Charles Kraus: Gwyneth Paltrow: The world's new domestic goddess

With a cookbook under her belt and plans for her own magazine, the Oscar-winning actress is fast becoming the lifestyle guru for our times.

Hollywood star, fashion queen, earth mother, country singer ? the celebrity franchise that is Gwyneth Paltrow has now moved its all-conquering act into the new terrain of domestic goddess with a cookbook entitled My Father's Daughter.

In America, "lifestyle brand experts" have seen its publication as the commercial equivalent of a tank rolling up on Martha Stewart's finely manicured front lawn. There are also rumours that Paltrow, who runs her own lifestyle website, Goop, is in discussion with Hearst publications to launch her personal magazine in the vein of Martha Stewart Living, although the guru imitation stops there; apparently, the actress has no plans to go to prison for insider trading.

The way Paltrow tells it, as part of an extensive, celebrity-rich publicity campaign, is that her motivation for writing the cookbook had nothing to do with a global campaign for domestic dominance. At an intimate dinner party for the book in New York a couple of weeks ago, she gave her reason for putting it together: "Because my friends are, like, 'How do you make that. I want your chilli recipe!'"

The chilli-recipe-demanding friends at the dinner included Jay-Z, whom she has described as her "best friend", Cameron Diaz, Michael Stipe, Christy Turlington and the Seinfelds, each one a walking marketing endorsement.

The idea behind the book, says Paltrow, was to pay testament to her late father's love of cooking. Nonetheless, it trades on the kind of bite-sized philosophy that spells success in that vast market of consumers who are looking for the three-minute recipe for spiritual enlightenment. "Invest in what's real," writes Paltrow. "Clean as you go. Drink while you cook. Make it fun. It doesn't have to be complicated. It will be what it will be."

You are what you eat, runs the old dietary doctrine, and the subtext of celebrity cookbooks is that access to their kitchen secrets will also afford admission to their lives. In other words, you can eat yourself to becoming Gwyneth.

But how? She looks like she only snacks on alternate days and even then just a bean salad. The answer, naturally, is "healthy" eating. Paltrow, by her own admission, is obsessed with the concept. Not only did she name her first child Apple, to signify wholesome nutrition, she can talk about sugar as if it contained the Sars virus and gluten as though it were edible nitroglycerin.

She dates this preoccupation with "good" and "bad" food to her father's death. A TV producer, best known for St Elsewhere, Bruce Paltrow died of throat cancer in 2002, after a lengthy illness, aged 58. His daughter became convinced during his treatment that not only had the wrong diet helped cause the cancer, but that the right diet might make him better. To that end, she tried to get him to follow her and eat macrobiotic food. But as she has often recounted, when she offered him some brown rice, he said that it "was like biting into the New York Times".

Now everyone has the chance to find out what the New York Times actually tastes like.

That's not entirely fair because, although she is no friend of meat or cow's milk, Paltrow has relaxed her strictures, as much of the cooking in the book is inspired by her father's favourite food ? potato cake, pancakes, and the kinds of things eaten by people whose looks are not their living.

Paltrow writes in the book that her father was "the love of [her] life until his death" and it's probably no coincidence that she met her husband, the Coldplay singer and songwriter, Chris Martin, shortly before her father died and married him the following year. It also marked the point at which she took a series of steps back from the celebrity frontline.

During the 1990s, she had an extraordinary rise to international fame. Having dropped out of an art history course at the University of California, she didn't hang around with walk-on parts. Perhaps it was the influence of her father and mother, the actress Blythe Danner, but by 23 she had hit the big time with Se7en. She also dated her co-star, Brad Pitt. The following year, 1996, she demonstrated her pitch-perfect English accent in Emma, and two years after that, and now going out with Ben Affleck, she starred in Shakespeare in Love, a role for which she won the Oscar for best actress.

At that time, it was very difficult to buy a women's magazine that did not have Paltrow's neatly symmetrical, flawless face emblazoned on its cover. She was courted by clothes designers, became a fixture on the front row of fashion shows and was the profitable muse of a thousand paparazzi. She was the ultra-cool blonde, the Grace Kelly of the Clinton years. Yet the Oscar night previewed a new public image and also, perhaps, the beginnings of a new calling.

She gave an acceptance speech of operatic lachrymosity, weepingly thanking everyone she'd ever known or shared a lift with. The ice queen melted before a world gripped in toe-curled disbelief. She later said that she was "traumatised" by the experience, but the tears also signified a kind of heightened emotionality that would increasingly inform her new age-tinged outpourings.

"I'm a very, very sensitive person and I pick up a lot of stuff," she told an interviewer recently. "I feel everything double and I pick up people's emotion and energy? and I'm also Libra so I don't like confrontation or anger or anything."

She admits that her style of communication is not absolutely shared by her husband. "I definitely have to coax things out of him when we talk. You know, he's British, so it's a different lexicon totally."

This is true. She is wont to say things such as: "If I've learned anything, it's that we're all one. We're all from the same soul." On Goop, she offers advice on how to "nourish the aspect". Any Briton, aside from the inhabitants of Glastonbury, would need coaxing.

Paltrow and Martin are mostly based in London, where they live in the Belsize Park house they bought from Kate Winslet. Paltrow likes London, she says, because it's "green", "civilised" and she doesn't "feel swallowed up by it". They make a point of not being seen in public together and, at Martin's insistence, of not speaking about each other. This has given rise to persistent speculation that they are on the point of splitting up, a suggestion Paltrow has strenuously denied.

On becoming a mother, Paltrow went into what's she's called "hibernation", cutting back on the prolific film work rate of her 20s, and at the same time developing her position as the transatlantic voice of high-spec yummy mummydom. In addition to their daughter, Apple, who's almost seven, Paltrow and Martin also have a boy, Moses, who's just turned five.

After Moses's birth, she reported suffering from post-natal depression. She decided, possibly with the help of the therapist she sees, that her anxiety stemmed from the "fear of loving a little boy as much as I loved my dad".

One of the epithets invariably attached to Paltrow's name, at least in America, is "Wasp". No small part of her appeal as a queen of cuisine is that she is viewed as the embodiment of Wasp perfection. But like those other commercial symbols of the Wasp myth, Martha Stewart (Polish Catholic heritage) and Ralph Lauren (Belarussian Jewish heritage), Paltrow is the product of the great American melting pot. Her mother came from Dutch Quaker roots and her father from a Russian Jewish background.

Faith, she says, plays a "huge, huge role" in her and her children's lives. "I believe in God and I pray with the children every night." At times, she can sound like the country music singer she plays in the recent film Country Strong, except that she likes to mix and match her religions, going to temple, but also throwing in bits of Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha.

Yet she's probably more fun than she often allows herself to appear. Recently, she began an interview with the Seinfelds by claiming she'd just finished "a three-way" with the couple. She also boasts that she can sing "every single word of NWA's Fuck tha Police". And she's taken to challenging or sending up her stainless image in a couple of high-profile cameos.

She's played the archly proper Pepper Potts in the Iron Man films alongside Robert Downey Jr, and appeared in the television show Glee, as the unconventional, down-with-the-kids substitute teacher, Holly Holiday. They are smart, sassy but undemanding parts, the sort of thing that she can fit in around her children's school schedule.

It seems unlikely, therefore, that she'll be making any further Oscar speeches in the near future. For the time being, she's more like to be making corn chowder, 10-hour chicken and, almost certainly, a nourishing pile of gluten-free money.

Andrew Anthony

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