The ‘Devil Wears Prada’ star revealed that her miscarriage occurred during a six-week run of the one-woman off-Broaday show “Grounded”.
Hollywood actor Anne Hathaway has recounted a difficult moment in her life, saying that she suffered a miscarriage in 2015 while acting as a pregnant woman in a play. In an interview with Vanity Fair, the 41-year-old Oscar-winning star said her first pregnancy “didn’t work out”, adding, “I was doing a play and I had to give birth on stage every night”. She revealed that her miscarriage occurred during a six-week run of the one-woman off-Broaday show “Grounded”. She said she “pretended everything was fine” but said she told her friends the truth when they visited her backstage.
In the interview, Anne Hathaway said she “had to keep it real” with her friends when they would visit her backstage after performances. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine,” she said.
“So when it did go well for me, having been on the other side of it – where you have to have the grace to be happy for someone – I wanted to let my sisters know, ‘You don’t have to always be graceful. I see you and I’ve been you,” the Oscar-winning actor and mother of two said.
“It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong,” she added.
The ‘Devil Wears Prada’ star welcomed her first son with husband Adam Shulman in March 2016. In 2019, she announced her second pregnancy. But in an Instagram post, she indicated her fertility struggles. “It’s not for a movie,” she wrote, alongside a photo of her baby bump. “All kidding aside, for everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love,” she said.
In the latest interview, the actor explained the reason for writing the Instagram post. “Given the pain I felt while trying to get pregnant, it would’ve felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy when I know the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone,” she said.
She added she “wasn’t going to feel ashamed” of something that seemed “statistically to actually be quite normal”.
Anne Hathaway said that after suffering a miscarriage, she was stunned to find out how common miscarriages are. She also found out that many of her friends had had similar experiences. “I thought, where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage. So I decided that I was going to talk about it,” she said.
“The thing that broke my heart, blew my mind, and gave me hope was that for three years after, almost daily, a woman came up to me in tears and I would just hold her, because she was carrying this [pain] around and suddenly it wasn’t all hers anymore,” she added.