Gwyneth Paltrow's Silence of the Lambs Terror Landed Her Hook Role

Gwyneth Paltrow won her big break as a young Wendy Darling in godfather Steven Spielberg's Hook during a drive home from a screening of The Silence of the Lambs.

The director, who was driving, caught Paltrow's terrified expression inthe rear-view mirror as she quizzed him about the film - and he knew he'd found the star of his 1991 Peter Pan film.

He recalls, "Bruce (Paltrow - Gwyneth's late father) and Kate (Capshaw - Spielberg's wife) and I had taken Gwynnie to see The Silence of the Lambs... We were driving back from the movie theatre, and I was going back to work (on Hook) the next day.

"I was looking in the rear-view mirror and she was talking about the film and she had this really frightened look onher face, and it suddenly clicked, and I said, 'Hey, you could be the young Wendy! You could be the young Maggie Smith.'"

He tells Entertainment Weekly magazine, "I turned around and said, 'Do you want to make a movie?' She got a Sag (Screen Actors Guild) card because of it".