Anne Hathaway has revealed the heartbreaking experience of suffering a miscarriage in 2015 while starring in a play that required her to portray a pregnant woman giving birth every night.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, the 41-year-old actress discussed her fertility struggles before giving birth to her two sons with husband Adam Shulman. Hathaway revealed that her first pregnancy “didn’t work out” as she was performing the one-woman show Grounded off-Broadway.
“I was doing a play and I had to give birth on stage every night,” Hathaway said of having to act out labor during the six-week run while privately dealing with her own miscarriage. Though she “pretended everything was fine” on stage, the Les Misérables star confided in friends who visited her backstage, admitting “it was too much to keep it in.”
Anne Hathaway had her first son Jonathan in March 2016. When announcing her second pregnancy on Instagram in 2019, she acknowledged her path to motherhood was “not a straight line” due to infertility struggles.
The Oscar winner explained her decision to openly discuss those challenges, saying
“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.”
Anne Hathaway expressed feeling initially unaware of how common miscarriages are until opening up about her own experience.
“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.”
In the years since, Hathaway says many women have approached her in tears, grateful for her candidness in destigmatizing pregnancy loss.
“I would just hold her, because she was carrying this [pain] around and suddenly it wasn’t all hers anymore.”
