Blythe Danner Thanks Gwyneth Paltrow’s Dad Bruce for Being ‘the Real Heart of the Family’

Shallow Hal actress Gwyneth Paltrow was quite the rebel when she was younger! While recently speaking to Us Weekly, her mom, Blythe Danner, recalled what it was like to raise Gwyn when she was a little girl and said that if it wasn’t for her husband and Gwyn’s dad, Bruce Paltrow, then she could have turned out to be a lot more different.

“Yes, she was [naughty when she was younger],” Blythe, 76, said about her daughter. “I had old-fashioned parental parameters and they didn’t always work.” Gwyn’s dad helped her get through her rebellious years by being a strict parent but also showing compassion for his little girl.

“Her father was the great [stabilizer],” Blythe admitted. “You know, the real heart of the family. Thank God he was there.” Bruce sadly passed away a few days after Gwyn’s birthday at age 58 from pneumonia on October 3, 2002, while he was vacationing in Rome, Italy. Since Gwyneth, 46, took her father’s death pretty hard, she decided to pay tribute to him at her glamorous wedding to Brad Falchuk on September 29.

“For years, I would go into kind of the deepest depression of all time around my birthday and then I thought, ‘I’ve got to reframe this somehow. My father would not want this for me,’” she recently explained on Dax Shepard‘s Armchair Experts podcast. “My birthday is September 27, and so this past September, I got married on the 29th of September. His ashes are buried under this beautiful tree at my house and we got married there — right near my dad … kind of on my dad. [Laughs]”

Bruce and Gwyn had a really close bond and she admits that her father’s death is something that she hasn’t fully coped with. “I still have a hard time with it,” she confessed. “He was such an intentional father, and he was so observant and so deeply supportive and set us up to win all the time.”