How can Gwyneth Paltrow bear so much ridicule?

There is nobody who finds Gwyneth Paltrow, 52, more interesting than the woman who was a teenager in the 1990s. This was the last era of the true pin-up, the heart-throb, the movie star as icon, rather than the whiffy melange of brand-pusher, pound-shop activist and reality star that constitutes celebrity today. I was as Nineties as the next girl living in provincial Massachusetts and when I first saw Shakespeare in Love in 1998, Paltrow’s first and only Oscar-winning role as the late-16th-century actress-in-male-garb Viola de Lesseps, I’d never enjoyed anything as much in my life.

And in 2025, Paltrow’s career’s Take Two fascinates the early middle-aged woman who finally gives in to the barrage of wellness marketing sent her way on Instagram. She now finds herself ordering ‘adaptogens’