In the summer of '74, tony-winning sylph Blythe Danner was playing Nina in The Seagull at the Williamstown Theatre in Massachusetts. One day, someone plopped Danner's daughter, who was not yet two, on the stage. "She didn't have anything on except her golden curls," Danner recalls in her famously delectable foggy-froggy voice. "She could barely talk, yet she knew the whole speech better than I did. She just started reciting"--and here Danner does a splendid imitation of a lisping infant declaiming Chekhov--"The men, the lions, the eagles, the part-widges.' That was the beginning. We should have known then, I guess."
Thus began the irresistible rise of Gwyneth Paltrow. At 23, the eldest child of Danner and TV producer Bruce Paltrow (The White Shadow, St. Elsewhere) has two blossoming careers: on screen, as the most beguiling actress of her young generation; and in the tabloids, as that cheerfully ravishing wraith on the arm of Hollywood dream supreme Brad Pitt.
They make a swank couple with Old Hollywood reverbs: Grace Kelly dating James Dean. Pitt has updated Dean's outsider hero from East of Eden in the unhappy-family saga Legends of the Fall and played Anne Rice's Louis as a vampire without a cause. He's good at it, but in Hollywood there are a million broody hunks; Pitt has the primacy but not the patent. Paltrow could be something different, maybe unique. She could bring elegance, lightness of touch, pedigree--what used to be called class--back to American movie acting. She has shown glimpses of it in earlier work, as Pitt's anxious wife in Seven and as the ultimate prom date in The Pallbearer. But now Paltrow has a movie all her own. She plays, beautifully, the title role in Douglas McGrath's sweet new take on the Jane Austen novel Emma.
For Emma Woodhouse, matchmaking is a higher form of gossip. As her vague father (James Cosmo) looks on, Emma schemes to convince gawky Harriet Smith (Toni Collette) that her destiny lies not with a simple farmer (Edward Woodall) but with the smarmy Rev. Elton (Alan Cumming). She also hopes to land handsome rake Frank Churchill (Trainspotting's Ewan McGregor) for herself. With other pretenders and poseurs intervening, it takes Emma the whole film to realize that she has been blind to the perfect match for herself: her brother-in-law, the kindly Mr. Knightly (Jeremy Northam).
Gee, it sounds just like Clueless. And it should, since last year's hit comedy was based on the same Jane Austen novel. The producers of Emma (yet another version of which will air on the A&E Network next February) must wish the release dates had been reversed: their Masterpiece Theatre-style adaptation should have been seen before the MTV-meets-Saturday Night Live parody. Won't audiences now be disappointed if Paltrow doesn't say, "As if"? McGrath, who was nominated for an Oscar writing Bullets Over Broadway with Woody Allen, has a ready reply: "She does say, 'As if.' But it's in the middle of a sentence. Things like, 'It is not as if I were not displeased with you, Mr. Knightly.'"