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Goldie Hawn Reveals Her Biggest ‘Regret’ Is Skipping Ceremony Where She Won Her Oscar
Goldie Hawn says that she has very few complaints. At 77, she is settled into a happy family life with her children, grandchildren and longtime love, actor Kurt Russell. She hasn’t officially retired, but after five decades in show business, she can afford to be choosy. She says it would be fun to do a sequel to her hit First Wives Club or play a “wild, crazy character” in a superhero movie.
But Hollywood doesn’t have as much allure as it used to. She admits she misses the glamorous old days. “It used to be elegant,” she says of the Academy Awards ceremony. “I’m missing reverence. I want to see people in awe. I want to see people believing again. I want to see people laughing more in a way that isn’t just at someone else’s expense.”
Fans of her films like Private Benjamin, often viewed as one of the greatest comedies ever, might find themselves awestruck in Goldie’s presence, but she insists she’s just a regular girl from Maryland. Career success never changed her. “Kurt and I are very similar,” she says. “He doesn’t consider himself a movie star. Nor do I. Neither one of us walks around thinking about that stuff.”
In fact, Goldie keeps her Oscar hidden in a bedroom closet and admits she wishes she’d attended the Academy Awards in 1970 to claim it in person. At 25, she earned a Best Supporting Actress nod for the comedy Cactus Flower, but she was up against actresses Silvia Miles, Susannah York and Dyan Cannon and didn’t think she had a chance.
On Oscar night, Goldie was in London filming There’s a Girl in My Soup with Peter Sellers. “I forgot it was on television that night,” she says. “Then I woke up to a phone call at like four in the morning. And it was a man’s voice and he said, ‘Hey, congratulations, you got it.’ ‘I got what?’ ‘You got the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.’”
Goldie spent the next hour crying over a long-distance phone call with her parents. “I regret it,” she says of skipping the ceremony. “It’s something that I look back on now and think, ‘It would have been so great to be able to have done that.’”
Balancing her work and personal life has always been challenging. “I once said to my father, ‘Daddy, I just want to be normal,’” says Goldie. “I just wanted to be a mom. Mothers were to me the most important thing ever. And I had to leave my kids for work sometimes.”
She got a lot right though. Her children, Oliver Hudson, 46, Kate Hudson, 43, and Wyatt Russell, 36, grew up respecting their mother’s work ethic but also knowing how much they were loved. “My mother and Kurt — Pa — never focused on [the fame] part of their lives,” says Kate. “They were very adamant about the importance of their children coming first.”
Goldie’s sweet life today has been her biggest reward. “I look at our kids and grandchildren,” she says, “and there’s nothing in the world that could make me as proud.”
