THOUGH THE TINSELTOWN NATIVE IS BEST KNOWN FOR HER ACTING CHOPS (HER BREAKOUT ROLE IN 2001’S ALMOST FAMOUS NABBED AN OSCAR BID), HUDSON IS ALSO A GIFTED SINGER, OFFICIALLY ENTERING THE COMMERCIAL MUSIC SPACE LAST YEAR WITH HER DEBUT ALBUM, GLORIOUS. THIS CHRISTMAS, SHE’S FLAUNTING BOTH TALENTS IN THE MUSICAL BIO-DRAMA SONG SUNG BLUE, PORTRAYING ONE-HALF OF A NEIL DIAMOND TRIBUTE ACT OPPOSITE HUGH JACKMAN

BY WILL HARRIS

The term “nepo baby” gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s usually dismissed pretty quickly when the “baby” in question proves that they’ve got the goods to make it in their chosen career without having to rely on their parents’ names, and that’s certainly the case with Kate Hudson.

In Hudson’s case, who co-stars with Hugh Jackman in the upcoming Neil Diamond-inspired film Song Sung Blue, you may be wondering about the pluralization of “parent,” since she’s decidedly well known for being Goldie Hawn’s daughter, but her dad has also spent ample time in the spotlight himself. Bill Hudson was, along with his brothers Mark and Brett, part of the musical group/comedy troupe known as – what else? – the Hudson Brothers. That said, Bill and Goldie divorced when Kate was all of 18 months old, at which point she was raised by Hawn and her longtime partner, Kurt Russell, so it’s fair to say that most of Kate’s pre-acting fame came courtesy of her mother. [Kate and Bill were estranged for many years, but she acknowledged in 2024 that they were finally trying to forge a relationship, telling Howard Stern, “I know him enough to know, throughout the years, that whatever it is that he carries, whatever it is that makes him unable to have the capacity to be our dad doesn’t mean that he hasn’t loved us from afar or tried his best. I wouldn’t be me if it wasn’t for my dad.”]

Although she dabbled in acting in her youth at the Santa Monica Playhouse, Hudson didn’t really start her career in earnest until the late 1990s, when she appeared in a few TV shows (one-episode stints in Party of Five and EZ Streets) before jumping headfirst into film. She made her motion picture debut as Skye Davis in the 1998 dramedy Desert Blue, bumping up her profile a bit more the following year with a part in the ‘80s-set ensemble comedy 200 Cigarettes, but by 2000 she’d cemented her place in Hollywood with the help of Cameron Crowe, who cast her as the gorgeous groupie Penny Lane in his semi-autobiographical ode to rock journalism, Almost Famous.

“I was supposed to play [William Miller’s] sister,” Hudson recalled in a 2022 BAFTA interview. “And then when Sarah Polley dropped out, I called Cameron and I was like, ‘Please can I audition for Penny Lane?’ He at first didn’t want me to. ‘I see you as this sister, you know?’ And I was like, ‘No, no, Cameron, I’m the only one attached to your movie! Let me audition!’ And he did. And then it was, I think, four auditions. Then I got the call.”

“She got Penny because of her loyalty,” Crowe told Rolling Stone in 2000. “She hung in and had turned down leads in other movies just to play the part of the sister in our movie. Everyone told her she was crazy and told us that we were going to lose her. Then she’d call and say, ‘Don’t listen to them, you’ll never lose me.’”

Loyalty paid off handsomely for Hudson: not only did she win the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, but she earned an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actress as well (the award went home that year with Marcia Gay Harden for her role in Pollock).

Hudson quickly became a staple of the silver screen, thanks in no small part to her ability to play romantic comedy. In 2003 alone, she starred in Le Divorce, Alex & Emma, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, with the latter being the biggest hit of the bunch, courtesy of the chemistry between Hudson and her co-star, Matthew McConaughey. The twosome teamed up again a few years later for the romantic action comedy, Fool’s Gold, confirming that their on-screen spark wasn’t just a one-off.

“The first meeting we ever had when we were going to shoot How to Lose a Guy…” Hudson recalled in a joint interview with McConaughey in 2008. “I think everybody in the room was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be really fun and easy,’ because we just got along really well.”

“And we surprised each other on the screen,” added McConaughey. “I think one of the things that’s cool with Kate and I is that if one of us does surprise the other, the other one doesn’t pop up and yell, ‘Cut!’ We kind of roll with it.”

If it can be said that Hudson had a “romantic comedy era” in her career, however, that came to a close not long after Fool’s Gold, with the actress opting to shake things up in terms of the roles she was choosing. From playing the wife of a serial killer in 2010’s The Killer Inside Me to an arc as a dance teacher on Glee in 2012 to playing a hooker with a heart of gold in 2015’s Rock the Kasbah, Hudson repeatedly demonstrated that she had no intentions of coasting on her past rom-com successes.

Indeed, she wasn’t even going to coast simply on being an actress, releasing her debut album, Glorious, in May 2024, which featured a dozen songs, all co-written by Hudson with various collaborators. Although she’d proven her mettle as a vocalist in a handful of projects over the years, including 2009’s Nine and 2021’s Music, she admitted to NPR’s Ari Shapiro that it was fear of rejection and criticism that kept her from recording an album.

“I was just afraid,” she told Shapiro. “Then COVID happened – as for many people, I think, reevaluating your life, your art, the things that you love. I just was like, if I don’t make an album, it will be my great regret. So I just said, let’s go. Let’s do it.”

And the singing hasn’t stopped: in Song Sung Blue, which hits theaters on Christmas, she and Jackman play married couple Claire and Mike Sardina, the vocalists of the Neil Diamond tribute band, Lightning & Thunder.

2K4PJEG ALEXIS DZIENA, KATE HUDSON, MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, FOOL’S GOLD, 2008

“The person I was in my ‘20s is very different than the person I am in my ‘40s, and the person I am now in my ‘40s is very different than the person I’ll be in my ‘60s,” Hudson told Variety earlier this year. “I just hope I get to keep making movies and telling stories and writing music and being a part of what I see as the great connector.”