IT took getting back to the bare bones of her craft - and treading the boards in front of live theatre audiences - to shake Gwyneth Paltrow out of her professional torpor.

 

And if she ever needed proof that she still had an acting career ahead of her, she found it in the play of that name.

 

After having won her Oscar for 1998's Shakespeare In Love, Paltrow says her professional life nosedived into a string of mishaps, misjudgments and misery.

 

She won't name names, but she says the bad years ran from 2000 to 2004, a period covering clangers like Shallow Hal (2001), where she dressed up in a fat suit; a cameo in Austin Powers In Goldmember (2002); View From The Top (2003); the commercial flop Sylvia (2003) and the ridiculous Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow (2004).

 

"I think I had done too many things," is Paltrow's explanation of why she felt so jaded before Proof came along.

 

"And I had been talked into doing something that I didn't want to do, and talked out of doing things that I wanted to do. And I made some mistakes, like I turned down a couple of things that I shouldn't have and I had said yes to a couple of things I shouldn't have. And I just worked back to back and worked with some directors I didn't feel totally inspired by. And I thought, 'Why am I doing this?' " she recalls.

 

The answer was about to be provided by the man who'd presided over her last great triumph, Shakespeare In Love's British director John Madden.

 

Madden was invited to direct a season of the acclaimed Broadway play Proof at London's Donmar Theatre by its artistic director at the time, fellow film guru Sam Mendes.

 

Madden approached Paltrow to see if she would play the part of Catherine, the favourite daughter of a recently deceased mathematical genius, who must come to terms with his life and death.

 

Although her private life with new husband Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman, could not have been better, Paltrow knew her career was on the rocks. She leapt at a chance to resurrect it.

 

"I enjoyed it tremendously," she remembers. "It was incredible. I was 29 years old and coming out of a period of time where I had worked my whole twenties, incessantly, and the shine had really worn off for me. I was really kind of disenchanted with the whole process. And then I did the play and I felt so invigorated and it was so immediate, such a pivotal experience in my life."

 

Paltrow believes accepting that stage job ushered her life into a turbulent new chapter full of love, grief, life and death.

 

"It was the start of a big shift," she says. "I did the play and had a great summer, and then that autumn my father died and then I got married and had a baby and so my whole approach to work really shifted from that point on".

 

During the stage show, Miramax film boss Harvey Weinstein had the idea of a movie version of the play, and approached Madden about it. He in turn asked Paltrow if she was willing to take the story further.

 

She was. She went from playing daughter to a father on stage at a time when her real father (Hollywood director Bruce Paltrow) was dying of cancer, to playing daughter to a father (played by Anthony Hopkins) on film after her real father had already died.

 

"It was interesting," she says. "Because when we did the play he was alive but he had been very ill with cancer, but we thought he was in remission and he was going to be fine. So my relationship to the piece was slightly different. In the play she has an incredibly close relationship to her father, who is unwell and she has got the fear of, 'Is the schizophrenia going to come back?' and for me it was, 'Is my father's cancer going to come back?'"

 

If that uncertainty informed the feelings of her character in the London stage show, her grief did the same for the movie version, co-starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

 

"It was very kind of parallel," she says. "When I went to do the movie he had died and so I was in the reality of the grief of it. It's kind of amazing how you find yourself doing something artistically that is so close to your own life.

 

"It's comforting in a way, because you feel like you are with someone who is going through the same thing as you are. It's kind of cathartic and you feel like you can really be with your emotions at that point and not betray where you really are in time and space in order to play some funny, silly thing. You can be where you really are which is really good."

 

She says the rush of being on stage has stayed with her.

 

"It was this tiny theatre and everybody sat right there. You could feel the energy change in the room and when the bomb drops, when she says that one line and the first act would end and you could hear people gasping, I would think, 'This is fun' and it was just really nice to have that immediacy; to know your work was having an effect because you do a film and you never know."

 

One area where she knows she is having an effect is in being wife to Martin and mother to their toddler daughter Apple, with another child on the way.

 

She says simply: "It's just a great feeling to feel that you have cracked the mystery of life and that it's about love and the love of a child. It's just the best."

 

Next she's filming The Good Night, written by her brother Jake about a man who lives mainly in his dreams.

 

http://www.sundaytimes.news.com.au

I heard that this film was quite good and her performance was good in it, shall have to see it sometime.

I heard it wasn't that good. The movie, not her. But I'd still like to see it. If only for the Jake value lol