It was late on a rainy London afternoon, Kate Hudson was really getting wet, and she couldn't have cared less. "We are in England," she said gaily. "It rains. That has to be one reason the pubs are always full." At that, she dashed across a quiet mews in Belgravia and into the Nags Head, a 233-year-old vestige of imperial Britain not far from Hyde Park. A couple of patrons shifted their gaze when she entered. But only for a moment. Hudson never looks bad, but that day she was dressed like any other hippie chick on vacation: Her blonde hair was in a bun; she wore jeans tucked into boots, a tiny white T-shirt, and a plaid bandanna wrapped around her throat. A few of her fingernails were painted fire-engine red, and the rest weren't painted at all. The musty anonymity of the place delighted her. "Peace," she said, sighing. "Peace and a pint of ale." The pub's owner, a phlegmatic Irishman named Kevin, heard her prayers and answered them. He sauntered over with the beer, sat down, and launched unbidden into a lecture about cars, mentioning that he no longer owned his favorite automobile—a relic made just after World War II with surplus aluminum that had been used to build bombers. He worked his way through the decline of the British automobile industry, concluding cheerfully, "We still make amazing taxis." Then he noticed the tape recorder. He recoiled in horror. "Not in here you don't," Kevin said. "We won't have that beeping and chirping and cell phoning in this place. It's a proper British pub. You can drink and talk and throw darts till your arm falls off. You can eat if you like. But absolutely no cell phones."

I explained that it wasn't a cell phone and that it was necessary for the interview. "What interview?'' he asked, genuinely unaware that the artfully disheveled and unmistakably American woman sitting next to him was an actress. "Who is interviewing whom?" I nodded at the tape recorder and then at Hudson; he shrugged and went back to the bar. "Don't you love this place?" she asked, delighted by Kevin's idiosyncratic nature. "You really do feel you could sit here all day." Hudson noticed that I had typed out some questions. "OK, let me guess," she said, not unkindly but like a woman who has tried this parlor trick before. "You must have the question about whether I am really such an incredibly bubbly girl?" Check. "And the ones about my mother, how it's impossible to live up to her and how I'm like her?" Check. Check. "How about me marrying the rock star and living my role in Almost Famous?" That one I had skipped. Her husband, Chris Robinson, the 39-year-old singer of the Black Crowes, was touring in Europe. Kate, 27, along with their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Ryder, was using the time mostly to hang out. "OK," she laughed, well on her way to conducting the interview by herself. "My mother is famous, I married a rock star, and everyone says I'm bubbly. People say what they want, and I can live with that. But isn't there anything about how, beneath the surface, I'm a little dark or different?"

Read enough stories about Hudson and one might simply conclude that her full legal name was Bubbly Blonde Kate Hudson. That seems a bit unfair. But dark? Kate Hudson is about as dark as Rio de Janeiro at Carnival. The biggest complaint I ever heard about her was that she had too many giggle fits during the filming of her upcoming movie, You, Me and Dupree, a slightly off-kilter Hollywood relationship comedy directed by the brothers Joe and Anthony Russo that seeks to occupy a place in the considerable territory between Wedding Crashers and Jules and Jim. Hudson stars with Matt Dillon as her husband. As Dillon's worst best friend, Owen Wilson is forced to move in with the newlyweds, ensuring an escalating series of humorous disasters. "I have never lost it that much before," she said, recalling that several scenes had to be shot in several takes, having been ruined by her uncontrolled gales of laughter. "It's fun until everybody starts to hate you," she said, wincing. "People wanted to go home, but we could never stop shooting because I could never stop laughing." Matt Dillon had more forgiving memories. "She definitely got a little giddy on the set," he said. "But that is sort of the risk of working with Owen. Anyway, she has one of the best laughs in America."

So, yes, Kate Hudson comes with some froth. Beyond the empathetic blue eyes and the smile that could light a nation, however, she displays a level of self-knowledge, not to mention self-confidence, that no lightweight could possess. "Katie is a strong-willed girl," her mother told me. "She was always ahead of her years. In that way she is an old soul and has this great inner wisdom and the ability to listen. She seems so easy, but easy and wonderful are two different things. And if you confused her absolute decency and kindness with simplicity, you would be making a big mistake." Any successful actress has to endure constant, and often unwanted, scrutiny; Kate Hudson is not just any actress (nor, as millions of Americans certainly must be aware, are her parents in the "just any" category either). Hudson's mother is Goldie Hawn, the definitive ditzy blonde of her generation; the man Kate regards as her father, Kurt Russell, has been with Hawn for more than 20 years.

As a couple, Hawn and Russell are famously offbeat; or so they appear. They never married and clearly don't see why they should. Goldie Hawn is a Jew and a practicing Buddhist. She has made a good living as a flake, but when the cameras stop, so does the routine. (Although most people see Hudson as a quintessential, if bohemian, Californian, Kate is a somewhat agnostic Jew. She no longer goes to temple but nonetheless misses her grandmother's brisket and matzo balls. In fact, her E-mail address is derived from an earthy Yiddish saying.) Despite appearances, the family couldn't hew more closely to the conventional idea of American domestic life. When Kate and her brothers were young, Hawn and Russell moved the family to Colorado, largely to shield the children from exposure to the listlessness so prevalent among the golden youth of Hollywood. They lived in Aspen, which, while not exactly the wheat fields of Iowa, isn't 90210 either. The move certainly did nothing to deter Hudson from the pursuit of a profession she says she settled on when she was three. "Katie has a performance gene," Hawn said. "There was never any discussion as to what she was going to do for a living. It was always clear. The only thing I wanted as a parent was to make sure that she had a real childhood; so when she was fifteen and they asked her to be in a movie, I said no. She wanted an agent, and I said no. I told her, 'You will go to school, play soccer, go to proms. Be a kid, and after school is done you can start to work.' She was not happy, but I have never doubted it was the right thing to do."

Hudson, an exceptionally poised and polite woman, was an obedient child. "We could never be rude or disrespectful, but they wouldn't lie and tell us drugs are totally horrible, either," she told me as she tucked into the plate of shepherd's pie she had just ordered, washing it down with her second ale. "Kurt would say, 'Sure, drugs are great. Why do you think people get addicted to them? But drug addicts die and their lives are ruined, and if that happens to you our lives are going to be ruined, too.'" She stopped for a minute and toyed with her food. Hudson has acknowledged smoking marijuana, and her husband has a past with harder drugs. "In the end, you know, I just never wanted to disappoint my parents."

She channeled her energy into soccer: "I always had a competitive sports thing," she said. "Even now, when I watch sports on TV." (She had just dropped a book of matches that the bartender had tossed to her. She wasn't really looking when he let them fly. "That isn't fair," she said, and threw them back. He threw them again, this time harder. She caught the matches with one hand.) "I was always the kind of person who plays right to the death. Even in tag football. Me and Kurt, we are the same." She said that when the two play charades, "the house starts to shake and everybody hates us. I am not like that with my work. When somebody else gets a part I want, I am the first person to say good for them. But if I am on a field with a team and a ball and a goal, that is a very different thing."

Hudson's ambitions are complicated. She craves professional success yet knows that it is not always possible for people to separate her goals from her mother's achievements. "You can feel it when you walk into an audition," she said. "Maybe I was right for a part and maybe I wasn't. I would always do the best I could, but I knew that if I was having an off day there would have been people sitting there whispering, 'Goldie Hawn's daughter is horrible. She should really choose another career.'" Hudson shrugs. None of that seems to bother her, in part because her goal isn't stardom, it's happiness. And, like Hawn, she seems to understand that there might be a difference between the two. She doesn't consider it a "sacrifice to turn down movies," because her family matters more to her. And since Robinson is often on tour, Hudson is far more likely to be found on a bus somewhere in Arkansas than at the cosmetics counter of Fred Segal or Barneys. "It can really be hard," she told me. "The number of times I have had emotional breakdowns on the road…where I just say I can't live out of a suitcase anymore…" Her voice trailed off for a moment. "I have been in an Embassy Suites in Montgomery, Alabama. Stuck because I want to be there for my family. And there have been times when I want to scream. Just really scream." She looked glum for a minute; and then the storm broke and sunshine returned to her face. "And then you know what happens? I end up having these incredible times, the best times of my life."

By the age of nineteen, Hudson had appeared in several films, including the largely panned 1999 Generation Y standard 200 Cigarettes, in which she played an adorable, if prim, dimwit. Despite its bad reviews, critics sensed that Hudson would flourish with a better role. The next year, she got her chance to prove it. The Canadian actress Sarah Polley pulled out of Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's touching, somewhat autobiographical film about his struggle to publish his first piece in Rolling Stone. In the role of Penny Lane, the winsome leader of a collection of semi-liberated groupies, Hudson turned in the most memorable performance in the camp-follower genre since Susan Sarandon appeared as the verbally and physically audacious Annie Savoy in Bull Durham. Hudson was nominated for a raft of awards, including the Golden Globe (which she won) and the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (which she lost to Marcia Gay Harden). "When you saw Almost Famous, you knew right then that somebody warm, lovely, and important had just come into the movies," Owen Wilson told me in Los Angeles, a few weeks after finishing work with Hudson on You, Me and Dupree, which he also coproduced. "It is almost easy to forget how talented Kate is because of that amazing warmth."

It has hardly been downhill since then—Hudson still gets scripts by the truckload—but the box office has not always been kind. Many of Hudson's films, which include Le Divorce, Raising Helen, and Alex & Emma, have been disappointments. Her only major commercial success was the 2003 comedic battle of the sexes How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which earned more than $100 million. While she hopes Dupree will do as well, Hudson is not an actress who lives or dies by Variety headlines. "There is really nothing like having a big successful movie, because everyone is so happy," she said. "And if a movie doesn't do well, you feel like you let people down. And I never want to do that. I go and work as hard as I can. I do what the director tells me to do. And then I go home and live my life." Hudson prefers to do that in New York, where she and Robinson have a home in Greenwich Village. She also lives in Los Angeles and says that Ryder seems to love it there. For the moment, the three are constantly in motion, bouncing between not only New York and L.A. but also to far less glamorous spots when Chris is performing. For the moment she enjoys it. "I don't want to raise my children on a plane. My parents never yanked us around, and it was wonderful for us. Kids need to have some stability, be in a school that doesn't change all the time. Chris and I are going to have to make that choice. We will have to pick a city."

Hudson is a favorite of the paparazzi, who can make it difficult for her even to stroll down the street. She doesn't take it personally, but her husband does. "He has a fit when they try to take our picture," she said, laughing. "Just a fit. If anyone ever tried to call him a celebrity, he would bite their head off." Hudson finds it mostly funny. "Kate has an easy relationship to her celebrity," Owen Wilson said. "And believe me, that is not something you see often. She doesn't ignore it or dwell on it. She doesn't pretend she isn't who she is, but she is also not about to let it get in her way when it comes to having a life."

Hudson says she is simply putting into practice lessons her parents taught her. "Kurt would always say that everybody is replaceable. I remember him saying that since I was a little girl," she said. "I have an amazing job. But you need more than fame to be happy. If anybody is in this business to get famous, they ought to get out, because everybody falls off the shortlist eventually. Everybody." Hudson believes that the national obsession with celebrity is harmful even to those actors who embrace it. "The idea behind movies is that it's make-believe; there is a mysteriousness," she said. "Wondering what goes on behind the curtain is part of the fun. But these days there is no 'behind the curtain.'"

"People are not usually ready for fame when it reaches them," she continued. "They don't understand it, and they often act in a way they regret. When it's over they will ask themselves, 'Why was I like that?' My parents, at the height of their careers, never had this constant attention. I don't know if it's the Internet or values in our society or what. But it is different, for sure. Somebody said to me the other day that if Cary Grant was walking down a red carpet and slipped, people would have turned their heads away. These days they are throwing banana peels." She says this all without a hint of anger. "A lot of people get burned badly by the press. They become terrified. And, honestly, who cares? If somebody has decided who I am, without ever having spoken to me, why should I care? It doesn't change who I am. Who my family knows I am. Who my friends are or what I believe matters. It doesn't change one thing about my life."

A month later, Hudson was making egg salad in her Los Angeles kitchen. Wearing old jeans, beat-up sneakers, and a yellow T-shirt that said "from gainesville with love," she looked like a teenager. And she works hard at it. Hudson has recently developed a new enthusiasm: pole dancing. Strip classes are the aerobics of choice these days in Hollywood, and they seem to hold a special appeal for women who live with rock stars. "I know it sounds ridiculous, but it is incredibly liberating," she said. "It's all about energy." Her younger brother, Wyatt, in town from Canada, where he plays hockey, sat in the kitchen with a friend of Kate's. Ryder, his flowing hair cascading over the tabletop, was holding court from his high chair. "I told him that it was time for bed," Hudson said as I entered, "and he just looked and me and said, 'Mom, it's my life.'" You could tell she was as proud as she was exasperated. She continued pressing, and he continued shaking her off. Finally she said, "How about if Wyatt puts you down?" He shrugged but did not object, so off they went.

Hudson is a serious music fan and can talk about seminal Bob Dylan bootlegs for hours. She recently sang onstage for the first time as a present for Chris's birthday. "It was terrifying, but my God, it was fun," she said. I asked if she had ever considered joining her husband's act, or cutting an album. "I would feel like a total fraud. I am not a dabbler. Also," she said, almost as an afterthought, "there is the question of talent."

Hudson said that Dylan and Mikhail Baryshnikov were the two people she had been most thrilled to meet. The Black Crowes had toured with Dylan. "I actually got goose bumps the first time I met him," she said. "Same with Baryshnikov." That is understandable, since she was six at the time. "My mom would always take me to the theater in New York. And we would go backstage after the performance sometimes."

We had moved out to the back porch. It was a quiet evening, and in the distance a line of airplanes swung in from the ocean to begin their approach to LAX. "One day my mother took me to The Nutcracker," she recalled. "When it was over we went up on the stage, and Baryshnikov suddenly came out and introduced himself. 'Hey, do you know how to do a cartwheel?' he asked. I shook my head. So he taught me." She still had the expression of startled delight in her eyes, 20 years later. "Mikhail Baryshnikov taught me how to do a cartwheel." She lit the fire near the pool. "I really love what I do," Hudson said. "People don't always want to believe that. They want to believe I do it because I felt I had to, or to be like my mom, or to compete with my mom. Or any other of a number of things that have nothing to do with who I am. I am so much less complicated than that. I like acting." She played with the fire as she spoke. "I hope to keep learning how to do it better, and I hope to entertain people while I do. But acting keeps me curious. And what could be better than that?"

"Pale Rider," by Michael Specter and photographed by Mario Testino, has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the July 2006 issue of Vogue.