Gwyneth Kate Paltrow

Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Blythe Danner, an actress, and Bruce Paltrow, a film and television director and producer. Paltrow's father was of Ashkenazi Russian Jewish descent and her mother is a Quaker of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. Paltrow's paternal great-grandfather, whose surname was "Paltrowicz", was a rabbi in Nowogród, Poland. Paltrow was raised in Santa Monica, where she attended Crossroads School, before moving and enrolling in The Spence School, a private girls' school in New York City. Later, she briefly studied art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before dropping out to act. Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a half-cousin of actress Katherine Moennig, and a second cousin of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08). She is an "adopted daughter" of Talavera de la Reina (Spain), where at 15 she spent a year as an exchange student and learned to speak Spanish. Paltrow is a childhood friend of Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph.
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