Actress Gwyneth Paltrow says breaking up with Brad Pitt and her father’s throat cancer changed her life and forced her to become an adult, according to an interview published today in Vanity Fair. “It really changed my life,” the Oscar winner said of the 1997 breakup of the high-profile romance with Pitt, who last month wed “Friends” actress Jennifer Aniston in a million-dollar wedding in Malibu, Calif.
“When we split up, something changed, permanently, in me,” she said in the magazine. “My heart sort of broke that day, and it will never be the same.”
Brad Pitt Paltrow, 26, said her relationship with “The Fight Club” star and its end “made me what I am” and she said she had no regrets.
But Paltrow said the recent illness of her father, writer-director Bruce Paltrow, was even more devastating: “It changed me more than anything else.” The good news, Paltrow told Vanity Fair, is that her father has recovered and has gained a newfound inner peace.
“It’s like he dipped his foot on the other side and brought that back with him,” she said.
Paltrow says she is currently single and is “happy with how things are right now.”
“And I try to remember, as I hear about friends getting engaged, that it’s not about the ring, and it’s not about the wedding. It’s – a grave thing, getting married. And it’s easy to get swept up in the wrong things.”
