Gwyneth Paltrow: It's toff at the top

She has found fame, fortune and a place on her mantlepiece for an Oscar. But what she really wants is a well-spoken, well-heeled Brit and, she says, she can't find one. Perhaps she should get out more

The acting legend to whom Gwyneth Paltrow is most often compared is Grace Kelly. United by their blondness, refinement, glacial good looks and all-round star quality, the difference is that Kelly had bagged her prince by the time she was 28, and Gwyneth, poor darling, is feeling lonely and unwanted at almost 30.

Let's be clear about this: it has to be a prince, or something very like it, to interest Paltrow. "I only go for the toffs," she said last week.

The trouble is, the toffs aren't going for her. Indeed, nobody is. Well, that's not strictly true. Gwyneth has amassed all of two dates (both toffs, she says) during lengthy stays in London, the latest in order to appear on the West End stage. And the Oscar-winning star of Shakespeare in Love, a seemingly irresistible combination of screen beauty and A-list celebrity, has begun to wonder what's going on. Like her friend Madonna, Paltrow has bought into the London scene, she has a flat in Chelsea, and loves the capital's general ambience. All she needs is a man to complete the picture. But he's not there.

"It's rather bizarre that she can't find a date in London," says the photographer and restaurateur Jake Gavin, who features on the September Tatler's list of eligible bachelors. "I'd certainly take her out."

Paltrow's problem seems to be the opposite of the one raised not long ago by her fellow-North American Leah Maclean, a Canadian journalist who caused a stir when she wrote an article complaining that none of her English dates ever led to anything. The charge of repressed homosexuality was duly made. But, unlike Paltrow, at least Maclean got as far as being asked out.

A major cultural difference lies at the heart of the US/UK dating experience. "British people don't seem to ask each other out," Paltrow says. "If someone asks you out they're really going out on a limb, whereas in America it happens all the time. Someone will come up to you and ask you for dinner and you'll say, 'Sure'. It's no big deal and no weight should be attached to it. It's only dinner, for God's sake."

Jake Gavin sympathises with that view. "The dating rituals are very different. If I ask someone out in New York, an ulterior motive won't necessarily be read into it. There's so much more significance attached to the process over here. People are much more cautious before taking the plunge."

That's not much comfort to Paltrow, who is now almost as famous for her disappointments in love as she is for a glittering acting career that has put her into Hollywood's big league alongside the likes of her contemporaries Jennifer Lopez, Cate Blanchett and Cameron Diaz.

Romance with Brad Pitt came to a messy end, and months afterwards Paltrow was still saying she was a little bit in love with him. But then along came another handsome young star in Ben Affleck, and Paltrow once again enjoyed the status of being half of one of Hollywood's hottest couples. That didn't last either. The duration of the relationships she subsequently had with Steve Bing, the father of Liz Hurley's baby, and the ketchup heir Chris Heinz were also strictly limited.

So what is it with Paltrow? The ex-lovers are far too gallant to say why it didn't work out, but when asked exactly what he went for in her, Jake Gavin got as far as her "lovely neck", but beyond that he couldn't really say.

For many men, it seems, the flawlessness is actually part of the problem. "She's beautiful but not sexy," is a comment often heard in relation to Paltrow. "It's not enough just to stand around in a Ralph Lauren dress expecting men to fall at your feet," a leading man on the London party scene says. "You get the impression that she's a bit above it all. That's not attractive. You want someone with a bit of spark, who'll really engage with you, who knows how to have fun. She's too icy."

Interestingly, it's women in whom Paltrow seems to provoke the most intense exasperation. One offers the view that she finds her so annoying that she would like to punch her. "She comes across as a spoilt whinger."

Rowan Pelling, the Independent on Sunday columnist and editor of the Erotic Review, knows a thing or two about what constitutes sexiness, and says that Paltrow simply doesn't have it. "We're supposed to find Gwyneth so romantic and desirable," she says, "but when you compare her with the great actresses of the 1940s – like, say, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday – you realise that these women were funny, bright and witty, and that's what made them sexy. Camilla Parker Bowles has far more sex appeal than Gwyneth."

Nothing in Paltrow's upbringing was likely to turn her into a good-time girl, and clearly she lacked whatever spark might have made her rebel against parents who valued the privileges they enjoyed. But then Paltrow, the product of New York's exclusive Spence School, always has too.

Her mother is the actress Blythe Danner, her father, Bruce Paltrow, a TV director and producer whose connections in Hollywood helped secure the 18-year-old Gwyneth a breakthrough role as Wendy in Steven Spielberg's Hook. That meant turning her back on the art history course she had embarked on at the University of California at Santa Barbara, a decision she has never needed to regret.

Paltrow has appeared in more than 30 films in little more than 10 years, and though her image is one of a rather precious serenity, the range of parts she has played is often overlooked. The 1993 thriller Malice, in which she starred with Alec Baldwin, upped her profile, before her association with costume drama took off with Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), and Jefferson in Paris the following year.

After Sliding Doors, the 1998 romantic comedy in which she pulled off the tricky feat of mastering an English accent, she went truly global in the acclaimed Shakespeare in Love, the witty romp in which she was the love who unlocked the playwright's heart. The teary speech with which she accepted her Oscar for Best Actress has gone down in Academy Awards legend.

Perhaps it was all too good to be true. The more princessy aspects of her character began to come through, and the seamless rise to career stardom contrasted with the less than gliding progress she was making in her private life. The fastidiousness was reflected in a strict yoga regime and a macrobiotic diet, preoccupations she says are needed to "balance my extreme life".

But a bit more extremity might not be a bad thing. Cocooned in a world where she can count Madonna, Matt Damon and Jude Law among her friends, still tightly bound to her parents and younger brother, refusing to look beyond a narrow social circle for a potential mate, maybe Paltrow should get out a bit more, even "try a bit of rough" as one columnist advised last week. If the rumours are to be believed, there was more of that going on in Grace Kelly's life than met the eye.