Wild At Heart

She’s a magnetic actress, a mother, a British rocker’s love, and, with this month’s launch of her Chrome Hearts Collaboration CH + KH, a jewelry designer. April Long talks to Kate Hudson about her decidedly charmed life

I am so sorry,” says Kate Hudson, as she voraciously chomps on a mouthful of ice cubes. “I just have this unbelievable craving….” When we meet, the actress is due “pretty much any minute” to give birth to her first child with fiancé Matt Bellamy, the lead singer of British rock band Muse, and she’s been having an insatiable urge to chew on ice. “I haven’t been able to feel my mouth for weeks because it’s so numb and so cold!” she says, laughing. “I’m going to have the baby, and all my back teeth are going to be worn down.”

Hudson may have, as she says, “entered the uncomfortable stage” of pregnancy, but she has yet to slow down. Just after wrapping up promotional duties for her latest film, Something Borrowed, she unveiled a jewelry collaboration, CH+KH, with her friend Laurie Lynn Stark, co-owner of the L.A.-based jewelry brand Chrome Hearts. The pair first met at a Rolling Stones concert when Hudson was 16; years later, they bonded when they were both expectant mothers—Hudson with Ryder (her son with ex-husband, Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson), Stark with twins. Since then, they’ve shared countless family vacations, and it was on one of these getaways, in the Bahamas, that the idea for their new venture was born. “It occurred to us,” Hudson says, “we spend all of this time together—why don’t we make something?”

CH+KH’s line, which is a departure from Chrome Hearts’ signature heavy-hardware biker aesthetic, harkens back stylistically to the 1970s vintage pieces that Hudson collects. The collection’s centerpiece pearl-and-gold seashell necklace, for example, was inspired by an heirloom choker that Hudson’s mother, Goldie Hawn, gave her on her twenty-first birthday. (“It was one of the first pieces I ever remember my mother wearing,” she says, “and it was like, Wow, I hope one day I get to wear jewelry like that.”) Stark says the line also reflects the actress’s bohemian spirit. “We used a lot of aquamarines because Kate loves them, but to me they also evoke her personality. She’s so open and light.

We Recommenudson is also charmingly easygoing about the unknown, whether referring to why she opted not to know the sex of her baby (“The experience is so crazy I don’t think it matters either way”) or why she and Bellamy have yet to make wedding plans (“One thing at a time. We’ll say hello to our new one and enjoy that for a while”). The couple met at the Coachella music festival a year and a half ago—a mutual friend introduced them while Radiohead’s Thom Yorke performed in the background—and they’ve since divided their time between California and Bellamy’s home in London, something they’ll continue to do despite having reportedly bought a house near that of Hawn and her partner, Kurt Russell, in a tony L.A. neighborhood. “Most relationships I’ve had in my life have been with people who travel quite a bit for work,” Hudson says. “I don’t know if I’m attracted to that specifically, but it is nice to be with somebody who understands having to be on the move.” Although she’s excited to get back to work (among the upcoming projects she’s involved in is a Linda Lovelace biopic), she concedes that logistics are “definitely getting harder. You have to think about things like, ‘Where is it? How long is it going to keep me away from my family?’ ” She laughs. “But, you know, life moves on. I would never want to be someone who complains and goes, ‘Oh my God, my life is so crazy,’ ” she says. “If you make the best of it, it can be amazing.”

For those times Hudson does feel “off balance,” she turns to Hawn for guidance. “We’ve definitely had lots of talks about parenting and being a working mom,” she says. “She never hands out unsolicited preachy words of wisdom, though. My parents allowed my brother and I to have our freedom and be ourselves and feel confident in our choices and to make mistakes without too much judgment.” She cracks a last chunk of ice. “I hope that I can do as good a job.”