Kate Hudson was born into the illusion business. Her mother is actress Goldie Hawn. Her stepfather is action hero Kurt Russell, who helped to raise her from the age of three. For Hudson, film sets were kindergarten and film crews are family.
Hudson was born in 1979, the year her mother made Private Benjamin, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Twenty-one years later, Goldie Hawn watched her daughter sit through a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her breakthrough role in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, after which Hudson became unconditionally famous (in Hollywood terms). "Everybody wants her," says Cameron Crowe. Hudson played Penny Lane, a teenage groupie who follows a seventies rock band on tour, with such radiance and wrenching sweetness that raddled old rock chicks rushed up to Crowe afterward, yelling, "That was me! That was me!"
Hudson didn't know the role would be pivotal for her. "I just knew that I wanted to do anything on a Cameron Crowe movie." But Crowe knew. "Before we made the final cut, everybody was watching this extremely long version. And somebody said, 'Kate Hudson explodes in this movie!' Well, we cut the movie, we shaped it around this person. And we weren't crazy—this was the character people couldn't get enough of." For Almost Famous Hudson mostly wore a lot of girly underwear and an Afghan coat. "We kept getting all these calls about that coat!" Crowe says. " 'Where can I get this coat?' 'Can I buy this coat?' "
I know, I know. There's something about the way she wears clothes that makes women's eyes snap open. Most women put their clothes on and look at themselves with varying degrees of doubt: Is this OK? Will this do? Hudson has no doubt, only desire, and it's feverishly catching. We go to an appointment at Saint Laurent, where they fall on her with cries of joy and toss Tom Ford's newest bits of his very covetable resort collection. She wriggles into a couple of rippled silk-satin bomber jackets with hoods, snuggles the collars up around her head, stares at herself in the wall-size mirror, and bursts out laughing. With delight. The rest of us start laughing as well: The clothes look so fabulous that they go to your head, like champagne.
"Sparkling Star" by Vicki Woods has been edited for STYLE.com; the complete story appears in the September 2002 issue of Vogue.
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