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Blythe Danner still has a love-hate relationship with New York City, where she lived with her husband, Bruce Paltrow (dad of Gwyneth and Jake), until he died in 2002. She’s still in mourning, she says. “A poet wrote, ‘The edge softens, but it never leaves.’” And there are a lot of memories to contend with. “We met here,” she said at a recent benefit for the Williamston Theater at the Puck Building. “I was in a show he produced that lasted two weeks. And we were walking home one night and went to a fortune-teller on a lark in the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” she told New York. “And she told us we were going to get married. We weren’t even dating.” Yet in the end, she says, it’s the city that keeps her going. “For a woman who’s a widow and pretty much a loner, I can walk out and I’m surrounded by NYU kids. The energy jumps off the sidewalks, and I never feel sad or bored.” —Tim Murphy
