Anne Hathaway

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Anne Hathaway is an American actress whose films have grossed over $6.8 billion worldwide. In 2015 she ranked among the highest-paid actresses in the world. Yet that same year she said, "I always assume that every film is my last, and I always assume that I have to go out and convince everybody why they have to hire me. I still audition." That attitude sits oddly beside the numbers. The questions that follow are simple ones. What does a girl who loves the stage do when the screen first sees her as a princess? How far will she go to vanish into a role, and what do those roles cost her? And why did audiences and critics keep switching between adoring her and mocking her?

  1258

• 2. Stage First

  ›

  On the 12th of November 1982, Anne Jacqueline Hathaway was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Her father, Gerald, was a labor attorney, and her mother, Kate, was a former actress. When Anne was six, the family moved to Millburn, New Jersey, where she was raised. According to The Daily Telegraph, she was named after William Shakespeare's wife.

  At age eight, she watched her mother play Fantine in the first national tour of Les Misérables and became instantly fascinated with the stage. Her parents were not keen on letting her act. Kate quit acting to raise Anne and her brothers, Michael and Thomas.

  A Roman Catholic upbringing gave her what she calls "really strong values", and as a child she wished to be a nun. At fifteen she learned that her older brother was gay, and her relationship with the Church changed. Her family joined the Episcopal Church because of its acceptance of homosexuality, then eventually left that too.

  At Millburn High School she played soccer and took part in many plays, including Once Upon a Mattress, in which she portrayed Winnifred. She later appeared in Jane Eyre and Gigi at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse. She also became the first teenager admitted into the Barrow Group Theater Company's acting program.

  Between 1998 and 1999, she sang soprano with the All-Eastern U.S. High School Honors Chorus at Carnegie Hall. Three days after that performance, she was cast in the short-lived Fox series Get Real. She played the teenager Meghan Green, alongside Jon Tenney, Debrah Farentino and Jesse Eisenberg. Despite that early success, she suffered from depression and anxiety as a teenager, though she said in 2008 that she had grown past it.

  She then spent several semesters at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, as an English major with a political science minor. She transferred to New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her first college semester was lost to the filming of her cinematic debut, and she never regretted leaving without a degree. She enjoyed being around people who "were trying to grow up".

  That debut role had been won in an unlikely place. Hathaway auditioned for it during a flight layover on the way to New Zealand.

  138916

• 3. Princess Hair

  ›

  Director Garry Marshall first considered Liv Tyler for the lead in The Princess Diaries. Then his granddaughters told him Hathaway had the best "princess" hair, and he cast her. The 2001 Disney comedy, based on Meg Cabot's novel, follows teenager Mia Thermopolis as she learns she is heir to the throne of the fictional Kingdom of Genovia. It grossed $165 million worldwide.

  Critics were warm. Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times found her to be "royalty in the making, a young comic talent with a scramble of features". People magazine named her one of its breakthrough stars of 2001. That same year she appeared in The Other Side of Heaven, a Disney film that drew mostly negative reviews and failed at the box office.

  In February 2002, she made her New York City stage debut in the City Center Encores! concert production of Carnival!. She played Lili, an optimistic orphan who falls in love with a magician. She trained with a vocal coach for two weeks and memorized almost all her lines and songs at the first read-through. Charles Isherwood of Variety called her "remarkably unaffected and winning", and she won a Clarence Derwent Award for Most Promising Female.

  Princesses and family films filled the next three years, and the mainstream press began calling her a children's role model. She voiced Haru Yoshioka in the English version of The Cat Returns, then starred in Nicholas Nickleby, which earned less than $4 million at the North American box office. Ella Enchanted, in which she played the title role, also performed poorly. She had first read that book at sixteen, and she sang three songs on the soundtrack, including a duet with Jesse McCartney.

  In 2003, she turned down the role of Christine Daaé in Joel Schumacher's The Phantom of the Opera. Its production schedule overlapped with The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. She was nervous about a sequel, but Marshall convinced her she would not be repeating herself. The film arrived in August 2004 to negative reviews and still made $134.7 million against a $45 million budget.

  Her partnership with Marshall outlasted that sequel. In March 2016, it was reported that she would return for The Princess Diaries 3, but the project was shelved after his death.

  1020212329

• 4. Growing Up on Screen

  ›

  "Anybody who was a role model for children needs a reprieve," Hathaway said of her move toward adult roles. Her first step was Havoc in 2005, where she played a spoiled socialite and appeared nude in some scenes. She denied that this was an attempt to look more mature, saying nudity is sometimes part of what her art demands. Havoc was not released in United States theaters because of unfavorable reviews.

  Brokeback Mountain brought a very different kind of attention. Heath Ledger played Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal played Jack Twist, and Hathaway played Jack's wife, Lureen. She had been sent the script with the part of Ennis' wife in mind but chose to audition for Lureen. She lied about her riding ability to win over director Ang Lee, then took lessons afterward. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said she "excels at showing Lureen's journey from cutie-pie to hard case". She said the film's content mattered more to her than its award count.

  In The Devil Wears Prada, she played an assistant to a powerful fashion magazine editor, played by Meryl Streep. Hathaway was "the ninth choice" for the part and later offered that as encouragement to people never to give up. She volunteered for a few weeks as an assistant at an auction house to prepare. She and co-star Emily Blunt followed a weight-loss regimen that left them hungry and, at times, in tears. The film grossed over $326.5 million worldwide.

  One role she walked away from was in Knocked Up. According to writer-director Judd Apatow, she was uncomfortable with the use of real footage of a woman in labor, and Katherine Heigl took the part. Her only release in 2007 was Becoming Jane, in which she played Jane Austen. A fan of Austen since age fourteen, she reread the novels and studied the author's letters. She also learned sign language, calligraphy, dance choreography and the piano, and moved to England a month before filming to work on her accent. That accent drew some critical complaints, though the performance earned a British Independent Film Award nomination.

  Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married gave her the part that critics have returned to ever since. She played a young woman who leaves drug rehabilitation to attend her sister's wedding, a character she saw as selfish. Peter Travers called her "raw and riveting". She received Academy Award, Golden Globe, Critics' Choice and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Actress, and she won the Critics' Choice.

  That same year, however, she also appeared in the thriller Passengers, which was both a critical and a commercial failure.

  4449535968

• 5. Price of Preparation

  ›

  While filming an action sequence for Get Smart in 2008, Hathaway split the flesh of her shin to the bone and needed 15 stitches. She had learned martial arts and dance techniques to play Agent 99, a role she called a childhood dream come true. The injury was an early sign of how physical her work would become.

  Christopher Nolan cast her as Selina Kyle, also known as Catwoman, in The Dark Knight Rises. She auditioned without knowing which part was under consideration and had Harley Quinn in mind. Only after an hour of talking with Nolan did she learn the truth. She called it her most physically demanding job to that point, trained extensively in martial arts, and looked to Hedy Lamarr while shaping the character. The film grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, and she won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress.

  Tom Hooper's film of the stage musical Les Misérables asked more of her. To play Fantine, a prostitute dying of tuberculosis, she ate fewer than 500 calories a day to lose 25 lb, researched prostitution, and cut her hair. During production in London, she sent her husband back to the United States so she could stay in the character's frame of mind, and she grew increasingly temperamental. At the 2012 CinemaCon, Hooper described her singing of "I Dreamed a Dream" as "raw" and "real".

  The payoff was enormous. She won the Academy Award, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress. Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote that the film's centerpiece belonged to her. In January 2013, her version of the song reached number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100. Asked whether she was pleased with her work, she answered only, "Eh".

  In Nolan's Interstellar, she played NASA scientist Amelia Brand, drawn by the character's growth from arrogant to humbler. The $165 million production was filmed mostly with IMAX cameras. During a water scene in Iceland, Hathaway nearly suffered hypothermia because her dry suit had not been properly secured. The film grossed over $701 million worldwide and earned her a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress.

  In 2024, for the thriller Mothers' Instinct, she asked cast and crew to call her by her character's name. Playing a grieving mother, she wanted a "protective layer" between herself and the part, since losing a child was her "worst fear". Reviewers were split on the result, and Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian thought her performance was overshadowed by Jessica Chastain's.

  556566

• 6. Voices and Stages

  ›

  In the summer of 2009, Hathaway played Viola in Twelfth Night at the Delacorte Theater in New York City. Charles Isherwood wrote that she "dives smoothly and with obvious pleasure into the embrace of a cohesive ensemble cast". The role brought a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Play. She has said she prefers performing on stage to film and claims to be terrified of acting on camera.

  Her voice has won her as much recognition as her face. In 2010, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance for the Simpsons episode "Once Upon a Time in Springfield". She voiced characters on Family Guy in 2010 and 2011. As the Spix's macaw Jewel in Rio, she helped the 2011 animated film gross more than $484 million against a $90 million budget. Rio 2 in 2014 grossed nearly five times its $103 million budget.

  Audiobooks came next. She had earlier voiced the first three Princess Diaries novels, and in 2012 her recording of L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was released at Audible.com. It earned an Audie Award nomination for Best Solo Narration, Female.

  She also became a regular host. In October 2008, she hosted an episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live. In December 2010, she and Denzel Washington hosted the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway. Two months later, she and James Franco hosted the 83rd Academy Awards. Critics were unenthusiastic about their chemistry but felt Hathaway gave her best and did better than Franco, who they thought seemed uninterested. The hosting earned her an Emmy nomination in the Outstanding Variety Special (Live) category.

  She was a good sport on television, too. In 2015, on the first season of Lip Sync Battle, she faced her Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt. Hathaway lip synced "Love" by Mary J. Blige and "Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus.

  Her music stretched further than that. She co-produced the drama Song One, sang "Afraid of Heights" for its soundtrack, and said she wanted to show the healing power of music. The film premiered at Sundance in January 2014 but failed to recoup its $6 million investment. In 2016, she joined Barbra Streisand and Daisy Ridley on the album Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, singing "At The Ballet" from A Chorus Line as the dancer Maggie.

  7177789395

• 7. Praise and Pans

  ›

  Time magazine put Bride Wars on its 2010 list of the ten worst chick flicks in history. The 2009 comedy, which Hathaway cheerfully described as hideously commercial, was nonetheless a financial success. Her pattern has often looked like this: critics sneer while ticket buyers turn up. Alice in Wonderland, in which she played the White Queen as "a punk-rock vegan pacifist", grossed $1 billion despite mixed reviews.

  Sometimes the criticism landed on her work directly. For One Day in 2011, her Yorkshire accent was judged subpar. Columnist Suzanne Moore said on BBC Radio 4's Front Row that her accents were "all over the shop". Hathaway later regretted that she may have unwittingly held misogyny during the production, because she felt she had not trusted the director, Lone Scherfig, on account of her gender.

  After her 2013 awards speeches for Les Misérables, several commentators called her "annoying" and her jokes "awkward", according to The Atlantic. She explained that public speaking makes her anxious and that she has since grown more compassionate. In 2019, Serenity and The Hustle were poorly received, and The Washington Post dismissed her Serenity performance as "cartoonish". The Last Thing He Wanted and The Witches in 2020 earned her nominations for Worst Actress at the 41st Golden Raspberry Awards.

  Then came the turn. The Apple TV+ miniseries WeCrashed, which she executive produced, cast her opposite Jared Leto as Rebekah Neumann of WeWork. Angie Han of The Hollywood Reporter praised her for resisting the temptation to make Rebekah a caricature. In James Gray's Armageddon Time, she played a character inspired by Gray's mother, and David Rooney called it her best performance since Rachel Getting Married.

  In 2023, she played emotionally troubled psychiatrists in Eileen and She Came to Me. She described Eileen as "Carol meets Reservoir Dogs". The next year, in The Idea of You, she played a divorced mother who begins a romance with a younger pop star. Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times wrote that the film "succeeds mostly because of Hathaway's performance".

  Her public persona has long been summed up as the girl next door. John Hiscock of The Daily Telegraph wrote in 2014 that she has never "gone Hollywood". An Esquire writer observed in 2018 that her career showed "subtle brilliance that has largely gone unnoticed". Her commercial standing is not in doubt. She became the face of Lancôme's fragrance "Magnifique" in January 2008 and the face of the Italian company Tod's in 2011.

  One oddity captures her fame better than any contract. The 2015 found footage horror film Be My Cat: A Film for Anne follows an aspiring Romanian filmmaker who goes to shocking extremes to persuade her to star in his film. It had its North American premiere at the 2016 Nashville Film Festival.

  In 2026, she starred opposite Michaela Coel in David Lowery's Mother Mary and returned as Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada 2. Still ahead are Nolan's The Odyssey, in which she plays Penelope, and a film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's novel Verity.

  748485100

• 8. Causes and Private Life

  ›

  In July 2006, Hathaway spent a week in Nicaragua helping to vaccinate children against hepatitis A. She has also been a long-term advocate for the Nike Foundation, raising awareness against child marriage, and has traveled to Kenya and Ethiopia to promote the rights of women and girls. In 2010, she teamed up with the World Bank on The Girl Effect, a two-year development program. In 2013, she narrated Girl Rising, a CNN documentary following seven girls around the world.

  In 2016, she was appointed a UN Women goodwill ambassador because of her advocacy for gender equality. The following year, she spoke on International Women's Day in favor of paid parental leave for both men and women. In 2018, she worked with 300 women in Hollywood to set up the Time's Up initiative, which aims to protect women from harassment and discrimination. She also sits on the board of the Lollipop Theatre Network, which brings films to children in hospitals.

  Her private life has had its own drama. From 2004 to 2008, she dated Italian real estate developer Raffaello Follieri. The IRS investigated him in June 2008, and he was arrested on charges of defrauding investors, including former President Bill Clinton, by posing as the Vatican's real estate agent. The FBI confiscated Hathaway's private journals from his New York City apartment. She was not charged with a crime, and in October 2008 Follieri was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty.

  On the 29th of September 2012, she married actor and businessman Adam Shulman in a traditional Jewish ceremony in Big Sur. They sold their wedding photo and donated the profits to the same-sex marriage advocacy group Freedom to Marry. They later hosted the group's National Engagement Party, which raised $500,000. Their sons are Jonathan, born in March 2016, and Jack, born in November 2019.

  In October 2018, she quit drinking and has described herself as sober. That November, she was among 50 nominees for the New Jersey Hall of Fame. In May 2019, she received a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  12