9/11 woman: Paltrow encounter saved my life

ACTRESS Gwyneth Paltrow has told how a chance encounter with a stranger while she was driving through Manhattan on the day al-Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers may have saved the person's life.

"I had gone to a yoga class very early," said Paltrow in Venice, while promoting her new film Contagion. "I was on the way home and it was the morning of September 11 - not that I knew at the time what that meant - and a girl was jaywalking across the street."

That girl was 24-year-old Lara Lindstrom Clarke, on her way into work at the World Trade Center.
 
Paltrow, who was in her SUV, stopped to let Clarke cross the road. Clarke was hesitant. As a result, said Paltrow, the pair then did "this stop-start thing... We kind of both stopped at the same time and waited a really long time".  

Eventually, Clarke crossed the road and Paltrow drove off. Both women were laughing as they went their separate ways.

It was only recently that the actress learned the impact that the encounter had on Clarke's life.
 
"I got a letter from her saying that she had been late for work," Paltrow explained. After their run-in, Clarke had made her way to the Christopher Street subway station to catch her train to go down to the World Trade Center, where she worked on the 77th floor of the South Tower.  The train was just pulling out.
 
The delay meant Clarke arrived at the station beneath the Twin Towers at 8.47 – the moment the first plane hit the building. Had it not been for their fateful meeting, said Paltrow, Clarke felt her life "would have taken a much different course".
 
In her letter to Paltrow, Clarke called their encounter a "Sliding Doors moment". She was referring to the hit 1998 hit film, starring Paltrow in the lead role, which details how seemingly irrelevant moments of fate can have huge consequences on the course of someone's life. ·