Gwyneth Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Blythe Danner, an actress, and Bruce Paltrow, a film and television director and producer. Gwyneth Paltrow's father was of Ashkenazi Russian Jewish descent and her mother is a Quaker of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. Gwyneth Paltrow's paternal great-grandfather, whose surname was "Paltrowicz", was a rabbi in Kraków, Poland. Gwyneth Paltrow was raised in Santa Monica, where she attended Crossroads School before moving and enrolling in The Spence School, a private girls' school in New York City. Later she briefly studied art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before dropping out to act. Gwyneth Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a cousin of actress Katherine Moennig and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08). Gwyneth Paltrow is an "adopted daughter" of Talavera de la Reina (Spain), where at 15 she spent a year as an exchange student and learned to speak Spanish. Gwyneth Paltrow was a childhood friend of Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph. 
Ben Affleck (born Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt; August 15, 1972) is an American actor, film director, writer, and producer. Ben Affleck became known in the mid 1990s after his involvement in the film Mallrats (1995), and later played the lead role in Chasing Amy in 1997. Ben Affleck has since become an Academy Award winner for his screenplay in Good Will Hunting in 1997. Ben Affleck has established himself as a Hollywood leading man, having starred in several big budget films, such as Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001), Changing Lanes (2002), The Sum of All Fears (2002) and Daredevil (2003). Ben Affleck has collaborated a few times with his younger brother, actor Casey Affleck.
