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By Angela Dawson
Entertainment News Wire
LOS ANGELES -- A walk through Central Park, a shopping excursion and dinner at the upscale department store Barneys New York is all it took for Kate Hudson to be swept off her feet. Two days after her first official date with Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson she moved in with him and they soon married. Bucking the odds, the couple celebrated their second anniversary on New Year's Eve, and they appear to be just as happy and in love as they did in the beginning.
"He makes me laugh every day and I get excited to go home to him every night," coos Hudson during a recent interview here to promote her latest movie, the romantic comedy How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
With two busy careers that often keep them apart for weeks at a time -- he with his touring and she with her acting -- Hudson and Robinson have worked hard to make their marriage strong. They try to arrange their schedules so they can be together as often as possible.
For example, last spring they spent an enchanted three months in Paris along with their dogs. Hudson was filming the James Ivory comedy Le Divorce with Glenn Close, while Robinson wrote and recorded his first solo album, New Earth Mud.
Hudson says they would have liked to remain in Paris, but alas, they returned to New York where she was signed to make How to Lose a Guy, a feisty film co-starring Matthew McConaughey. Robinson joined Hudson there before embarking on a concert tour of the Northeast with his New Earth Mud band. (The Black Crowes are on hiatus.)
After wrapping that film, Hudson was off to Toronto to star in Loosely Based on a True Love Story, a Rob Reiner-directed comedy slated for release later this year. So Robinson took his band to Canada to tour and be near his beloved bride.
Hudson is starting work on yet another comedy, Raising Helen, to be shot in Los Angeles and New York, in which she plays the unlikely guardian of three orphans. After wrapping the Garry Marshall-directed comedy Hudson plans to take a much-needed break and join her husband on tour.
Dressed in a beaded, vanilla-colored peasant blouse and hip-hugger jeans, Hudson is looking just a little tired as the Super Bowl quietly glows in the background of a Beverly Hills hotel suite. She says she's not superstitious (she notes that 13 is her lucky number because she met Robinson on the 13th), but she routinely carries a crystal in her purse to calm her nerves. "Crystals are pretty healing," she points out.
With a mane of curly blond hair framing her cherubic face, Hudson chain-smokes American Spirit cigarettes. She plans to quit while making Raising Helen, in which her character is trying to stop smoking.
Of her frantic work schedule she explains, "I loved all these characters and they're all completely different. These are all directors I really wanted to work with. Am I going to say no to Rob Reiner, Garry Marshall or James Ivory? I jumped at these opportunities."
Hudson says she's never felt pressure to work. In fact, she took a year off after her breakthrough role as the endearing "band-aide" Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe's '70s rock 'n' roll paean Almost Famous, a role that earned her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. It was around that time that she and Robinson, 12 years her senior, decided to marry.
As the child of divorced parents -- her biological father is musician Bill Hudson of Hudson Brothers fame and her mother is actress Goldie Hawn -- Hudson decided the best way to start her marriage was to concentrate on being a wife for a while. It was a bold move, given that her star was on the rise and in Hollywood it's best to strike while the iron is hot. Nevertheless, Hudson heeded the advice of her twice-divorced movie-star mom to stay home and establish a relationship with her husband for a while. Hudson says it was the smartest move she's ever made.
"I love being able to be a wife and make dinners and have him have his friends over and make it nice for him," she says, tossing a wayward golden lock of hair behind her shoulder. "It's a nice thing for a man to feel that and for me to feel that I can give that."
The break also gave her time to think about her career and where she wanted to go with it. At 21, she figured she would have plenty of time to play different kinds of roles.
"I'm not going to hurry myself, because the people who are the most successful in what they do are usually the most successful at home," says Hudson, 23. "When you're happy with your home life and not worrying about what magazine you're in or what events you're being invited to, you can do good work."
Sounds like more sage advice from her Oscar-winning mama and surrogate dad, Kurt Russell, who has lived with Hawn for the past two decades and virtually raised Hudson and her brother, Oliver, as his own. Hudson, who adores her "Pa," as she calls him, says her husband shares a lot of Russell's qualities, like being honest, hard working, opinionated and putting family first.
She dismisses rumors that Hawn and Russell are getting married. She suspects the rumors stem from "that honking diamond he gave her for Christmas," which Hawn wore to this year's Golden Globes.
Meanwhile, Hudson has a film to promote. In How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, she plays Andie Anderson, an advice columnist who lands an unusual assignment: to write a firsthand account of all the things that women do to inadvertently drive men away. The film opens strategically a week before Valentine's Day.
"A lot of time when you read romantic comedy (scripts) they are cute but they're not funny, and this one made me laugh out loud," says Hudson. "I liked that it was a two-hander -- a battle of the sexes."
In the film, Andie has 10 days to find a guy, get him to fall in love with her and then make classic dating mistakes so he'll dump her. It turns out that her target is ad-agency exec Benjamin Barry (McConaughey), who has bet his boss that he can make a woman fall in love with him in 10 days.
Director Donald Petrie (Miss Congeniality) says he agreed to direct How to Lose a Guy because of Hudson's involvement. "I love working with people who are early in their careers, when they're still directable," he says with a laugh. "Kate's amazing. She's extremely talented -- way beyond her years in sophistication and knowledge, and she's really smart when it comes to comedy."
Co-star McConaughey, 33, agrees. "She rolls with everything, which I like," says the hunky blond Texan. "Every take is different and you can't really throw anything at her that's going to make her stop or really get in her way. She keeps it fresh."
Petrie says he liked the fact that his two leads were willing to improvise. In one scene, Andie arrives at Ben's bachelor pad, interrupting his card game with the guys to give him a frou-frou dog for a pet. To Ben's astonishment, Andie throws herself on him, smothers him in kisses and playfully musses his hair.
"I told Kate to do that but I didn't tell Matthew it was coming," says Petrie. "So doing stuff like that keeps those kinds of things alive and keeps it fresh for them."
Hudson recalls that McConaughey, known for his eccentricities, was fun to be around on the set. She reveals that he stayed in a customized Prevost bus (favored by music bands) during production rather than a hotel.
"I would come to work every morning and he would be outside brushing his teeth," she recalls with a giggle. "Soon we were putting down Astroturf (around the bus) and buying him little pools and stuff. It was just so funny. That's just what you love about Matthew. He is just so wild and fun."
Though married now, Hudson still recalls the dating scene and admits to some of the dating no-nos spelled out in the film. "I definitely did things, like call someone too much or write a letter telling them how I felt," she says.
Unlike her character, though, Hudson says she didn't play mind games with the opposite sex. "If I ever wanted to lose a guy, I'd just tell him," she declares. She does recall abandoning one guy mid-date because he was just too shy.
Hudson says she was never comfortable dating and actually preferred being unattached to being in a romantic relationship. Until she met Robinson.
"I wouldn't envy anybody in the dating circuit," says Hudson, who wears a simple wedding band. "I hated it. It was not fun for me. I loved being single and alone and having a great time with my girls. But I think that no matter what, when you really find the guy you are supposed to be with, when you really find each other, you can't do anything wrong."
