Gwyneth Paltrow Takes Up a Cause Close to Her Heart

Gwyneth takes up a cause close to her heart and hit the town on Thursday night to host a diamond jewelry auction at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City to raise funds for the city's first Hope Lodge, which provides housing for cancer patients despite having a horrible cold courtesy of her infant son Moses.

"It's for a really good cause. This has been planned for a long time, so I couldn't take a sick day today," she says.

The cause is very close to her heart following her father's death in 2002 after a battle with throat cancer.

"My life has been affected by cancer in so many different ways," she says. "When my father had cancer, he found it so isolating. It's very difficult to empathize with it if you haven't gone through it."

After taking off time to spend with her children Apple, 2, and Moses, 10 months, Paltrow is back at work in the new film, The Good Night, which was directed by her brother Jake and she just signed on to co-star with Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man.

"I haven't really done a real part in a long time. I'm going back to work now," she says. "When I had kids, I just wanted to be with them. That was it for me. And that was great for a couple of years, and it still is. Because my parents were good parents and my mom was home with us a lot of the time, that's been the way I've gone."

She says she plans on doing one movie a year as the kids grow up because working "makes you more interesting as a person and wife and mother."

She describes her kids as totally different personality types, saying: "Moses is fiery and very sweet and very sensitive and hysterically laughs all the time. Apple is the most charming, articulate 2 1/2 -year-old you'll ever meet in your life."

Source: USA Today