Goldie brings LA glamour to Hay

Clare Gabriel
BBC News website

Hawn talked of table dancing at truck stops and meeting Elvis

Hollywood came to Hay on Wye on Saturday when Goldie Hawn added a dash of Tinseltown to the literary festival.

And the Private Benjamin actress, whose career has spanned more than 35 years, found it a far cry from the red carpets of LA as the wind buffeted the tented village on the outskirts of the town.

"God, it's like a weird spaceship in here," laughed Hawn, who had flown in from Dublin to talk about her book, A Lotus Grows in the Mud.

Hawn is the first Hollywood "great" to grace this year's Hay festival - fellow actor Jane Fonda will appear next Sunday.

They star in a growing line-up of international figures, led by former US president Bill Clinton, who have chosen to come and "bare their souls" to the festival, now the biggest and most celebrated in the UK.

Dressed in a satin baby-doll top, trousers, and glittering sandals, Hawn was the "most unlikely grandmother" there, as her interviewer said.

She described how writing the book had helped her accept all the experiences that had made up her career and life.

I could not believe I was going to die before I was ever kissed Goldie Hawn on growing up during the Cold War

"I thought I would be able to write these little footprints in my life that led me to contemplation," she said.

But the book is not an autobiography. Hawn hates them. Instead it is an interpretation of what effect significant events - like when she almost lost her son at birth - have had on her.

She talked of growing up in a suburb of Washington DC, a young ballerina looking for perfection at the time of the Cold War.

"I guess I was around 11 when I realised that I could die. I really got a sense of my mortality," she said.

"(President) Khrushchev was arguing with Kennedy and everybody was going to kill everybody else".

"I could not believe I was going to die before I was ever kissed," she said.

The actress signed copies of her new book for fans

She told of how she was forced to finance her dream of Broadway by go-go dancing on a table at a truck stop in New Jersey.

"It was awful, I thought why the hell am I doing this anyway?"

But her ambitions did not she stop and she went from being a TV comedy actor to an Oscar-winner, from director to campaigner for children's education.

She described how she dealt with the "dumb blond" jibes levelled at her, telling the women's movement she felt truly liberated already.

She also talked of her special bond with comedian Peter Cook, who sent her an armoire from France for her Hollywood home.

Meeting Elvis on the set of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In was another watershed.

He told her she looked like a "chicken that had just hatched", and she had no idea whether this was a compliment.

But there was no mistaking her admiration for Presley.

"He was so hot, oh God," said Hawn. "He was so cute, he was gorgeous. He had a lot of energy that man."

Cardiff-born broadcaster and writer John Humphrys was also at the festival to promote his new book on the importance of language.

Broadcaster Humphrys berated politicians for misusing language

Humphrys, the feared presenter of Radio 4's Today said the main reason why language has become so ambiguous was the "massive, massive, massive error" of changing teaching methods in schools in the 1960s.

"I left school at 15 and had no education to speak of. But I was taught about grammar and with that I was able to get a job on a local newspaper."

Humphrys berated what he saw as the "misuse" of language by politicians - particularly Tony Blair's lack of verbs in his speeches.

"It's a way of delivering a series of thoughts so you get a reaction but don't commit yourself to anything," he said.

In fact, Humphrys shared the same joke with another of the day's speakers - satirist Rory Bremner - about President George Bush, who they both pronounced had famously said: "The trouble with the French is they don't have a word for entrepreneur."

Bremner warmed up his crowd by doing a 15-minute series of the impersonations of politicians for which he is most famous.

He described meeting Blair in 1996 and telling the future PM he would soon be impersonating him. Blair replied as a joke: "How does Lord Bremner sound?"

The impersonator said the Butler and Hutton reports had lifted the lid on the way the government works. There was "feeling that there is something rotten at the core," he said.

He also criticised the current level of apathy in politics, especially among the young, saying he wanted to draw a line between cynicism and scepticism.

At the end of his performance, another of the day's speakers, actor Stephen Fry, presented Bremner with a first edition David Copperfield on behalf a book charity.