What would Gwyneth do?

Gwyneth Paltrow is on a crusade to enrich your sad, spiritually and materially malnourished life. The first sign of the Oscar winner’s humanitarianism appeared last September with the launch of Goop.com, a website and free weekly newsletter sent to subscribers offering advice on topics as diverse as her bowel-cleansing “detox,” how to copy her daily “uniform,” and her favourite places to stay and eat. Other celebrities, among them Paltrow’s ex-fiancé Brad Pitt, tour refugee camps. Providing a portal into her privileged life is Paltrow’s way of giving back. As she told USA Today: “I just thought if I could affect one woman’s life positively who was trying to do all the things I was doing, and I had one solution that worked for me that might work for her, it was worth it to try and share it.”

It’s the rare woman, of course, who has Paltrow’s hectic schedule—commuting by private plane between houses in London and the U.S. with her husband, Coldplay front man Chris Martin, and their two young children, balancing an acting career with endorsements for Estée Lauder, Tod’s and South Korean fashion line Bean Pole International, and squeezing in yoga classes and workouts with the trainer she shares with Madonna. Still, Paltrow’s noblesse oblige is such that she finds time to convene her “sages,” among them Deepak Chopra, to discuss surviving family tensions during the holidays, to post a video of butt-reshaping exercises starring her trainer, Tracy Anderson, and to compile a holiday gift guide that includes a US$500 Dean & DeLuca “Small Ultimate Gift Set” with truffled goose foie gras. Just last week, she provided a new twist on the tired book-club trend, with picks from her “most literary-minded” girlfriends, among them Madonna and the model Christy Turlington.

If it appears Paltrow’s treading, if ever so lightly, on turf long occupied by Oprah and Martha, well, that’s the plan. An unnamed “source” close to the actress recently revealed to the British magazine Now: “Gwyneth wants to be the new Martha Stewart. She wants to launch her own homeware range, a fashion line, a food range and self-help books.” She just signed a deal to write a cookbook that focuses on the importance of family dining, to be published next year. It’s also rumoured she’s backing Anderson’s New York City gym.

Paltrow arrives in the crowded women’s life-coaching arena without precedent. Oprah Winfrey’s ascendancy dovetailed with the appetite for personal confession and spiritual self-help, Martha Stewart’s with the desire for home cooking to look catered. Paltrow enters on their coattails, as a hipper, more karmically evolved Martha and a fitter, more domestically plugged-in Oprah. Her Goop persona is that of the worldly girlfriend who vacillates between the you-are-responsible-for-your-failures rhetoric of the blockbuster The Secret (“My life is good because I’m not passive about it”) and gushy confessional (“I need to lose a few pounds of holiday excess. Anyone else?”). Her inspirational hectoring can occasionally read like Zen for Dummies: “Pause before reacting,” she writes. “Learn something new. Don’t be lazy. Work out and stick with it . . .”

“Sticktoitiveness” is a Paltrow mantra. Certainly it describes the actress’s stealthy campaign to establish her life-coach bona fides with the masses. First, she had to shed her image as an aloof, macrobiotic vegan who spends her days sharing post-colonic kale-and-carrot juice with Stella McCartney. So she provided a friendly peek into her fabulous $5.4-million Hamptons house with a separate workout studio in the November 2007 House & Garden. Last June’s promotional tour for Iron Man, in which she played “Pepper” Potts, was deployed to flaunt her newly toned legs in micro-minis and vertiginous heels. (Retailers dubbed the stampede to imitate her footwear the “Gwyneth effect.”) She erased her vegan rep—and ramped up her culinary cred—by joining the carnivorous chef Mario Batali on his PBS TV series, Spain . . . On The Road Again, which spawned a book. Then, with impeccable timing, Paltrow appeared on Oprah the week before Goop’s launch to talk about how she shed 20 lb. of baby weight and to champion Anderson, whose DVD she produced and directed, as “the exercise genius of all time.”

Why the notoriously private 36-year-old is trying to reinvent herself as a 21st-century Mrs. Beeton is a mystery. For all of its breezy openness, Goop is shrouded in secrecy. The number of subscribers is unknown. When a reporter from the New York Observer went to the address listed on the website, there was no Goop office and a security guard couldn’t find any record of it on the computer. Paltrow’s spokesman, Stephen Huvane, didn’t respond to Maclean’s phone calls or emails.

The most logical explanation for Goop is that Paltrow figured she could make some serious money by capitalizing on her celebrity—and style-setting image. On the TV program Popular, which aired nearly a decade ago, high school girls talked about wanting to be “like Gwyneth.” Maybe, she figured, the same demographic, now mothers, still do.

“To her credit she’s always had lovely style,” says Dany Levy, who attended the private Spence School in New York City with Paltrow. “She’s almost the person you want to hate growing up with in high school.” Levy, the founder and editorial director of DailyCandy.com, another emailed newsletter offering style tips, asked the actress to write about her favourite spots in her New York neighbourhood shortly after the site began in 2000. Paltrow’s picks didn’t make a big impression, says Levy: “The response was surprisingly muted.”