I didn't know if I'd still remember how to act!

Oscar-winning actress and Goop queen Gwyneth Paltrow on making her first 'real movie' for decades, embarrassing her children and why it's best not to have a plan B

- By Gabrielle Donnelly

UN-KISSED and glowing far more brightly than any 53-year-old has any right to and with her trademark blonde hair pulled back from her face and her enormous blue eyes shining with health Gwyneth Paltrow is certainly an advertisement for sticking to your guns.

An Oscar winner at the age of 25, she semiretired at 32, refusing almost all casting offers except for the running role of Iron Man’s secretary Pepper Potts in the Marvel Cinema’s Avengers franchise. Instead, she concentrated on raising her two children, Apple and Moses, by Chris Martin — her first husband and Coldplay’s frontman.

Along the way Gwyneth started a weekly lifestyle newsletter called Goop, which turned into a worldwide wellness juggernaut promoting everything from fragrances to home accessories to sex toys to an only-from-Gwyneth mixture of all three (“Smells Like My Vagina” candle, anyone?)

“You can’t have a backup plan,” she tells me firmly. “I think if you have backup plans then it’s very hard to hold to manifesting the primary dream. You have to have so much belief almost delusional belief that you can achieve your dream, that that belief is how you manifest it into being.

“If you have a plan B in your mind, that acts as a sort of hedge to undercut the mission that you're on.”

She stops, and, ever the realist behind the new-age speak and multi-million-dollar bank account, takes care to add a practical note.

“Of course, life can be quite sobering sometimes,” she says.

“And sometimes you can arrive at a point where you think, ‘OK, this isn’t working, so maybe I should think about a different direction’.

“But while you're holding on to the dream, there can be no Plan B.”