Goldie Hawn inspired Reese Witherspoon’s business empire: “She pushed hard”
Reese Witherspoon has done quite well for herself, and that’s a bit like saying water is wet, or pigs can’t fly, or Maroon 5 isn’t a very good band.
A few years ago, Forbes estimated her net worth at around $440million, making her one of the wealthiest celebrities in America, akin to basically half a Jerry Seinfeld.
How did she get so rich? Well, for a start, she has been in many successful movies, most notably around the beginning of the century when she starred in not one but two Legally Blonde movies, plus Sweet Home Alabama, before she picked up a ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line in 2005.
She made a boatload of cash from all that, commanding around $15–20million per film and signing herself up for contracts with very lucrative companies, including Elizabeth Arden and posh kitchenware store Crate & Barrel.
Although her career took a bit of a ten-year nosedive due to some not great films, she recovered in around 2012 and made the eminently sensible decision to start a movie production company called Pacific Standard in order to produce strong female roles and a couple of years later she produced-starred in Wild, an adaptation of the eponymous novel telling the tale of a young woman who hikes more than 1,000km to escape personal issues.
Her company also produced the multi-award-winning Ben Affleck movie Gone Girl and HBO’s Big Little Lies, before it became a fully-fledged media production giant, with a three-million-followers-strong book club, filmmaker labs, and social media series. At the end of 2021, Witherspoon reportedly sold a part of the company for a staggering $900m.
So yes, she’s doing OK, and Witherspoon openly acknowledges that she had a fine role model when striving for all the success she’s achieved, namely one Goldie Hawn, who the actor says served as a huge influence on the way she approached working in the industry.
She told Net-a-Porter: “[Goldie Hawn] went to studios and pitched Private Benjamin, Wildcats, Bird on a Wire, The First Wives Club. She pushed hard to create characters that were independent, and all of them are underestimated. She showed that being pretty with a high voice and a bubbly personality doesn’t mean you’re stupid.”
Hawn was the young actor who won an Academy Award at the first time of asking for a role in the 1969 Walter Matthau comedy Cactus Flower. She went on to star in a string of popular films throughout the 1970s, including Steven Spielberg’s debut The Sugarland Express and Shampoo with Warren Beatty.
She perhaps hit the peak of her career in the 1980s and ‘90s, though, with major hits including First Wives Club, Death Becomes Her and action comedy Bird on a Wire with Mel Gibson. Outside of acting, she started a non-profit foundation called MindUP aimed at providing better mental health in education for young people.
Witherspoon, meanwhile, who also launched her own fashion label and lifestyle brand Draper James in 2015, which was eventually bought for an undisclosed amount by a private investment firm, has focused her acting talents on television in recent years, with a regular role on Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, alongside Jennifer Aniston.
In terms of the big screen, she’s slated to be back in the long-awaited third movie in the Legally Blonde series and will appear in the upcoming live-action kids’ movie, Tinker Bell.
