Music’s number one “rock goddess”, according to Kate Hudson: “She’s just the ultimate”
Some people have a genuine love of music, others seem to have it running through their veins, and it certainly seems to be the latter where Kate Hudson is concerned, someone who has made it an aspect of almost every area of her life.
It would be easy to point out the actor’s major relationships, almost all of which have been with either rock stars or working musicians in the form of Matt Bellamy from Muse and Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes, but she also had a musician father, a singer named Bill Hudson, and her two Academy award nominations, 25 years apart, both came for films with music at their cores.
The first is arguably the best fictional rock movie of all time, Cameron Crowe’s brilliant Almost Famous from 2000, which won the director an Oscar for ‘Best Screenplay’ and has never been bettered as a love letter to the joy of classic rock, and it was the role which made her a star and led to her success in the 2000s as a rom-com queen in movies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days opposite Matthew McConaughey.
She then got to exercise her vocal cords in the Daniel Day-Lewis musical romance Nine in 2009 and landed a part in the TV show Glee, which also required some singing, before in 2015 she went back to movies with guitar music for Rock the Kasbah starring Bill Murray and Zooey Deschanel, which sank without a trace at the box office.
Eventually, after doing a cover of a Katy Perry song, she got the opportunity to make her own album, Glorious, released in 2024, which had some decent reviews and performed better than most people would have expected, hitting number 28 on the UK albums chart. It also attracted some comparisons to Fleetwood Mac legend Stevie Nicks, which, unsurprisingly, Hudson was quite happy about.
She told Vogue, “Obviously, I’m beyond flattered. She’s probably most female musicians’ rock goddess. Stevie is one of my very favourite female artists, so that’s a very kind thing. I just saw her not that long ago at this private show, and I was looking at her, just thinking, ‘Wow, this woman has lived an incredible life’.”
Hudson has, in fact, long been considered to play Nicks in a rumoured biopic, something the actor has frequently expressed her desire to follow up, although she may well have to battle Margot Robbie for that honour. While there are no definite plans for the Nicks movie, there is a forthcoming Fleetwood Mac documentary on the way, authorised by the remaining band members and which may be released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Rumours in 2027.
It’s Nicks that Hudson is most interested in, however, stating, “Her music, and her story, and her energy, she’s just the ultimate. But part of that is because she never tried to be anything but herself. That’s what I’ve been thinking about all my favourite artists. So not just Stevie, but Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, or Cyndi Lauper. These women are authentic voices.”
Hudson’s latest musical project was the Neil Diamond-inspired Song Sung Blue last year, for which she picked up another Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’, missing out to Jessie Buckley for Hamnet. She’ll also be a talking head in a new film about guitar god Peter Frampton, titled simply Frampton, which will be released next month.
