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WITH her trendy Bugaboo Stroller, yoga classes and macrobiotic diet, Gwyneth Paltrow has long been the poster girl for a certain type of London lifestyle. Not the kind enjoyed by the likes of Kate Moss, obviously. You can’t imagine Paltrow drinking till dawn, snorting coke.

No, she is the epitome of the nanny-spurning, baby-food puréeing yummy mummy: effortlessly glamorous, nutritionally-obsessed, socially aware and as dull as dishwater. While the Primrose Hill set are scandalising the neighbours, in Belsize Park, one a

ssumes Paltrow and her equally worthy husband, Chris Martin, of Coldplay fame, are knitting sweaters, sipping herbal tea and discussing the exploitation of child workers in the Third World.

The nearest Paltrow has come to causing a stir in the past five years was when she wore towering high heels at the premiere of her latest film Iron Man. So it must have come as a surprise to many last week to find she had incurred the righteous wrath of animal rights activists.

Less than a fortnight ago, Paltrow demonstrated her concern for abandoned horses by attending The Mane Event benefit in aid of the Amaryllis Farm Equine Rescue Centre in New York. But the 35-year-old actress ditched her carey sharey green credentials quicker than you can say “club that seal” when she draped herself in fur for a photo shoot for Italian designer Tod’s in Capri last week. “Apparently her beauty really is only skin-deep,” said a spokesman for Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Bang goes her right-on image; bang goes her friendship with Stella McCartney (maybe); bang goes her humdrum, detoxified, controversy-free existence.

But on second thoughts, perhaps Paltrow has always been something of a contradiction. Her claim to a social conscience is, after all, undermined by her materialism (her London home, bought from Kate Winslet, cost a cool £3.4m and her shoe collection, well, that’s anyone’s guess) and her apparent serenity is undermined by the excruciating sob-a-thon she subjected audiences to during her infamous Oscar acceptance speech. On top of that, she is incredibly aspirational. It is difficult to reconcile the thoughtful woman who supports so many good causes with the insufferable prig who boasts that her daughter Apple’s first words were humus, agua (she was teaching her Spanish, obviously) and “chop chop” – the phrase Apple used for the helicopter she frequently travelled in.

Despite the fact that they try so hard to present themselves as ordinary, Martin and Paltrow both come from privileged middle-class families who sent them to private schools. But born of Hollywood stock – Paltrow’s mother is actress Blythe Danner and her father film director Bruce Paltrow – the 35-year-old actress’s childhood was by far the less conventional of the two.

In fact, her passion for yoga and her strange eating habits probably stem from her years at her Californian primary – a kind of hippy dippy establishment where pupils learned to meditate and to connect with their feelings. Ah, that explains the Oscar night debacle.

Paltrow, who idolised her father, says she always wanted to act, but her parents did not let her try her hand until she had graduated from Spence School, a private girls’ school in New York. In fact, she waited until she had dropped out of the University of California, where she had been studying history of art, and spent the next five years making up for lost time. She made her debut in Shout, family friend Stephen Spielberg cast her as Wendy in Hook and then there was Malice, Flesh And Bone and her breakthrough film Se7en, opposite Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.

The following year, Paltrow’s Anglophile tendencies became apparent for the first time, when she played Emma, complete with flawless English accent. But the high-point of her career so far came in 1999 when she won the Academy Award for best Actress for her role in Shakespeare In Love, a box office sensation which earned more than $100m at the box office.

The role which brought her most recognition in her pre-Martin years, however, was arguably the real-life one of ex-girlfriend, as she dated then split with Brad Pitt, to whom she was engaged, Ben Affleck and Luke Wilson. She wasn’t bitter, but she did once describe Affleck’s perfect woman as “anyone who serves cold beer in a bikini”.

Any upset Paltrow suffered over the break-up of those relationships paled in comparison with the distress she felt when her father collapsed and died while they were in Italy together celebrating her 30th birthday. A few weeks later, she met Martin, whose hit ‘Fix You’, with the lyrics, “tears stream down your face, when you lose something you cannot replace” was inspired by her grief, and the following year the pair married in a secret ceremony in southern California, with Apple already on the way. Moses followed two years later.

With the birth of her children Paltrow – who had by now added The Talented Mr Ripley, Sylvia and The Royal Tenenbaums to her CV, moved more or less permanently to London, embracing the role of full-time suburban mum.

More recently Paltrow has begun to take on work again. In 2005, she became the face of Estée Lauder, work she says she took on to make sure she never has to make films where they “put her in a bikini and give her a gun”. She has made a handful of movies – including Proof and Iron Man – while Martin has recently released a new album. The enforced periods of separation have brought predictable speculation about the state of their marriage. In a recent interview, Paltrow dismissed such rumours good-naturedly, admitting she too likes the gossip pages.

But then, just when you think you’ve misjudged her, you remember she decided to call her daughter Apple because “apples are so sweet and they’re wholesome and it’s biblical and I just thought it sounded so lovely and clean”. In another interview, she decried women who enjoy a glass or two too many on a night out. “I think it’s incredibly embarrassing when people are drunk,” she said. “It just looks so ridiculous. I find it very degrading.”

Espousing views like these, it’s no wonder Paltrow once prompted an commentator to write: “It is possible to be pale and uninteresting.”

Paltrow and Martin will never capture the public imagination like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor or even Brangelina. They are unlikely to top anyone’s poll of couples you would want to invite to your dinner party.

But perhaps Paltrow’s decision to stray from the path of political correctness will puncture their self-righteous image just a little.

strong>You’ve been googled

• Paltrow is a descendant of a famous 17th century Polish rabbi, David HaLevi Segal of Krakow, through the Russian rabbinical family Paltrowich, which produced 33 rabbis over several generations.

• “I spend a good portion of my dinner party conversation defending America, because no matter what the political agenda, it’s still a fantastic, amazing place.” Paltrow on anti-Americanism.

• In the film Duets, Paltrow had to sing with co-star Huey Lewis. The pair performed a cover version of Smokey Robinson’s ‘Cruisin”, which was later released as a single and went to No 1 in Australia. She also sang a duet with rap artist Jay-Z, left, during his concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

• “Beauty fades! I just turned 29, so I probably don’t have that many good years left in me.” Paltrow on getting older.

• Paltrow made an enemy of Sharon Stone when she played her in a Saturday Night Live skit that poked fun at Stone and her then husband, Phil Bronstein.

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