nancy Meyers, who co-wrote it, and the role brought a second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress. In 1972 she had even cut a country album, Goldie, with help from Dolly Parton and Buck Owens. Not every gamble paid off: Town & Country, budgeted at roughly 90 million dollars, took only about 7 million in North American cinemas.
Hawn stepped away for four years to nurse her mother, who died of cancer in 1994, then directed her first project, the television film Hope (1997). After The Banger Sisters in 2002 she made no live-action film until Snatched in 2017, opposite Amy Schumer. Off screen she founded the Hawn Foundation in 2003 to educate disadvantaged children, has called herself a Jewish Buddhist, and has been with Kurt Russell since 1983.
Source: Goldie Hawn
