Nearly twenty-five years after the death of her father, actress Gwyneth Paltrow reflected on falling into depression following his passing.
On a new episode of the goop podcast — which has since been taken down from YouTube, though the audio-only version is still live — Paltrow sat down with fellow actress Kelly Rutherford. About ten minutes into the show, the ladies discussed the process of healing after loss.
Paltrow's late father, director and producer Bruce Paltrow, died in October 2002 at 58 years old after battling oral cancer. The filmmaker had been married to Paltrow's mother, Blythe Danner, since 1969.
"My father died kind of suddenly when I was 30. And about two weeks later, I was on the set of a film, and luckily I was playing Sylvia Plath," Paltrow said about the 2003 biopic Sylvia. "My depression definitely aided me in my work. If I
had had to do something where I wasn't letting myself be completely swallowed
in pain, there's just no way I could have... I don't think I could have done it."
The Academy Award winner starred in Sylvia as the titular character, a famed poet and novelist who struggled with depression and mental illness until she died by suicide at age 30 in 1963.
Paltrow shared that it's been "art" that has helped her recover from sadness.
"We all have go through and pain and trauma of our own kinds. And that was the thing about being an artist," she explained. "I mean, I barely do it now, but the thing about about being an actor that I think was really healthy for me, was to transmute the human experience and my own pain, and mix it around in there like a centrifuge, and then have it come out in a part."
Supporting Paltrow at the time of her father's death was her now-ex-husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who wrote his band's 2005 single "Fix You" about his then-wife's grief. The former spouses divorced in 2016 after thirteen years of marriage.