Who is Gwyneth Paltrow, really?

Some people love her unapologetic defiance and strong sense of style; others condemn her flagrant advice-giving and air of mirthful superiority. When the cameras are off, something that '90s movie darling-turned-wellness magnate Gwyneth Paltrow seems to always be is authentic, says New York writer Amy Odell.

That doesn't mean the 52-year-old is always that "smiley, chatty, happy" person who charms late-night talk show hosts, though, the Gwyneth author says.

"She can be icy, very businesslike when she's at [her lifestyle company] Goop… I was really surprised by this, but people compared her to [notoriously cold former Vogue editor-in-chief] Anna Wintour," Odell tells Saturday Morning.

The New York writer got the go-ahead from Dame Wintour herself to interview friends and acquaintances for her previous book Anna: The Biography (2022). After Gwyneth declined her request for this authorisation, Odell says she "really had to dig" to craft a complete and nuanced portrait of the Goop founder.

For Gwyneth, she interviewed over 220 people who've crossed the Oscar winner's path, including former friends, current friends, film colleagues and ex-employees from Goop.

While the Los Angeles Goop HQ can be a tough place to work, they told Odell, the "nice" thing about Gwyneth as a boss is her crystal clarity in identifying what she likes to staff members and communicating that to staffers who craft and market products that are "an extension of her image".

Another plus for Gwyneth's leadership, several former Goopers said, is her excellent copy editing skills, which Odell suspects were developed by reading and working with scripts from a very young age.

Gwyneth was just a toddler when she first stepped onstage, playing bit parts in the Chekhov plays that her mother, acclaimed actress Blythe Danner, starred in every summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.

Later, as an aspiring film actress, the ability to be "very, very comfortable" on a movie set, which she'd first experienced at just 12 days old, was a really big asset for Gwyneth, sources told Odell.

"You always saw the kids of people like Blythe and Bruce," or, "I knew Blythe and Bruce, so of course I wanted to see Gwyneth," the casting agents and directors of her early films said.

Despite being what many people described as "really smart", the teenage Gwyneth had no interest in education, Odell's sources said, perhaps - she guesses - because of an assumption that as Blythe and Bruce's daughter, her fate as a performer was "already sealed".

After graduating from an elite all-girls school in New York City, Gwyneth tried studying history for a year at UC Santa Barbara before launching her movie career with Shout in 1991.

In subsequent films, she excelled at playing "upper-crust, aristocratic, glamorous type" people not unlike herself, Odell says, including Emma (1996), A Perfect Murder (1998) and Shakespeare in Love (1998) for which she won Best Actress at the 1999 Oscars.

But although Gwyneth had been "so, so praised" before the Academy Awards ceremony - to which she wore a baby pink gown and a diamond earrings-and-choker set her father later bought for her - afterwards, the young actress received a lot of flak for "seemingly swanning into this acting career and had everything going for her".

Asking her sources how the then-26-year-old dealt with that first public pile-on, several told Odell that it never really bothered her.

"I think she learned to tune out the hate to a degree."

Although Gwyneth clearly inherited her mother Blythe's dramatic talent, her signature wry sense of humour is more a reflection of her father Bruce, Odell says.

"Polarising" is how some old friends describe the art school graduate turned Hollywood producer, who is most famous for the critically acclaimed '80s hospital drama St Elsewhere.

"He would say things that some people thought were hysterical, that others could be quite offended by."

In 2002, while Gwyneth was filming The Talented Mr Ripley in Italy, Bruce was diagnosed with throat cancer. On a father-daughter trip to Rome for her 30th birthday, suffering from its complications, he died.

As many people do when a loved one becomes ill, Odell says, Gwyneth went looking for answers. Why did this happen to her dad? And what was in the mysterious concoction that she'd helped him ingest through a feeding tube?

Just like that, "wellness" became for the young star a very high priority.

In 2008, feeling like she had "great recommendations to share with the world", Odell says, Gwyneth launched Goop - at first as a newsletter with tips on travel, restaurants, home decor and fashion.

When her recommendations for expensive items and experiences that most people could never afford were savaged by the media as "out of touch", the budding entrepreneur still seemed pretty unfazed.

"I am what I am. I can't pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year," Gwyneth famously told Elle UK in 2009.

Very early on, Goop became her platform for discussing wellness ideas such as the dangers of toxins, and why people should detoxify their bodies and homes via "clean eating" and "clean beauty", Odell says.

The critical reaction by medical experts to the products and practices Goop recommended - like a jade egg to help increase vaginal muscle tone and regular vaginal steaming - only served to make the lifestyle brand even more famous and spread its Gwyneth-backed ideas, she says.

In bringing a gorgeous aesthetic to an industry that's "all about toxins and parasites and death, really", Gwyneth is a major innovator, Odell says.

Because their boss was such a "smart and savvy" person, former Goop employees said, her choice to promote controversial wellness gurus like Anthony William - a "medical medium" who has claimed he can "read" cancer - was often very confusing.

Maybe moving through the world as a famous movie star for decades, you get used to people not questioning the value of your ideas, Odell guesses.

As wellness culture mingles with US Health Secretary RFK Jr's controversial Make America Healthy Again movement, she finds Gwyneth's health messaging has "some overlap" with that of her fellow raw dairy fan.

"Both have sown a distrust of the medical establishment, Western medicine, and established science."

Looking back, the controversial "wellness" products Gwyneth recommended over a decade ago seem "really quaint" compared to today's morass of online medical misinformation, Odell says.

In a global industry that is now outpacing "Big Pharma", Gwyneth Paltrow holds a powerful amount of influence.

"Gwyneth is a really effective spokesperson and face of an industry that's deeply flawed and deserves a lot more scrutiny."

Fans of Gwyneth's acting might be interested to learn that at the end of the year, she will step out of semi-retirement and hit the big screen with Timothee Chalamet in the new Josh Safdie-directed film Marty Supreme.

Playing a frosty, fancy woman who has a lot of sex with a young ping-pong prodigy, Gwyneth's turn in Marty Supreme seems like a return to the kind of roles that made her a star 30 years ago, Odell says.

"It'll be interesting to see what happens with her acting career now."