Gwyneth Paltrow — actress with roots in the Russian Empire
Gwyneth Paltrow was born in Los Angeles in September 1972 to Bruce Paltrow, a television producer and director, and Blythe Danner, the stage and screen actress. She grew up between Los Angeles and New York inside one of the more established families in American television.
The Russian connection is on her father's side and it is a rabbinical one. The Paltrow name is a shortening of Paltrowicz, and the family descends from the Paltrowicz line of rabbis of Krakow. Her paternal great-great-grandfather was a rabbi in Nowogrod, a small town in Congress Poland, and the family emigrated to the United States from Belarus and Poland - both, at the time they left, territory of the Russian Empire. The frequently repeated claim that the family came from Nizhny Novgorod is a misreading of Nowogrod. The documented ancestor is a great-great-grandfather; no single named emigrant has been established.
Her screen career began in the early 1990s and moved quickly. Seven and Emma established her; Shakespeare in Love in 1998 brought the Academy Award for Best Actress along with a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award. She won a Primetime Emmy for a guest role on Glee, and from 2008 played Pepper Potts across the Marvel films, a run that continued to Avengers: Endgame and introduced her to an audience that had not seen the earlier work.
From 2008 she built Goop out of a weekly newsletter into a consumer brand and media company. It has been commercially substantial and persistently controversial, and has probably done more than the acting to fix her current public position. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Grammy nomination for narrating children's audiobooks.
Her father died in 2002, and she has said since that she came to the family's rabbinical descent late, through genealogical research rather than through anything handed down.
"Paternal family emigrated from Belarus and Congress Poland to the United States"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Nowogrod (Poland) / Belarus
The line reaches her through her father, the television producer Bruce Paltrow, and the surname is a shortening of Paltrowicz. She has described discovering the rabbinical descent through genealogical research rather than family memory.
Descended from the Paltrowicz line of rabbis of Krakow. Her paternal great-great-grandfather was a rabbi in Nowogrod in Congress Poland; the family emigrated to the United States from Belarus and Poland, both then inside the Russian Empire. 'Nizhny Novgorod' in some sources is a misreading of Nowogrod.
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Nowogrod (Poland) / Belarus. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.