Kate Hudson: 'I've been a performer since I was in the womb'

That Kate Hudson and Goldie Hawn share the same gene pool is all too obvious, as soon as Hudson opens the door to her suite in a swanky Santa Monica hotel. Apart from that endearing, hiccupy giggle, both have Hollywood-white teeth, creamy skin, flyaway blonde hair and a mole nestling sensuously above the corner of their mouth.

That Kate Hudson and Goldie Hawn share the same gene pool is all too obvious, as soon as Hudson opens the door to her suite in a swanky Santa Monica hotel. Apart from that endearing, hiccupy giggle, both have Hollywood-white teeth, creamy skin, flyaway blonde hair and a mole nestling sensuously above the corner of their mouth.

"We stood in front of the mirror the other day," reveals Hudson happily. "And I looked at her and we were both smiling. We just caught that little moment when we both looked alike."

And do they share the same klutzy-ness? Hudson wrinkles her picture-pert, movie-star nose, and playfully bites back: "No, I'm not klutzy at all. I try to be as graceful as I can possibly be!"

Letting out another infectious laugh, she beams: "We're more like sisters. She's great, because she knows when to be and not be a mother. She never treated me like a child. She always treated me like a peer and I really learned to respect her for that. My mum would always encourage my opinions... Even as a child."

But Hudson is no longer riding on the coat-tails of her famous mother, and her equally famous stepfather, Kurt Russell. Since she garnered an Oscar nod for her performance as the rock groupie Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, the one-time ingénue has rightfully secured her own place on the celebrity map. And let's just hope Hudson has taken a few notes from her mother's sketchy career book, and doesn't opt for the zany, slapstick-comedy route.

As Hudson motions for me to take a seat on the sofa, I marvel at her tiny frame, perfectly poured into figure-hugging beige trousers and a flowing, cream blouse. It's been only a few months since Hudson shed the 60 or so pounds she had gained when pregnant with her son, Ryder, her first child with her husband of four years, Black Crowes' lead singer, Chris Robinson. In true Tinseltown fashion, she hired an around-the-clock team of body transformers - trainer, nutritionist and gourmet chef - to whip her back into her original slinky size so that she could begin work on her next film, Skeleton Key, a thriller set in New Orleans, directed by Iain Softley.

It's a typically hot, lazy Saturday afternoon. A gentle ocean breeze can be felt from the patio windows and Hudson keeps looking out towards it, longingly. Would she rather be outside playing with Ryder? Or is chatting to a journalist her idea of heaven on earth?

She smiles.

"It's a tough juggling act," she admits. "I'm working on it. Oh man, it's a lot. But it actually makes this stuff easier, because my mind and my being is somewhere else. Our friend who helps us take care of Ryder had to go to a wedding, and so Chris is with the baby all by himself."

"Is this his first time?"

Hudson laughs. "Yep, all by himself!" she says. "So, I'm thinking I've got to run home at any minute. I've got the cellphone on just in case..."

Being a mother, she says, has made her think more about her own childhood. "My mum says I've been a performer since I was in her womb," Hudson says with a radiant smile. "I shot out of her belly like a little fireball, ready to conquer."

Tucking a few stray strands of hair behind her ears, she warms to the theme. "She always told me I was the easiest child in the world," she says. "Like I always knew when I wanted to eat. I was never a picky child. Really talkative. I had this big personality. It was a lot of, you know: 'Hey, watch me sing this song! Hey, watch me perform this play!'

"We would go on vacation to Hawaii and my mum would lose sight of me. Then she would see this four year old chatting to the bartender, ordering a Virgin Piña Colada. She says I was a piece of work."

Growing up with Kurt Russell (Hawn's partner of more than two decades) as a stepfather isn't such a bad introduction into the world of hard knocks, either, especially if "movie star" is at the top of your job list. Hudson - who refers to Russell as "pa", since he was the one who did the leg work in raising her - christened her son with the middle name "Russell". It's only recently that she has rekindled a relationship with her natural father, the musician and comedian Bill Hudson. (His split from Hawn was excessively acrimonious, even by Hollywood standards.)

Life does indeed sound like a bed of roses for Hudson, who as a child divided her time between homes in Malibu, California and Aspen, Colorado, along with her brother Oliver, 27, Wyatt, 17, (from Hawn's relationship with Russell) and Kurt's son, Boston, 21 (from his marriage to the actress Season Hubley).

"My childhood was actually very normal," she insists. "My parents were very careful not to bring their work home and they didn't throw big raving parties. They're not those kind of people.

"My pa was the kind of dad who woke up, took the kids to school and watched CNN all day. Believe it or not, my mum still knits and reads. It was all so very normal."

It all sounds dull as dishwater, doesn't it? But surely the young Hudson hung out on glamorous Hollywood film sets?

"Oh yeah, I grew up on a movie set," she says matter of factly. "I'd go to work a lot with my mum, but it wasn't anything glamorous. There was always so much energy on the sets. I remember my favourite time was on the movie Overboard, because there were lots of kids and it felt like summer camp. Whenever I finished being tutored, I'd help out. I was always in the make-up trailer, or I was in the wardrobe, or I was helping the camera guys. I never grew tired of it.

"But I was very lucky, because we were never spoiled as kids. One of the big things growing up was that my parents were adamant about us understanding just how lucky we were. We never got any perks. My parents challenged us all the time as far as making us do our chores and not giving us expensive things without working for them."

To her credit, Hudson has managed to avoid many of the traps privileged children fall prey to - there's been no stint in rehab; no suicidal tendencies; no teenage pregnancies. Nor has there been the need to shake off a "party girl" image.

And then there's her acting. She may look like a ditzy rock chick, married to a rock star, but on celluloid, Hudson conveys emotions of a woman twice her age. Wisely, she resisted the offers to play in vapid teen horror flicks unlike her contemporaries Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Instead, she cut her teeth in quirky, indie flicks such as 1998's Desert Blue, with Christina Ricci, and the following year's 200 Cigarettes, alongside Ben Affleck and Courtney Love.

Since Almost Famous, Hudson's biggest hit has been the romantic comedy How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, opposite Matthew McConaughey, which grossed more than $100m at the US box office. But several of her films have sent the needle into the red. There was the poorly received and over-budgeted war epic Four Feathers (for which Hudson reportedly turned down the part of Peter Parker's girlfriend in Spider-Man); and Dr T and the Women, a laughable film in which she played Richard Gere's lesbian daughter, in love with Liv Tyler. "If you have to kiss a woman's lips, then what better ones to kiss than those?" Hudson remarked at the time.

Her new offering, Raising Helen, is directed by Garry Marshall, whose past successes include Pretty Woman. And while it failed to make much of a dent when it opened in the States over the summer, it's an endearing and smartly acted film.

Hudson plays Helen Harris, an up-and-coming New York City modelling agent, whose toughest decision on a typical day is accessorising her outfit. But Helen's carefree lifestyle comes to a screeching halt when one phone call changes everything: her elder sister dies in a car crash and she becomes a guardian to her three children. We then watch this high-flying glamour girl morph into a soccer mom, but she still manages - this is Hollywood after all - to find love along the way with the children's school principal, Pastor Dan (John Corbett).

"I chose to do this movie because Helen is a real character," Hudson says, venting her frustration at being in that difficult age bracket in the film industry.

"Helen goes through a journey and it's rare that an actress my age will get the chance to read a script like that. I'm not yet 32 and so producers feel as though I can't play those kind of responsible characters, because I'm not at that stage in my life."

Glancing out at the ocean again, Hudson's brain switches gears, and her thoughts revert to Ryder.

"Chris and I love to sing and play the guitar when we sing him a lullaby!" she smiles.

"We sing him these really pretty songs, like George Jones's 'Just One More'... [starts to sing] 'Just one more and then another...' Then we think: 'Mmm, it sounds good. It makes him sleepy, but the song is about an alcoholic. Maybe we shouldn't be singing that to our five-month-old child!'"

'Raising Helen' is released on 27 August