Goldie Hawn, Back On The Big Screen

She made her career as a ditsy blonde, but this Oscar-winner is one smart cookie. Now, after a 15-year career hiatus, she’s back on the big screen with fellow comedy actress Amy Schumer.

- Michelle Davies

At the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in Washington DC one June evening in 1956, the cast is preparing for the start of The Nutcracker when the star due to play Clara is taken ill. Her understudy, 11-year-old Goldie Hawn, steps in, but the director neglects to give the young dancer stage directions for the close of her pivotal scene with the Sugar Plum Fairy. Instead of slipping into the wings as Clara is meant to do, Hawn cheekily steps to the front to take a bow alongside the prima ballerina, much to the audience’s delight. ‘I stay right where I am, curtseying from the waist repeatedly to the crowd, [then] I flounce offstage,’ Hawn recalled. It was that night her career truly began. Now 71, Hawn is one of the world’s best-loved actresses. This year, she celebrates the 50th anniversary of her first screen appearance and in May returns to acting after a 15-year hiatus to star with Amy Schumer in comedy Snatched.

Born Goldie Jeanne Hawn in Washington DC on 21 November 1945, Hawn’s father, Edward, was a musician, while her mother Laura worked at a jewellery shop and taught dance. It was no surprise when Hawn, one of three children, followed in her parents’ creative footsteps. In 1961, aged 16, she made her acting debut as Juliet in a Virginia Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo And Juliet. After graduating she enrolled at a private university in DC to study drama but dropped out at 18 to run her own dance school.