Gwyneth Paltrow still battles "excruciating" pain over the death of her father more than two decades ago
The Iron Man star was left devastated when her dad Bruce Paltrow passed away in October 2002 aged 58 following a battle with cancer, and Gwyneth has now revealed she has learned to process her grief differently over the years but she still feels a "dread" and a "heaviness" set in as she approaches the anniversary of the loss
16 September 2025
In her Goop newsletter, she wrote: "My father died six days after my 30th birthday on October 3, 2002.
"We were on a road trip together in Italy that began in Tuscany and was meant to end in Portofino but we never got there; he was airlifted to intensive care in Rome from Lucca on October 2 and died early the next morning.
"I had experienced loss and grief before that day, but something about the bereftness, wrapped in shock, was a new kind of anguish - astonishingly acute - and it would last for years ...
"The pain was so heavy, so inescapable, I wondered if it would ever relent. Eventually it did - or rather, it changed. It became more abstract.
"As I had my own children and made more self-affirming choices in my life, the lost-child part of the grief softened, and the experience became integrated into my story as if it had been written into my DNA".
Gwyneth went on to reveal she still feels anxious as her birthday and the anniversary of her dad's death approaches every year, but she now tries to experience her grief fully rather than pushing it away.
She explained: "Even now with my birthday on the horizon, I feel the heaviness start to creep in. It feels like dread - a subtle compression of the heart.
"I used to try to push it away, to distract myself, to think of other things.
"Now I let it in. I move through the events, if I need to, I replay them all and allow myself to feel it all. It is not comfortable - it can be excruciating.
"But I have learned ... that what you resist, persists. So I open my heart to the memories and to the pain.
"I let them wash through me and, somehow, I become fortified by them."
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