Kate Hudson had a poignant lesson on how to handle an Oscar loss courtesy of Kurt Russell. The star of "Almost Famous" recalled that heading into her first Academy Awards in 2001, where she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her breakthrough performance in Cameron Crowe's film, she was "prepared" for all eventualities. "I was so young and it was such a whirlwind," Kate said during her Feb. 24 appearance on SiriusXM's The Howard Stern Show. She explained how Kurt—who's been with her mother Goldie Hawn for 43 years—was her "great barometer of the business, my life."
"My dad, who raised me, kept saying, 'Don't listen to everybody. You never know. You never know what's going to happen. Sometimes you might win and you don't, and sometimes you don't think you're going to win and you might win,'" Kate continued. So, despite numerous people telling her she would win, Kate walked into the ceremony with zero expectations thanks to the Tombstone actor's advice. "You can't have the expectation," said the 46-year-old, who ultimately lost to Pollock's Marcia Gay Harden. "It was a good first lesson."
Now, with a second Oscar nomination under her belt for her work in Song Sung Blue, Kate is approaching the ceremony with the same mindset. "I'm not a fan of the rehearsed speech," she shared when host Howard Stern asked if she had any prepared remarks in case of a win. "I like it when it feels like it's from the heart, spontaneous and authentic or nervous and real." Kate added, "I have so many things to say about my family that I'm nervous to even prepare any of it. I think it just needs to come out the way it's supposed to come out."
The How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days alum has a lot of gratitude for Kurt, 74, and Goldie, 80. After all, Kate said the longtime couple also taught her and her brother Oliver Hudson how not to expect handouts. "We were clearly privileged kids," she shared on a recent episode of Happy Sad Confused, "but I do think that my parents were so adamant about how none of it belonged to us, that we didn't earn it, that in order to get a life [like the one] we were living, we had to earn it ourselves, that that would never be available to us unless we had the same kind of work ethic."
That's why when Kate first broke into the scene during the early aughts, she was "so happy" that she had her biological dad Bill Hudson's last name. "I was like, 'No, I will never rely on my parents,'" she said. "And that was my big thing, like, ‘I will never take a job because of them. I don't want anybody knowing they're my parents.'"
