Gwyneth Paltrow Talks About Saving a Woman's Life on 9/11

1:21 PM PDT 9/6/2011 by Patrick Kevin Day

0
0
0
0
0
Email
Print
Comments

Larry Busacca/Getty Images

The "Contagion" star inadvertently caused a woman to miss dying in the World Trade Center collapse.

Gwyneth Paltrow has finally addressed the story of the woman who claims the movie star saved her life on September 11, 2011.

Gwyneth Paltrow Gets Star on Walk of Fame

Gwyneth Paltrow Joins Twitter, Facebook

The actress is at the Venice Film Festival promoting the Steven Soderbergh disease thriller Contagion, and recalled the fateful morning to Reuters.

"I was on the way home and it was the morning of September 11 -- not that I knew at the time what that meant -- and a girl was jaywalking across the street and we kind of both stopped at the same time and waited a really long time," she said.

"Ten years later I got a letter from her saying that she had been late for work and we had that thing and she went down to the Christopher Street station to catch her train to go down to the World Trade Center where she worked on the 77th floor of the South Tower and the train was just pulling out.

"So had we not had that interaction she feels like her life would've taken a much different course."

STORY: How Gwyneth Paltrow Saved a Woman's Life on 9/11

The woman, New Yorker Lara Lundstrom Clarke, made headlines when she went public with her story in August. At the time, she told the press, "If I had made that train I would have been at my desk on the 77th floor of 2 World Trade Center."

Paltrow said the woman compared the moment to the actress' film, Sliding Doors, which shows how a woman's life can take radically different paths depending on if she catches the subway or misses it.

STORY: 9/11 Anniversary: What the TV Networks Are Planning

Paltrow wonders how her celebrity distorts the importance of the event.

"It was an extraordinary story and all I could think about is all of the people who had experiences like that that day, but aren't able to reach out because it wasn't a recognizable person," she said.

"She saw it was me so she was able to get me a message, but I think a lot of fates were changed that day obviously and I am very humbly happy to be a part in her story."