What Kate Hudson’s Relationship With Her Dad Bill Is Really Like Now

Kate Hudson calls her father, musician Bill Hudson, a great songwriter, but also says she doesn’t have a relationship with him, as part of an interview for CBS News Sunday Morning, which aired April 28 on CBS and streaming via Paramount+. Her relationship with her father has been estranged for years, but in the interview, Hudson speaks openly about their relationship, her family, her music, her plans to tour, and her experience as a mother.

As Kate, 45, noted, she and Bill, 74, do not have a relationship at the moment. “But it’s like, I, you know, it’s warming up. There’s warming up with this all happening …”

“It’ll be whatever it will be,” she explained. “I have no expectation of that with my father. I just want him to be happy.”

Kate’s mother, Goldie Hawn, welcomed Kate and Oliver Hudson into the world during her and Bill Hudson’s six-year marriage. Bill, who was part of the 1970s band The Hudson Brothers, separated from Hawn while Hudson was a toddler. 

They divorced in 1982, and the Oscar winner, now 78 years old, moved on to another man the following year — Kurt Russell. Russell, 73, has long been regarded as a father figure by Kate and Oliver, 47.

“I often wonder how different our life would have been if he never entered the picture,” Kate wrote on her Instagram account in a 2021 birthday tribute. “How different I would be.” During that same year, Oliver, who co-hosted the podcast Sibling Revelry with Kate, spoke to Us Weekly about the fact that they had “a tight family.”

On Father’s Day in June 2015, Oliver posted on Instagram that he wished Bill a “happy abandonment day.” In a later interview, the musician said his children were “dead to” him and no longer “recognize[d] as [his] own.”  

“I say to them now, ‘I set you free,’” he told the Daily Mail. “I had five birth children but I now consider myself a father of three. I no longer recognize Oliver and Kate as my own.”

Additionally, Bill requested that Oliver and Kate stop using his last name. “They are no longer a part of my life,” he continued. “Oliver’s Instagram post was a malicious, vicious, premeditated attack.” The following month, Russell told E! News that Bill and Oliver had “some nice back and forth” after the social media upload.

Listeners to the podcast in January 2021 heard Kate mention the idea of reconciliation with Bill’s other children. “We’ve got four siblings we don’t spend any time with,” the singer said at the time. “We don’t ever acknowledge the fact that we have four other siblings — four.

“So I’ve been thinking a lot about the Hudsons,” she continued. “Thinking that it’s important that we reach out with all of our siblings and maybe connect with them a little bit.”