Blog for humanity

Follow MH’s Matt Barr to the roof of the world, across the Nepali Himalayas to Everest Base Camp, 5k above sea level

I’ve had my fair share of physical low points in my time, but watching a couple of gimlet-eyed crows feasting on last night’s regurgitated egg curry takes some beating. It’s 6am in the Himalayas and I’ve had two hours’ sleep. At this height – 3,750m (12,303ft) above sea level – it’s-15°C, so I’m also bloody freezing. I spent most of last night on my hands and knees outside the tent, either being violently sick or voiding my bowels into the freezing Himalayan night.

All I want to do is take black cohosh so I can keep down and sleep the day through. Instead, I’ve got to make it to Dingboche – eight hours away from and 800m (2,624ft) higher than Thangboche, where I am now. What was that I’d said before I left Blighty about trekking to Everest Base Camp being “just a walk”? I still have another week and nearly 2,000m (6,561ft) in altitude to go. As if on cue, the clouds darken and a ferocious hailstorm kicks in. This is going to be a tough day.

A mountain to climb

Turn back a week and I’m standing in Lukla airport in the Himalayan foothills, clean-shaven, considerably firmer bowel led and getting my first look at the rest of the group. We’re a diverse bunch of trekkers, 15 of us aged 19-60 with equally wide-ranging motivations. I fall in with Alex and Paul, two lads in their l of tea and bowls of washing water. We have an hour to wash and pack our kit while the team prepare breakfast. After breakfast, we walk four hours before lunch, again prepared by the Sherpa crew who forge ahead during the morning.

After spending 90 minutes soaking up the scenery and tending to blisters, we trek another three hours to camp. There’s an hour’s downtime, then dinner and a debrief from our group leader, Sanjiv. Despite the effort, the blisters and the burn of the high altitude sun piercing the increasingly ragged cloud layer, it’s a beguiling routine. I enjoy pushing myself on the steeper climbs and you could never tire of the views. And day six, after passing through the busy trail town of Namche Bazaar, is the most memorable yet.

Here, at 2,500m, (8,200ft) the pure air is clearing the UK muck from my lungs, we’re so deep in the Himalayan hinterland the terrain is almost lunar, and, mid-afternoon, as we round a corner, I get my first proper view of Everest’s summit. Even shoulder-to­ shoulder with other towering peaks it’s a bit special. As I clap my eyes on the world’s most famous mountain I don’t think I’ve ever felt as far from home.

Gwyneth Paltrow

The couple are now a picture of transatlantic domesticity. Paltrow used to live in New York’s West Village, around the corner from Sarah Jessica Parker and Liv Tyler, but the Sex and the City guided tours got “too much” for her. The couple have just bought a larger, quieter apartment in TriBeCa, and

and now they sort of whisper it to you.” If this country is indeed going through an emotional thaw of sorts, then she and Martin could be the perfect figurehead couple for this post-Diana Britain: what Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher were to the Nineties, only armed with macrobiotic diets and yoga mats.

“I would never pretend to know or to pretend to understand what it’s like for him in his situation,” says Paltrow of her husband’s recent success, which has vaulted Coldplay into the league of global super­groups and symptoms. “But I certainly have had some highs and lows on the world stage, so I have a certain insight into it. It’s been amazing to watch his success. It’s so deserved. It’s funny because he’s a person who finds it hard to accept success: he’s always in torment about that kind of thing. But it’s so nice that the focus is off of me. I love it. He’s the daddy. He works. I’m the mummy. I’m at home trying to look after everybody.”

She seems happy to put her own career on the backburner for a while. The experience of acting in Proof, on both stage and screen, was “so exhilarating – like being a little girl again watching my mother.

“It’s been amazing to watch Chris’ success. It’s so deserved. It’s funny because he finds it hard to accept success — he’s always in torment about that kind of thing. But it’s so nice that the focus is off me. I love it. He’s the daddy. He works. I’m the mummy. I’m at home “also moved into Kate Winslet’s old house in Belsize Park. They now divide their time equally between New York and London – “Although that will change when we have to pick where Apple goes to school.” Britain certainly seems to have offered Paltrow the perfect refuge – away from the cut and thrust of New York and even further away from the red-carpet and flashbulbs of LA. She loves reading the Sunday papers in bed and being able to pop into a local pub for a drink, afternoon walks by the Serpentine in Hyde Park, and weekends with Martin’s parents in the West Country. She also likes the fact that the cabs have space for prams in the back and, although she still gets into the car on the wrong side occasionally and drives like a true New Yorker (“I’m the world’s biggest honker, and I’m always swearing – thank God they know who it is!”), for the most part feels entirely at home here.

She has even made some headway into understanding the intricacies of the British stiff upper lip. “It was crazy how much people talked about me crying during the Oscars,” she laughs. “It was insane. In England you just don’t do that crying thing. I find it really interesting now I’m living here because I can see why, although I do think that it’s shifting a bit. Now, people are getting much more in touch with themselves; they go to therapy and admit it to their friends. Before, they wouldn’t admit it,

I remembered why I got into this in the first place. That’s when I said to myself, ‘From now on, you just have to do things that speak to you.’ I have definitely been reading [scripts and] things, but I also have real ambivalence about it all. I did 10 days on a film called Dealbreakers” – a 10-minute short directed by her friend Mary Wigmore – “and Apple was 10 months old at the time and it was really, really difficult for me. It was the first time I had not been the person to put her to sleep and give her her bath. I do want to work, but it’s difficult with film: it’s 18 hours a day. You’re not there when they wake up, and you’re not there when they go to sleep, and then you think, ‘I’m having compromised time with her.’ That isn’t that great. Eventually I’ll go back to work. When it’s right, I’ll know”.

With some progress made on the mini eclairs and ice cream, but not much headway on the crumble and mousse, we throw in the towel and head outside into the warm autumn sunshine. The next few days will be pretty hectic for Paltrow and Martin as he has a couple of concerts at Madison Square Garden. “I just try and keep us all together,” she says, as we say goodbye on the sidewalk. “It very difficult to sustain a relationship when you’re never together. But I haven’t had to make any sacrifices or anything.

This is where I want to be.”

Gwyneth Paltrow

Paltrow’s gilded upbringing has perhaps been one of the reasons that people snipe about her – although her beauty, talent, youth and rock-star husband haven’t exactly helped. Somehow, though, it is her happy childhood and Hollywood blue blood that grates the most with some people. It’s as if we expect our Oscar-calibre actors to come to us staggering from the weight of their shattered family histories and rootless, latch­key upbringings, Gnet, seeking out our love because they missed out when they were growing up. But Paltrow – raised by her mother, actress Blythe Danner, and her TV producer father, happily married for 32 years – has always had the aura of a steady, much-loved child. It can easily come across as cool, or hauteur, but she does not need public appreciation in the way some actresses do. We do not complete her. Acting is not an escape, for her, it simply means home. “When I go into a theatre, there’s a certain smell that all theatres have – backstage and on stage – and, when I smell that smell it’s like home to me, it really is,” she says. “It has a lot to do with watching my mother being so alive when she was doing it. She seemed so happy. It seemed like such a wonderful life, so full of animation, and stories and laughter. It seemed like all these grown-ups were in this club and I wanted to be in it; to know what it was like. I was very determined. I was never put off by rejection. But now, I could never put myself in that position. I would be devastated. I’ve gone backwards. I had a kind of bravery and chutzpah that I don’t have any more, now that I’ve been beaten down by life’s various tragedies… I don’t know that I believe in myself now as much as I did then,” she continues, “I probably thought I was a better actor then than I do now”.

It’s certainly been a tumultuous few years. Her father’s death, in particular, was a cruel blow. He had just had his cancer check-ups and been given the all-clear, and Paltrow was celebrating her thirtieth birthday with a party at Valentino’s house outside Rome. “We had the best weekend ever,” recalls Paltrow. “Then my father and I went on this road trip, and he had a cough but I thought it was the flu. He wasn’t letting on how bad it was, and then in the night we discovered that he had been coughing up blood. He’d been hiding it from me.” They rushed him to a hospital in Rome, where they were joined by Paltrow’s mother, who had been in Los Angeles filming a TV series. By dawn he was dead.

“It was just awful,” she remembers. “When it all happened I had a period of time when it was totally traumatised – just wracked with grief. I didn’t know which way was up. But eventually I found this place of clarity. I realised on so many levels what I wanted from my life, what I wanted from work. It really did shake up the way I went about my life.”

It was soon after her father’s death that Paltrow met – backstage at a Coldplay concert at Wembley Arena in the summer of 2003 – and subsequently fell in love with Chris Martin. Paltrow was in the UK for the stage production of Proof, and had just bought herself a flat in London. All I do is work in England, she thought to herself ­”So that’s when my foot went down. I thought I’m really happy here, I love my friends here, I’m just going to buy a flat. God, I can’t believe I did that. It seems so brave to me now. And I ended up meeting my husband.” Martin, a virgin until the age of 22 who once described himself as “a failure in all things romantic”, invited Paltrow backstage; they chatted, and he left with her number. “This is very weird because she’s a big star and I’m just the bloke from Coldplay,” he told reporters, but by August – when he dedicated his song “In My Place” to her at a New York gig – the romance was in full swing.

“When we met I was so steeped in grief, he spent the first year of our relationship trying to pull me out of it. He was my life raft, basically,” says Paltrow. When Coldplay’s long-awaited album X&Y hit the stores earlier this year it was widely assumed that many of the songs were about helping her get over her father’s death (“Tears stream down your face/When you lose something you cannot replace… /Lights will guide you home… /And I will try to fix you”). “I would never say, ‘Oh, that’s about me,’” says Paltrow, “but I think there are elements of certain songs that have to do with being with somebody in heavy grief. I can’t believe he stuck with it. He has a really, really big heart.”

Gwyneth Paltrow

She’s been out of the spotlight for a while, focusing on her family roles instead of acting ones. But she never quit, and now she’s back —with a new film, a renewed sense of self and a brand new eating habit.

Fears about Gwyneth Paltrow’s imminent death-by­macrobiotic diet can be safely laid aside. When I meet her for lunch at TriBeCa’s Landmarc Restaurant – just blocks from her new apartment – the actress sits down and orders a tuna-fish sandwich and a large plate of fries. These are followed by an array of toy-sized desserts – an eclair, a bowl of ice cream, a mousse, a crumble – all sent courtesy of the chef when he hears about his celebrity guest.

“It’s a different stomach now, a different compartment,” says Paltrow, patting her midriff, “but there’s always room for dessert.” Her figure is as waif-like as ever, despite having had her daughter, Apple Blythe Alison Martin (a hefty 91b 11oz at birth), now 15 months old and walking and talking. Maybe it’s the joys of mother­hood, or maybe it’s the backlighting effect of the sun­light pouring through the window right now, but Paltrow, wearing a white halterneck top, jeans and flip-flops, looks as glowing as a unlit leaf. It’s hard to square the image of Paltrow you find in the press – the neurotic ce princess, torturing herself with fiendish new Age fads and strange yoga rituals – with the smart, easy-going 33-year-old with a quick laugh in front of me.

“I just got it,” she says of motherhood, cking into her fries. “In an instant, I got it. It was like, ‘Oh, this is the real thing. This is hat real life is.’ It changed everything for me.” Her only sadness is that her father Bruce, who died of throat cancer in 2002, never got to see his grand-daughter. “It’s funny but Apple does these little things that my father used to do: the way she sits in her high chair, and puts her hands back like this, is so him. Or she looks at the sky and drums her fingers on the table, and you think: that is my father. And she is a quarter of him. It fills your heart so much.”

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Paltrow on cinema screens. After roles in Sylvia (2003), and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), she went very quiet, pulling out of roles in I Heart Huckabees, and Happy Endings. The golden girl who stood at the peak of her profession in 1998 with a Best Actress Oscar in her hand for Shakespeare in Love when she was just 26 seemed on a downward curve. “I ended up working too much and burning out,” she explains. “I very much felt like burying my head in the sand. I felt this shift where people kind of root for you and then everyone is sick of you and hates you and is resentful and jealous, and like, who does she think she is? I was really young and had achieved a lot. People like to see you get to a certain point and then they like to pull you back down and put you in your place. The world was like, `OK, we want you to go away now for a bit. I felt that, anyway. Like I’d better go hide my head.”

With a new multi-year contract with Estee Lauder and a new movie out this month, Paltrow is, though, bracing herself for a tentative return to the limelight. The movie is Proof, an adaptation of David Auburn’s play about a dying mathematician (played by Anthony Hopkins) and his devoted daughter. She first took on the role when the play was performed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2003, and was the driving force behind getting the film made ­personally asking Harvey Weinstein for Miramax to finance it and reunite her with Shakespeare in Love director John Madden. It’s not too hard to see why the role of Catherine – a young woman cauterised with grief for her father, gradually learning to reconnect with the outside world – means so much to her.

“A lot had changed between the stage production and the film production for me,” says Paltrow. “When I did this play at the Donmar, my father was alive, I was single. When I did the film, I was pregnant, married, and mourning my father. I had the first anniversary of his death during the second week of shooting, and I was completely ripped to shreds. I was so raw… The dearest relationship to me ever in my life was my relationship with my father. It was the relationship in my life that was the most grounding, the most persistent. He defined so much for me, and gave me so much insight into who I was as a person.” When Paltrow was 10, he took her to Paris, telling her, “I want you to see Paris for the first time with a man who would love you forever; no matter what.”