Sunday, November 21, 2010

Happy Birthday Goldie Hawn

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Although her first gig was on the short-lived sitcom Good Morning, World, Goldie Hawn soon thereafter burst into the public consciousness as the giggliest part of the ensemble sketch show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. It took a trio of movies, though - Cactus Flower*, There's a Girl in My Soup and Butterflies Are Free - to prove to that, while she was effervescent and sweet off camera as well as on, the ditz act was just that.

Appearances in Shampoo, The Sugarland Express, and Foul Play helped her career maintain its momentum despite such meteoric early success; it was 1981, though, that added an untold trajectory to Goldie Hawn's career. That was the year she appeared in Private Benjamin with Eileen Brennan and Armand Assante - which is exactly how I would have cast it - and it was clear that she had become a star for the ages...

She hasn't exactly rested on her laurels; since leaving the army Hawn has also starred in such fan favourite films as Swing Shift, the Vancouver-shot Bird on a Wire, and of course as part of the electrifying ensemble of The First Wives Club.

Nowadays, Hawn's fondness for the movies seems to have slipped; recently she and longtime love Kurt Russell decamped to Vancouver for the sake of their son Wyatt, whose dream was to play hockey. They've since left, but the few years they were here only served to confirm what Vancouverites have long known - that in addition to her skills as an actor, Goldie Hawn is also one of the world's great people. Currently she's engaged in charity work, empowering girls around the world, and being a grandma, which is the greatest kind of humanitarian work there is.

*For which she won an Oscar.
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