Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Blythe Danner, an actress, and Bruce Paltrow, a film and television director and producer. Gwyneth Paltrow's father was of Ashkenazi Russian Jewish descent and her mother is a Quaker of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. Gwyneth Paltrow's paternal great-grandfather, whose surname was "Paltrowicz", was a rabbi in Kraków, Poland. Gwyneth Paltrow was raised in Santa Monica, where she attended Crossroads School before moving and enrolling in The Spence School, a private girls' school in New York City. Later she briefly studied art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before dropping out to act. Gwyneth Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a cousin of actress Katherine Moennig and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08). Gwyneth Paltrow is an "adopted daughter" of Talavera de la Reina (Spain), where at 15 she spent a year as an exchange student and learned to speak Spanish. Gwyneth Paltrow was a childhood friend of Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph.