ate Hudson is put
through the rumour mill in this suspenseful tale ofbetrayal and revenge.
Kurt Russell, and those bells start to clang in a big way. Hudson's parents may be the best known thing about her at the moment, but she's working hard to change that. Very hard, in fact.
At the tender age of 19, Hudson has already racked up an impressive list of independent movie credits.
These include her breakthrough role as a ditzy New Year's Eve date in last year's 200 Cigarettes, her turn as a spoiled starlet in the romance Desert Blue, and her latest release, Gossip. Despite these edgy roles, she insists, "I'm not the cool, hard, independent-movie-chick in the grunge outfit reading Dostoyevsky. I like to look and dress nice. I'm very Betty Crocker."
If that is indeed the case, then Hudson plays true to form in the drama Gossip. She describes her character, Naomi, as "the kind of girl who always gets what she wants, like the popular boy, the car, all that. She's a virgin. She won't let any
guy touch her."
Because of this reputation - or lack of same - Naomi and her boyfriend, Beau (played by Joshua Jackson), become the unwitting subjects of an experiment on the power of gossip. The experiment is conceived as part of a class project by three college roommates who spot the couple in a drunken make-out session at a nightclub. The three then fabricate a story about Beau raping Naomi to track the rumour's growth throughout the campus. Since Naomi passes out later that night, even she doesn't know what really happened and the rumor spins wildly out of control. "The film's quite a ride," says Hudson.
Gossip marks Hudson's fourth film in the past year. She seems to be making up for lost time - for those days in her childhood when she desperately wanted to perform but her parents thought she was too young. "I begged them," she
recalls. "I wanted to act, and they kept telling me 'No, no.' "
Hawn finally allowed Kate to audition, at age 11, for a lead role in a (never produced) television show with Howie Mandel. Hudson won the part, but Hawn turned it down for her and only told her daughter about it a year later. "She just wanted to see if I could do it," says Hudson, who bears no grudge.
After graduating from a performing-arts high school, Hudson won a guest spot on TV's Party of Five. "I broke up Justin and Julia on the season finale." She landed the part in 200 Cigarettes soon after and has been in front of movie cameras ever since. It was inevitable that her engagingly klutzy performance in that film would be compared to Goldie Hawn's early work, but Hudson remains unfazed. "She's my
mother, but I'm not her clone," she says. "I get either 'She's so cute, she's just like her mom' or 'She's trying to be like her mom,' so I let it go."
And so will audiences once news of Kate Hudson's unique talent hits the grapevine.
- Deborah Smyth