Actress Gwyneth Paltrow says she was in her mid-twenties when she realised she did not love acting that much.

The realisation came soon after she won an Oscar for "Shakespeare In Love".

"I sort of felt like, well, now who am I supposed to be? Like, what am I, what am I driving towards?" she said during an appearance on "Quarantined With Bruce", reports people.com.

Now 45, Paltrow said that "part of the the shine of acting wore off" due to the "intense public scrutiny" of being a young actress in Hollywood.

"Being a kid who's like living every breakup on every headline, like being criticised for everything you do say and wear," Paltrow continued.

"And also, it's so transitory, you're always all over. It's hard to plant roots. Like I'm such a homebody, you know me, I like to be with my old friends and cook and squeeze my kids. Like I don't want to be alone in a hotel room in Budapest for six weeks. Like, it's just not who I am," she said.

She also went on to talk about the toll that producer Harvey Weinstein took on her. He was her boss as the president of Miramax for several years, including when she won the Best Actress Oscar in 1999 for "Shakespeare In Love". They also previously worked together on the 1996 film "Emma".

"If you compound those things with the fact that like, you know, to be totally candid, I had a really rough boss for most of my movie career at Miramax," she said of the disgraced mogul, who she has accused of sexual harassment.

"Like, so you take all those things (and) you're like, ‘I don't know if this is really my calling'," she said.

Paltrow has dated stars like Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

The actress went on to marry Martin, with whom she has daughter Apple, 16, and son Moses, 14. The two split in 2014 and Paltrow married producer Brad Falchuck in 2018.