The one role Goldie Hawn wanted to return to – but never did: “We went back to ground zero”
If you’re settling in to enjoy either of The Christmas Chronicles movies on Netflix over the next week or so, then the chances are you might be wondering why the on-screen chemistry between Santa Claus and Mrs Claus crackles with such festive intensity. Well, the answer, of course, is that they’re played by real-life couple Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn.
The pair might be in their 70s and 80s respectively but that doesn’t stop them sipping some mulled wine, laying by the fire and sizzling in those fur lined boots and suggestive leather belts… wait… this is going in completely the wrong direction… let’s bring it back to the fact that both those movies are more than passable ways to collapse comatose from an excessive intake of Quality Street and Buck’s fizz, and the fact that Goldie Hawn won an Oscar, at the first time of asking, almost 60 years ago.
Hawn had only been in showbiz for a couple of years, first as a dancer and then as a cast member for a pre-SNL style comedy show called Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, when she got a part opposite the curmudgeonly Walter Matthau in a film called Cactus Flower in 1969.
It was a kind of knockabout comedy despite a central theme of Hawn’s character trying to unalive herself at the start, and also featured screen legend Ingrid Bergman and was pretty well reviewed at the time, doing decent trade at the box office and serving as a follow-up to the Robert Redford-starring Barefoot in the Park from 1967 for director Gene Saks.
But it was the performances at the core that really stood out, Bergman picking up a Golden Globe nomination and Hawn doing the same, together with a Bafta nod and an Academy award nomination, which she would go on to win the following year in something of a surprise given she was up against Sylvia Miles for Midnight Cowboy and Susannah York for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.
The Oscar win didn’t quite send Hawn’s career to the levels it might have done. Over the next decade or so, she would appear in several fairly low-budget movies, including Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express, made just a year before Jaws, and Warren Beatty’s comedy Shampoo, although she was again Golden Globe nominated for the latter.
She picked up another Oscar nomination for Private Benjamin in 1980 and that sparked what stands as her most successful period, a 15 year run in which she became one of the most glamorous stars in Hollywood, working consistently with her partner Kurt Russell on hits like Overboard and then with Mel Gibson on Bird on a Wire and Bruce Willis on Death Becomes Her in 1992.
In 1996, she teamed up with Bette Midler and Diane Keaton for a film that eventually became one of her most loved movies, First Wives Club, the ‘out of nowhere’ hit focusing on three middle-aged women hellbent on revenge on their husbands for leaving them for younger women. It was a massive success, bringing in $180million against a budget of just over $20m, but as Hawn discovered, it didn’t mean that a much-asked-for sequel was a shoo-in.
She told Harvard Business Review: “First Wives Club. We were all women of a certain age, and everyone took a cut in salary to do it so the studio could make what it needed. We all took a smaller back end than usual and a much smaller front end. And we ended up doing incredibly well.”
Adding, “The movie was hugely successful. It made a lot of money. We were on the cover of Time magazine. But two years later, when the studio came back with a sequel, they wanted to offer us exactly the same deal. We went back to ground zero.”
In the end, several attempts were made to get a sequel to First Wives Club off the ground, first in 2004, when fees with the three main stars couldn’t be agreed upon, then in 2016 through Netflix, which was abandoned due to the script. Finally, in 2020, another project with Midler, Hawn and Keaton was ditched, before Keaton’s tragic demise.
