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Anne Hathaway on Tuning Out the Haters and Embracing Her True Self

By Julie Miller

Photography by Norman Jean Roy

Styled by Deborah Afshani

It’s a gray Manhattan morning, but Anne Hathaway and I are sitting in a restaurant so dazzlingly white, it looks like the afterlife scene in a movie. The Oscar winner is warm and considerate. I arrive 10 minutes early and she is already seated, in a white sweater and pale blue jeans, at a table she thought would be best for my recording purposes. The restaurant’s menu is strictly plant-based—we order green chickpea hummus, market beets, and honeynut squash—but Hathaway’s diet is not. Later she’ll deadpan, “I think everybody can agree I have the personality of a vegan.”

Hathaway has been famous for more years than she hasn’t and is well acquainted with the internet’s noisy opinions. She’s undergone an existential overhaul in the last five or so years—a period that coincided with giving up alcohol, new motherhood, turning 40, and treating herself with more grace. “This is the first time I’ve known myself this well,” she’ll later explain. “I don’t live in what others think of me. I know my own mind and I am connected to my own feelings.” Also: “I’m way quicker to laugh now.”

Her newfound clarity is evident on screens and red carpets, where she’s debuted a kaleidoscope of vivid colors and edgy silhouettes that have earned her Gen Z approval. Donatella Versace called the formerly pristine star “dangerous, but sexy”—the ultimate compliment for a Scorpio—and chose her to front her Icons campaign. Hathaway accompanied the designer to last year’s Met Gala, where she was a best-dressed revelation in a tweed gown held together by pearls and safety pins, à la Elizabeth Hurley, hair teased to ’90s supermodel heights. This May, she stars in and produces Amazon’s adaptation of Robinne Lee’s sex-positive romance novel The Idea of You, in which she plays a 40-year-old divorcée who finds love with a 24-year-old Harry Styles–esque boy-band member (Nicholas Galitzine). Now 41, Hathaway tells me she’s proud to depict a fully realized woman experiencing her sexual bloom at the time of life when women are told they’ll become invisible.

The restaurant we’re in is not just vegan but “high-vibration,” meaning that the food is as close to its natural state as possible. For Hathaway, reaching her own high vibration is tricky with a recorder running. “The idea of anything you say being picked to define you is daunting,” she says. She’s not as serious as interviews make her seem, she tells me. But as we first start talking at least, she’s definitely careful—present and engaged but also pausing to mentally scan answers for web-flammable sound bites before sharing them. “You don’t want to say anything to provoke any kind of reaction, but you also don’t want to say something that could be misinterpreted,” she says as we begin. “I’m feeling a little goldfishy.”

“What do we do to get out of that?” I say.

“I have no idea,” Hathaway says. She grabs my hands across the table and says, “Let’s discover it together.”

A waiter arrives with the beets—an abstract painting of crushed purple and orange on a white plate. It’s the most gorgeously presented root vegetable either of us has ever seen. “That’s beautiful,” Hathaway says. “On the heels of being like, ‘No, I swear I’m not that earnest,’ I die over beets.”

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Years ago, in one of their Key & Peele sketches about the hilariously manic hotel valets, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele confronted all the snark about the woman they reverently referred to as “the Hathaways.” After seeing a tabloid article mocking the actor, Key and Peele exploded with open-mouthed, hyperspeed, strangled-voice indignation. They cited her résumé, sang their own rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables, and asked an incisive rhetorical question: “Why would you be hatin’ on the Hathaways?! Confident woman in Hollywood whose sole character flaw is that she cares too much ?”

She certainly owns who she is. “I’m an intense person,” Hathaway says at the restaurant. We’re talking about how, when she was a three-year-old in New Jersey, she saw her mother play Eva Peron onstage and knew, in every cell of her being, that she wanted to act. “She’d come and see me in things and concentrate with the most rapt attention you can imagine,” her mother told a reporter many years ago. Hathaway’s parents—her father is a labor lawyer—tried to dissuade her from acting professionally. As her mother put it, “My husband and I had seen perfectly nice children become little monsters.”

But Hathaway is not easily talked out of things she believes in. She took drama classes, understudied future Tony winner Laura Benanti in a production of Jane Eyre at 14, and had the chutzpah to write to an agent with her headshot at 15. “You can tell from that story I don’t do things by half measure,” she tells me. “When I love something, I imagine myself doing it to the hilt.” There was a fleeting moment when Hathaway decided she wanted to be a nun. “But it turned out that you can love God without being a nun,” she says. (She later learned you can also love God without being a Catholic, leaving the Church because of its stance on homosexuality. As she once told British GQ, “Why should I support an organization that has a limited view of my beloved brother?”)

Hathaway’s mother gave up acting to raise the kids, so the dream Hathaway dreamed was just to support herself as an actor. If she was successful, maybe someone might know her name. “The last thing in the world you expect is that it’s going to go this way,” she says. For 20-plus years, she has roamed expertly among genres. If you look at just the titles of her best movies, it’s hard to imagine what they have in common until you realize that it’s her: The Princess Diaries, Brokeback Mountain,The Devil Wears Prada, Rachel Getting Married, The Dark Knight Rises, Les Misérables, Interstellar ,and (three greatly deserving indies) Colossal, Armageddon Time, and Eileen.

Hathaway goes all in on her characters. For her Oscar-winning turn in Les Misérables, she lost 25 pounds to play the desperate Fantine and suggested shaving her head after researching the time period and realizing it would be an authentic detail. She also requested more than 20 takes of “I Dreamed a Dream,” even though the director thought she’d nailed it on the fourth take. Hathaway tells me that sometimes while filming, she will be so in the zone that it’s like she leaves her body: “The truth is that you let go. You black out a little bit. You come up at the end and you’re like, ‘What just happened?’”

James Gray, who wrote and directed Armageddon Time, remembers Jonathan Demme raving about Hathaway after directing her in Rachel Getting Married 16 years ago. “He talked about how great, intense, and brilliantly committed she was,” he says. “He said, ‘This is someone you’re going to want to work with.’ ” Gray continues: “When you’re looking at actors, you’re looking for a level of commitment. It doesn’t mean they have all the answers. But it does mean that they will give themselves 100 percent to whatever they’re doing.” Gray cast Hathaway essentially to play his mother in the semi-autobiographical film and says she was so devoted that she tried to perfect his mom’s chicken cutlet recipe down to the way she dunked the poultry in the egg wash. “And by the way, Jeremy Strong and Tony Hopkins were the same way. They were willing to do anything for me. It makes me want to cry thinking about it now, because it’s very rare that you get that.”

Michael Showalter, who made The Idea of You, says Hathaway cared about everything from the interior design of her character’s house to what pens she used. “She’s fiery,” he says. “She has deeply held feelings about things that can feel intractable. I’m a Gemini. Things change constantly for me. Once we put an astrological sign to it, that opened up the floodgates for us to communicate in a different way. I’m not joking. And I’m not an astrology guy, but even I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Of course. I understand you now. It’s just that you’re a Scorpio.’ ”

Well, yes and, as the saying goes. At least one reason Hathaway prepares so thoroughly for her roles is surprising and nonastrological. “I’d rather not be unseated on the day [of filming] by my anxiety,” she says. “Part of the way I can tell myself that I am okay is by having such a complete level of preparation that if I get a critical voice in my head, you can quiet it down by saying that you did everything you could to prepare.” Early in her career, she says, “I had a horrible anxiety attack and I was by myself and didn’t know what was happening. I certainly couldn’t tell anybody, and it was compounded by thinking I was keeping set waiting. Now I feel much safer going to someone in charge, pulling them to the side, and explaining, ‘I’m going through this right now.’ Most people will sit there with you for the 10 minutes it takes for you to come back down.”

Hathaway has learned that there can be a personal cost to the deep dive. She just had an edifying experience filming David Lowery’s Mother Mary, an epic pop melodrama in which she plays a singer enmeshed with a fashion designer played by Michaela Coel. There was an intimacy coordinator on set, not just for sex scenes but for any scene in which the actors felt especially stressed or emotionally exposed. It was a godsend, she says, to have “someone there who is making sure—in a moment of vulnerability, when you’re showing something true and sacred to yourself—that you’re not going to be harmed.”

When Hathaway’s star was first on the rise, everyone had an opinion about how she should handle fame: “All the advice that you’re given is to protect yourself. ‘Everybody’s dangerous and everybody’s trying to get something from you.’... People were advising me that I armor myself and keep that distance, and that I have two selves.” The outward-facing Hathaway, they meant, and the private one. But figuring out one identity is daunting enough, let alone two. “I found that terribly confusing,” she tells me. “So I don’t do it that way. I’m not armored.” Which is a boon for acting, because your emotions are accessible. But when you’re criticized, it’s acutely painful.

She doesn’t love to look back on the time when people mocked her for high crimes like, say, cohosting the Oscars as if it was an honor and mattered. (“When you do everything right and society hates you for it,” read a BuzzFeed story in 2015, “that’s Anne Hathaway Syndrome.”) In 2022, during a Women in Hollywood speech, Hathaway said that the vitriol toward her cut even deeper because it mirrored her own: “This was a language I had employed with myself since I was seven. And when your self-inflicted pain is suddenly somehow amplified back at you at, say, the full volume of the internet…. It’s a thing.” Says Gray, “We live in such a brutal, ironic, postmodern moment that everyone thinks if you’re sincere, you’re somehow full of shit.” Speaking about social media, he says, “It handles a certain kind of sincerity very poorly. It is much more attuned to a snarky viciousness, and it tends to demean a seriousness of intent and purpose.”

Hathaway tells me that period didn’t just mark a personal low. Even though she had won an Oscar, she says, “a lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online. I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who did not care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve had in one of the best films that I’ve been a part of.” She’s talking about when Nolan, who’d previously directed Hathaway as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, cast her in Interstellar as a scientist sent to space with Matthew McConaughey. “I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect,” Hathaway says. “And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.”

“Humiliation is such a rough thing to go through,” she continues. “The key is to not let it close you down. You have to stay bold, and it can be hard because you’re like, ‘If I stay safe, if I hug the middle, if I don’t draw too much attention to myself, it won’t hurt.’ But if you want to do that, don’t be an actor. You’re a tightrope walker. You’re a daredevil. You’re asking people to invest their time and their money and their attention and their care into you. So you have to give them something worth all of those things. And if it’s not costing you anything, what are you really offering?”

Hathaway is friends with her two-time costar Jeremy Strong ( Serenity, Armageddon Time ), the similarly committed and unarmored Emmy-winning Succession actor. Strong asked to write me an email about Hathaway rather than talking on the phone, ostensibly because he was in the midst of Broadway rehearsals for Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People but also, I suspect, because he wanted to get his thoughts exactly right: “In an age of increasingly curated and performed selfhood I think Annie has an understanding that any step away from authenticity—any cultivation of an idealized persona or bulletproof image—will necessarily erode what a person has to offer as an artist. Annie is committed to the steeper path of Growth. She puts her heart and her backbone into Growing. As an artist, as a woman, as a mother, as a friend. Siri Hustvedt once wrote ‘only the unprotected self can experience joy.’ I would say the same is true for Life and for Art: you have to cast off your protective covering to really experience it in an embodied way. I think Annie is interested in Joy; in joyfully doing her work and joyfully, consciously, living out loud. She does not hide and she is not afraid. Which makes her a radiant person and a fearless actor.” In short, why would anyone be hatin’ on the Hathaways?

During one of our conversations, we talk about how scary it is to think about our children encountering the cruelty of the internet. I must look distraught, because Hathaway again takes my hands in hers and asks if I’m okay. I ask her what she’d tell a young person who finds themselves on the receiving end of cyber-hate, given her unintended doctorate on the subject. That night, when Hathaway has trouble sleeping, she emails her answer. What she’d say to them is Your hurt is real. “I want to hug them, make them tea and tell them to live as long and as well as they can,” she writes. “That there is an excellent chance that the longer they live, the smaller this moment will feel. That I wish them a life a million times more fascinating than this terrible moment.”

In 2019 Hathaway announced her second pregnancy on Instagram, and if you look back at the post, you can see some evidence of how she’s willing to make herself vulnerable. Along with a black-and-white photo of her baby bump, she wrote, “It’s not for a movie…. 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.”

I ask her about that moment. “Given the pain I felt while trying to get pregnant,” she says, “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.” In 2015, Hathaway had suffered a miscarriage during a six-week run of the one-woman off-Broadway show Grounded. “The first time it didn’t work out for me. I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night,” she says. When her friends came to visit her backstage after performances, she told them the truth: “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine. I had to keep it real otherwise…. 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.’ ” Her eyes well at the memory: “It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong.”

Hathaway was shocked to learn that many of her friends had gone through similar experiences and found a study estimating that as many as 50 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage: “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. 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.” When she wrote that Instagram post, she says, “it was more about what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal.”

Hathaway says she’s become gentler in her time as a mother to Jonathan, eight, and Jack, four—her sons with her husband, producer Adam Shulman—and extends that softness to herself: “When I was younger, the way that I knew how to improve was by being hard on myself. There’s a ceiling to that path. I had to relearn what it means to have drive but to do it in a nurturing way. And that’s when you go, ‘Oh, if there’s a ceiling, I haven’t discovered it yet.’ ”

Her new mindset is possible in part because she stopped drinking. “I knew deep down it wasn’t for me,” she says. “And it just felt so extreme to have to say, ‘But none ?’ But none. If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it.” She wants to make clear that she’s not saying this from a place of self-righteousness or judgment. “It’s a path everybody has to walk for themselves,” she says. “My personal experience with it is that everything is better. For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow. The thing that I have faith in is that everybody else is going to have one or two drinks, and by the time everybody gets to two drinks, you’ll feel like you’ve had two drinks—but without the hangover.”

All this is to say that Hathaway takes much better care of herself now than she did when she was 20. “I make a lot of my lifestyle choices in service of supporting mental health,” she says. “I stopped participating in things that I know to be draining or can cause spirals.” And it’s clearly not just about alcohol. “I actually don’t have a relationship with myself online.”

The next time I see Hathaway, it’s a sunny Monday morning, and she’s sweeping into the lobby of Condé Nast, the parent company of Vogue as well as Vanity Fair. The pop-cultural significance is not lost on her. Eighteen years earlier, her Devil Wears Prada character did the same on her way into her fateful job interview at “ Runway ” magazine. This time, the actor’s wearing a dandelion-colored trench coat and sunglasses. When we get to the elevator bank, she deadpans in her best Andy Sachs, “Hi, I’m new here.”

Thirty-four floors above, in a lounge surrounded by windows, we marvel at the view of the southern tip of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and, beyond that, New Jersey, where Hathaway grew up chasing soccer balls, watching Pretty Woman on repeat, and dreaming about acting.

As a kid, she noticed how different men’s and women’s roles were in movies. “Young men were encouraged to pursue their desires and young women were encouraged to be desired,” she wrote to me after our interviews. “One is active, the other is passive. I always identified more with being active, which made me a misfit at times.”

Hathaway was told she had no sex appeal when she started in Hollywood, which she never believed: “I was like, ‘I’m a Scorpio. I know what I’m like on a Saturday night,’ ” she tells me. (The irony is that other people’s opinions about her sex appeal could exempt her from roles but not the industry’s predatory climate.) But the cultural definition of what was sexy was narrower then: “The male gaze was very dominant and very pervasive and very juvenile.” Because of what was being reflected back at her from movie screens, she spent her 20s, like many women, more concerned about optics than emotional well-being. In an email, Donatella Versace says of Hathaway, “Her power and beauty really caught my attention…but what gives her real strength is her kindness and compassion.”

Hathaway now knows that the question How do I feel? is more important than the question How do I look? And it’s made her more comfortable onscreen. “I feel ready to be a sexual creature out loud,” she says. The Idea of You novel became a pandemic sensation because of its love scenes, yes, but also because of the escapist, about-time quality of its December-May love affair and what it says about an aging woman’s worth. Hathaway says she appreciated that her character, Solène, is a complete person before she meets her love interest. The film is different from the book in that Solène is less tony and more relatable, but the sex scenes are still very sexy. “It’s not like one healthy, consensual female orgasm (okay, multiple) is going to change the world,” Hathaway wrote to me, “but I’m really happy to be part of a story that takes pleasure in female pleasure.”

Just as she was informed that she wasn’t sexy when she was young, Hathaway was told her career would nosedive when she hit 35. She hasn’t forgotten that. Before Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie took on Barbie, Hathaway and a friend, Ocean’s Eight cowriter Olivia Milch, were attached, and it sounds like their script would have explored ageism-adjacent terrain. As Milch puts it: “the idea of a Barbie who feels like an outsider and doesn’t make as much sense in Barbie Land anymore.” (Milch echoes Hathaway’s own praise for Gerwig’s movie when she adds, “The version we were working on was wonderful and exciting, but I’m so glad that the version that exists is the one that is in the world.”)

Hathaway doesn’t gloat when she remembers those old prognostications about a nosedive. She talks about how grateful she is that she can still help movies get made (“You never know how long that’s going to last”) and admits that, despite everyone’s best intentions, not everything works (“I have definitely cashed a few of my chips in recently”). But there’s no denying, for instance, that her turn in the thriller Eileen last year—she played a platinum-blond prison psychologist who captivates a young woman working there—was one of the most assured performances of her career. And there’s no shortage of upcoming projects, often unexpected narratives about women, to keep Hathaway’s lifework at a high altitude.

Next up, Hathaway and Jessica Chastain will star in the psychological thriller Mothers’ Instinct as women whose relationship fractures after the young son of Hathaway’s character dies in a freak accident. Hathaway signed onto the role as a new mother but, because of scheduling conflicts and the pandemic, the project didn’t start filming until her oldest son was close in age to her character’s son. “I couldn’t back out on a friend,” she says, meaning Chastain. But the experience was sufficiently harrowing that Hathaway found she couldn’t eat on set. “Even though I loved the people I was working with, I needed to get out of there when it was done and never look back.” After Mothers’ Instinct , Hathaway and Salma Hayek will produce and star in an action buddy comedy called Seesaw Monster , Netflix’s adaptation of the novel by the Japanese author Kotaro Isaka, who also wrote Bullet Train.

Hathaway will likely always get questions about a potential Devil Wears Prada sequel from fans hoping to manifest more Andy, Emily, and Miranda. At the end of every performance of the Broadway show Gutenberg! The Musical!, surprising celebrities appeared as producers and added a grace note to the plot. In January, Hathaway showed up with Anna Wintour, the inspiration, of course, for Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly. Onstage, Wintour introduced Hathaway as her assistant. To which Hathaway, mock dejected, responded, “Still?” Then, in late February, the actor reunited with Streep and Emily Blunt while presenting at the SAG Awards. But Hathaway will likely never do a Prada sequel because the media landscape is digital these days, and she prefers her movies to be true escapes from everyday details like texting. Looking at my recorder, she feels that itchy need to clarify: “I’m just realizing this as I talk to you,” she says. “I haven’t turned to my team and said, ‘Only send me movies that predate the personal computer revolution.’ ”

In January, Hathaway did have an honorary moment as a Condé Nast staffer when, during the first attempt at taking photographs for this article, she left the set in solidarity with the Condé union members taking part in a one-day work stoppage as they negotiated a new contract. Hathaway’s own guild, SAG-AFTRA, had just waged a 118-day strike, so her sympathies were clear. The shoot was rescheduled for the following day. In the meantime, she trended on social media, and Vulture ran the headline “Anne Hathaway, Formerly of Runway , Walks Off Photo Shoot in Support of Union.”

When Hathaway goes viral now, it’s generally for celebratory reasons. For instance, a handful of videos of her connecting with fans have captivated certain corners of the internet. In a video taken in Rome in 2022, Hathaway, wearing a sparkly pink Valentino skirt suit, addresses frenzied fans and photographers, telling them, “Calma, calma, amore.” In another, taken in London last year, the actor, wearing a red couture dress in the shape of a rose and thigh-high boots, soothes a crowd of fans and tells them how things are going to go: “Do not move please. I’ll come to you. We are not going to push. This is very calm.” There was no sound to the video, so a deaf content creator posted a TikTok lip reading that was liked more than 3.4 million times. “So much poise, class, and talent,” one commenter wrote. “She’s an assertive queen! Good boundaries and safety awareness are awesome.”

When I bring up that last encounter, it’s clear that Hathaway has no idea what I’m talking about; these are regular occurrences. But she remembers events by what she was wearing at the time, so I describe the thigh-high boots. “You’re going to have to give me more,” she says. “I wear those a lot.” ( Pretty Woman is still her favorite movie.) “The thing is, we all have nervous systems,” she says when we’re on the same page, then pokes fun at herself: “I have a very intimate relationship with my nervous system.” She pauses. “People just want to be seen. And in that moment we can get on a wavelength together.”

Hathaway says Julie Andrews taught her what it meant to be a gracious star when she made time to sign autographs at the end of each day on The Princess Diaries. “She respected that they had a relationship to her work that spanned their entire lives and made it a beautiful experience for them,” she tells me. “I don’t know that I was always capable of that. So I’ve learned that I want to handle myself in a way that I’m going to be proud of at a later date.”

Bodysuit by Viktor & Rolf Couture.

These days, Hathaway tells me, “what I feel more comfortable with is letting things happen.” Though she doesn’t say it, that sounds like a significant step forward for someone shadowed by anxiety and by critics, including herself, for so long. Last year, Hathaway was captured on camera dancing to “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle at a Valentino after-party during Paris Fashion Week. “I turned and I realized I was being recorded,” she says. When I scowl, she says, “But I didn’t do that. ” Instead, she told herself, “I’m in a nightclub and I’m dancing and this is the world. Don’t stop, don’t perform. Stay where you are because you feel great. Despite…” She stops herself. “Despite nothing. Why wouldn’t anybody wearing Valentino at a nightclub in Paris dancing feel great?”

Her unapologetic happiness was viewed more than 20.7 million times on TikTok. “And by the way,” she tells me, “if I watched you, I would think you looked great, and I’d be really happy for you too.”

HAIR, ORLANDO PITA; MAKEUP, GUCCI WESTMAN; MANICURE, MERI KOHMOTO; TAILOR, OLGA DUDNIK; SET DESIGN, VIKI RUTSCH. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY BOOM PRODUCTIONS. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

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Oct 7, 2021

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Anne Hathaway has been in the film industry since the early 2000s. The multifaceted actress has delivered a variety of performances over the last two decades. The New York City native is best known for her roles in ‘ The Princess Diaries ’ films, ‘ The Devil Wears Prada ’, ‘ Les Mis érables ’, among numerous others.

Flashing Back to Anne Hathaway’s Childhood

At the age of six, Hathaway watched her mother perform as Fantine in ‘Les Mis érables’. This is the moment she fell in love with the stage. Unfortunately, her parents weren’t on board with the idea of her pursuing an acting career. During her time in high school, she participated in many plays and appeared in plays at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse. 

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In 1993, she studied at the American Academy of Performing Arts. She was the first teenager to be admitted into the Barrow Group Theater Company’s acting program. After her time there, she spent several semesters studying English. If she wasn’t an actress, Hathaway would have been an English teacher or a psychologist.

Breakthrough and Early Roles

Her breakthrough role came with her acting debut in ‘The Princess Diaries’. The film follows a teenager Mia Thermopolis (Hathaway) who discovers that she’s the heir to the throne of a fictional kingdom called Genovia. The film became a critical and commercial success making $165 million worldwide. People magazine named the actress as one of its breakthrough stars of 2001.

In 2004, she starred as Ella of Frell in ‘ Ella Enchanted ’. The fantasy romantic-comedy follows Ella as she navigates life and love in a fairy-tale world while trying to break a curse that was given to her by her fairy-godmother as a baby. The film received mixed reviews and gave a poor performance at the box office. In the same year, she reprised her role as Mia Thermopolis in ‘ The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement ’ which received mostly negative reviews but was a box office success making $95 million.

Transition to Adult Roles and Critical Recognition

After her breakthrough role in 2001, the actress tried her best to avoid getting typecast so she began taking on adult roles. As a result, Hathaway starred as Lureen Newsome Twist in the 2005 drama ‘ Brokeback Mountain ’ alongside Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal . The film depicts the emotional and sexual relationship between two married men, Ennis (Ledger) and Jack (Gyllenhaal). The film garnered critical acclaim and received several Academy Award nominations. Hathaway stated that the content of the film was more important than the awards it received and making this film made her more aware of the stories she wanted to tell as an actress.

In 2006, she starred as Andy Sachs in ‘ The Devil Wears Prada ’ who is the assistant to powerful magazine editor Miranda Priestly ( Meryl Streep ). The actress said working on the film made her respect the fashion industry more than she ever did before. Overall, the comedy film received positive reviews and became Hathaway’s biggest commercial success to that point, grossing more than $326.5 million worldwide.

Romantic Comedies, Animation, Oh My!

Hathaway starred as Emma Allan in the 2009 romantic comedy ‘ Bride Wars ’ which ultimately failed in the box office and with critics. The film follows two best friends, Emma (Hathaway) and Olivia ( Kate Hudson ) who end up having their weddings planned on the same day which causes a huge rift between them. 

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The actress pulled off three notable films in the first year of the new decade. The first being ‘ Valentine’s Day ’ which has an all-star cast including Julia Roberts , Ashton Kutcher , Jennifer Garner , and Taylor Swift . The film broke the box office earning $215 million worldwide. She portrays Liz who is in a relationship with mail clerk Jason ( Topher Grace ). Their relationship is one of many that is explored in this film.

Hathaway starred in Tim Burton’s 2010 live-action adaptation of ‘ Alice in Wonderland ’ alongside Mia Wasikowska , Johnny Depp , and Helena Bonham Carter . She portrays the White Queen and reprised the role in the 2016 sequel ‘ Alice Through the Looking Glass ’. Critics praised the visuals of the 2010 film but weren’t fond of the inconsistent narrative. It grossed $1 billion worldwide and became the second-largest grossing film of 2010. 

In the same year, she starred in the romantic drama ‘ Love & Other Drugs ’ alongside Jake Gyllenhaal. Critics were fond of the adult relationship but not so much with the elements of the plot. 

Hathaway made her voice acting debut as Jewel, a female Spix’s macaw, in the 2011 animated feature ‘ Rio ’ which was praised for its visuals, voice acting, and music. It was a commercial success earning $484 million worldwide. She would reprise the role in the 2016 sequel ‘ Rio 2 ’ which surpassed the original film in terms of worldwide box office numbers.

Oscars and Blockbusters

After making waves in the animation realm, Hathaway starred as Selina Kyle in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ and trained extensively for the role. 

Her performance as Fantine in the 2013 film ‘ Les Mis érables ’ received critical acclaim and numerous nominations for awards. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2014. In an interview with The Guardian , the actress details her reaction to winning the award, “ I felt wrong that I was standing there in a gown that cost more than some people are going to see in their lifetime, and winning an award for portraying pain that still felt very much a part of our collective experience as human beings.” 

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She starred in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 science fiction epic ‘ Interstellar ’ alongside Matthew McConaughey. The film depicts a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new humanity. It was partially filmed on IMAX cameras and had a $165 million budget. The film was a box office success making a little over four times the film’s budget, $701 million.

Comedic Appearances

The middle to later half of the 2010s had Hathaway starring in comedic roles. In 2015, she starred in the 2015 comedy ‘ The Intern ’ and alongside Robert De Niro . The film’s premise follows Ben Whittaker (De Niro) who is a 70 year-old widower and becomes a senior intern at an online fashion site run by Jules Ostin (Hathaway). The film grossed $194 million worldwide. 

In 2018, Hathaway starred in the all-female ‘ Ocean’s Eleven ’ franchise spin-off, ‘Ocean’s 8’. Her co-stars include Sandra Bullock , Cate Blanchett , Awkwafina , Mindy Kaling , Rihanna , Sarah Paulson , and Helena Bonham Carter . The film follows a group of criminals who create an elaborate heist to rob the Met Gala. Hathaway portrays Daphne Kluger, a famous and egotistic actress who has a hidden agenda of her own. 

The actress found the role fascinating because she got the opportunity to play a character with a huge ego. While the film was a commercial success making $297 million worldwide, critics believed that her performance stood out amongst her co-stars and gave the film mixed reviews. 

In 2019, Hathaway starred in the thriller ‘ Serenity ’ and the comedy ‘ The Hustle ’. Unfortunately, both films performed poorly at the box office and received negative criticism. The actress showed up on our small screens in Amazon Prime Video’s romantic anthology series ‘Modern Love’ by portraying Lexi, a woman with bipolar disorder.

As far as recent roles, she was in the 2020 adaptation ‘ The Witches ’, and critics gave her performance positive feedback. In the same year, she starred alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor in ‘ Locked Down ’. Both films were released on HBO Max.

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Upcoming Projects

The actress will be playing a lead role in a film based on the ‘ Sesame Street ’ franchise. She is also starring in an adaptation of Pamela Druckerman’s book ‘ Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting’. She will be teaming up with fellow actress Jessica Chastain in the psychological thriller ‘Mothers’ Instinct’. She has also signed on to star in Apple’s scripted WeWork project called ‘WeCrashed’ along with actor Jared Leto . The drama series is set to premiere on Apple TV+.

Over the last two decades, Anne Hathaway has given us an array of performances that are certainly memorable. Her dedication to the craft is why she is widely known all over the world and received critical acclaim, numerous awards, and nominations for the roles she has played. We can’t wait to see what this talented actress has in store for us for years to come whether that is on the big or small screen.

By Jessica Welner

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The Talented Anne Hathaway: An Ode to Her Brilliance

• by history tools
• November 19, 2023

Before diving into Anne‘s illustrious career, let‘s get to know the actress:

As a long-time Anne fan, I‘m thrilled to provide an in-depth overview of her early life, meteoric rise to fame, her immense talents, and why she‘s so beloved:

Her Upbringing and Early Years

Anne was born in Brooklyn but raised in Milburn, New Jersey. From an early age, her mother Kate, an actress, inspired Anne‘s passion for the arts. She thrived in high school musicals and plays before being accepted into the prestigious acting program at Paper Mill Playhouse.

Even while pursuing acting, Anne remained a top student—she was accepted to Vassar College! But her breakout role in The Princess Diaries set her fate as one of Hollywood‘s brightest new talents.

Seeing Anne‘s flawless screen presence as a teenager, I knew she was destined for stardom.

Skyrocketing to Fame and Critical Acclaim

After stunning with legend Julie Andrews in The Princess Diaries , Anne quickly proved her versatility. She smoothly pivoted from family films to period dramas like Nicholas Nickleby and Becoming Jane .

But Anne was just getting started flexing her acting chops. Her emotional performance as a recovering addict in Rachel Getting Married earned her first Oscar nomination at 26!

My favorite was her heart-wrenching, Oscar-winning turn as Fantine in Les Misérables . From portrayal of despair to her breathtaking singing, Anne moved me to tears and left me in awe.

She makes every character compelling and human. The way she disappears into her roles is unparalleled.

Her Illustrious Filmography

While impossible to cover all her iconic roles, these are some career highlights that stick out:

• Brokeback Mountain (2005): Her raw acting opposite Heath Ledger shows her fearlessness.
• The Dark Knight Rises (2012): Anne brought complexity to Catwoman/Selina Kyle.
• Ocean‘s 8 (2018): Leading this ensemble, Anne proves her mega star power.
• Locked Down (2021): One of the first films about the pandemic highlighted her relevance.
• WeCrashed (2022): Her role as Rebekah Neumann is already garnering awards buzz.

She elevates every project she‘s in. Anne has this magnetic quality that pulls you into each character‘s mind and world.

Her Advocacy and Charity Work

Beyond acting, Anne uses her platform to champion women‘s rights, LGBTQ equality, and disaster relief.

After winning her Oscar for Les Mis , she donated her custom Valentino gown to charity—proof of her generous, down-to-earth spirit. She inspires me to give back.

Why Anne Hathaway Is So Loved

As an Anne superfan, I‘ll never forget the joy of seeing her brilliance unfold over the years. Here‘s why she‘s so beloved by fans like me:

• Legendary acting ability: She astonishes in any genre, from musicals to heist films effortlessly.
• Emotional depth: You feel every character‘s anguish, joy, anger—she‘s an open vessel on screen.
• Vocal talents: Anne‘s singing voice gives me chills every time, especially her Les Mis numbers.
• Style icon: On red carpets she exudes glamor! But also stays true to her quirky, artsy style.
• Humble nature: She comes across as genuine, funny, intelligent—the kind of person you‘d love to be friends with!

Anne Hathaway is the rare star who has it all: blockbuster appeal, critical accolades, activist spirit, and public admiration. She‘s a cinematic icon who I can‘t wait to continue enjoying for years to come!

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Anne Jacqueline Hathaway (born November 12, 1982) is an American actress. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award, and was among the world's highest-paid actresses in 2015. Her films have grossed over $6.8 billion worldwide, and she appeared on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list in 2009.

As a teenager, she was cast in the television series Get Real (1999–2000) and made her breakthrough as the protagonist in her debut film, the Disney comedy The Princess Diaries (2001). Hathaway made a transition to adult roles with the 2005 dramas Havoc and Brokeback Mountain. The comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada (2006), in which she played an assistant to a fashion magazine editor, was her biggest commercial success to that point.

She played a recovering addict with a mental illness in the drama Rachel Getting Married (2008), which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She went on to star in several commercially successful films, including the comedy Get Smart (2008), the romances Bride Wars (2009), Valentine's Day (2010), and Love & Other Drugs (2010), and the fantasy film Alice in Wonderland (2010). In 2012, she starred as Selina Kyle / Catwoman in her highest-grossing film, The Dark Knight Rises. Also that year, she played Fantine, a prostitute dying of tuberculosis, in the musical Les Misérables, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

She has since played a scientist in the science fiction film Interstellar (2014), the owner of an online fashion site in the comedy The Intern (2015), a haughty actress in the heist film Ocean's 8 (2018), a con artist in the comedy The Hustle (2019), and Rebekah Neumann in the miniseries WeCrashed (2022).

In addition to film roles, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for her voice role in the sitcom The Simpsons, sung for soundtracks, appeared on stage, and hosted events.

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The Interview

Anne Hathaway Is Done Trying to Please

Credit... Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

Supported by

By David Marchese

• April 27, 2024

This is the debut of The Interview, The New York Times’s new weekly series, featuring in-depth conversations with fascinating people. Each week, David Marchese or Lulu Garcia-Navarro will speak with notable figures in the worlds of culture, politics, business, sports, wellness and beyond. Like the Magazine’s former Talk column, the conversations will appear online and in print, but now you can also listen to them in our new weekly podcast, “The Interview,” which is available wherever you get your podcasts. Below, you’ll find David’s first interview with the actress Anne Hathaway; Lulu’s first interview, with the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, is here .

Listen to the Conversation With Anne Hathaway

On one level, Anne Hathaway’s new movie, “The Idea of You,” which arrives on Prime Video on May 2 and is directed by Michael Showalter, couldn’t be more straightforward. It’s an adaptation of Robinne Lee’s hit romance novel about Solène, a divorced 40-year-old mom played by Hathaway, who winds up in a relationship with a much younger man — a singer in a boy band, played by Nicholas Galitzine. Warmhearted and with unabashed mainstream appeal, the film is a return for the New Jersey-raised actress, who has fruitfully spent much of her time lately playing thornier characters in indie films, to the kinds of charming fish-out-of-water tales that first helped bring her to stardom, like “The Princess Diaries” and “The Devil Wears Prada.” This time, though, instead of being the plucky ingénue thrust into a glamorous, high-pressure situation, Hathaway is playing a character who’s coming into a new world a little less starry-eyed, and with a firmer sense of self.

But “The Idea of You” also works on another, more complicated, even self-referential level. It’s a movie about a woman pushing against societal expectations and getting a lot of grief for it, which is something Hathaway, 41, knows about. More than a decade ago, around the time she won an Academy Award for her work in “Les Misérables,” the online commentariat turned on Hathaway for … who knows, exactly? Some strange groupthink kicked in that caused people to pile on her for seeming like an inauthentic striver — or something. Other than as a case study in the inexplicable and random cruelty of the internet, the whole phenomenon, described at the time as Hathahate, makes even less sense now than it did then.

Since that time, Hathaway told me when we talked twice last month, she has been learning to let go of other people’s opinions and expectations of her as an actress, a celebrity and a human being. This has made her work even more compelling to watch and made her more guarded as a public figure. “I really like expressing myself through my work,” says Hathaway, who after so many years and so many great performances is still figuring out the best way to play the puzzling real-life part of a famous actress.

There are a bunch of things that are intriguing to me about the new movie. One of them is that there are a few of what I took to be Anne Hathaway psychological Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the film. I’ll get to those, but first: You haven’t done a romance in a while. Can you talk to me about why you wanted to do “The Idea of You”? It’s such a softball question, and I can feel my brain complicating it.

Go as complicated as you can. I still find it so much more natural to express my thoughts and feelings through characters and through the story. So a part of me wants to be like: Just see the movie. That’s why I wanted to make it. But I should probably be able to describe it. So, this is a movie about a woman healing her heart after a massive trust trauma, and it says that a bloom can happen in a person’s life at any stage. I found myself almost possessed with the need to explore what those two things meant and looked like.

I’m curious about the nature of that possession. Was it abstract, or did it connect to you in a direct way? Oh, it was completely direct. My character, Solène, might not seem like the most complicated character I’ve ever played. There’s no accent, there’s no particular gait — I love a character’s gait. But she felt familiar. I recognized aspects of myself in her. I recognized aspects of friends or women I admire. She had a richness to her, combined with this idea that early in her life she had been a people pleaser. I was excited by that idea of somebody at a place in their life where they’ve grown out of that phase.

I’m glad you brought up that people-pleaser line. That was one of the Easter eggs: “A people pleaser from New Jersey.” Yes.

But before I get into that, my vote for best Anne Hathaway character gait in a movie: “The Dark Knight Rises.” So much swagger! I worked with a choreographer for three weeks to find that swagger.

Really? Yes, I did. Because — oh, this is going to sound like a weird sentence — I wasn’t connected enough to my hips. I kept imagining a cat’s movement and the way it’s fluid and swishy but also strong and purposeful, and they helped me find my hips.

You need to introduce me to that choreographer, because not being connected enough to my hips describes most of my life problems. We are going to follow up, because I have so many thoughts! I didn’t feel connected to my body early in my life. It was this weird thing.

Why weren’t you connected to your body? That’s a great question. I mean, it would take me 41 years to answer that. It’s so many things, but I think it’s just assumed that we have a relationship with our body. Like you: Something you know about yourself is that you do not have a relationship with your hips.

Not a good one. But if somebody said, Here’s a path for you to have one, what would you do?

Oh, boy. I don’t know how to answer that. Let’s move on. Sure. Where are we going? We’re going to the knees or the torso?

I want to go back to the people-pleaser line. I interpreted the inclusion of the line “a people pleaser from New Jersey” as pretty intentional. Can you talk to me about why that line is in there? Well, she had to be from somewhere, and yeah, it might have been me who suggested that line. Maybe. Possibly.

Am I wrong in interpreting that line as self-referential? You are a people pleaser from New Jersey, right? I think I’m a former people pleaser from New Jersey. So much of the reason I was drawn to acting is that it was an outlet for expression that I could not find on my own. And in the space between feeling so connected when I was acting and so lost when I wasn’t, you try to make your way, and one of the ways that you make your way is, “Oh, if I do this, that will make someone else happy, and maybe that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.” It takes a long time to go, “That doesn’t really matter if you don’t know who you are.” Unless you just want an identity that’s all about pleasing people. Which I suppose is perfectly valid. But I’m not that nice.

It was interesting for me to revisit your work and see what I took to be — and I don’t mean this in a condescending way — an eager-beaver quality. I’m thinking of “The Devil Wears Prada” or “The Princess Diaries.” I think your character in “Valentine’s Day” had that, and in a slightly spikier way maybe “The Intern.” Was that quality something you consciously tried to change? I was not aware of it until this conversation. But I think there’s a thread that runs through those characters: someone trying to do something that they might not be comfortable with but think is the right thing to do. The thing I was interested in about Solène was this idea that, turning 40 and knowing who she was in a professional sense, knowing who she is as a mother, she had not necessarily given herself full freight to explore aspects of herself as a person.

Forty years old is a real milestone for people. But there’s also something weird about our cultural fixation on the arbitrary age of 40. I’m curious how you think about middle age. I don’t take it that seriously. There are so many other things I identify as milestones. I don’t normally talk about it, but I am over five years sober. That feels like a milestone to me. Forty feels like a gift. The fact of the matter is I hesitate at calling things “middle age” simply because I can be a semantic stickler and I could get hit by a car later today. We don’t know if this is middle age. We don’t know anything.

This makes me sound like a New Age-y ding-dong, but — Go there. Come on. Let’s bring it out. Where are your crystals? I’ve got incense burning. Let’s do this.

What you said is exactly right: We can’t take for granted how much life we have left. But internalizing that, so that we can treat each day like it could be the last, is the hardest thing to do. As a formerly chronically stressed young woman, I just remember thinking one day: You are taking this for granted. You are taking your life for granted. You have no idea. Something could fall through the sky, and that would be lights out. So when I find the old instincts rising, I just tell myself, You are not going to die stressed.

This is a small question but maybe invites a big answer: What were you so stressed about? I didn’t know how to breathe yet. That was really complicated. I mean, it’s too — you’re right. It’s actually too big an answer and the simple answer is literally everything. I was very in my head about a lot of things.

Your answer to that question was about breathing. Earlier you alluded to not feeling comfortable in your body. Those are somatic things. You must have felt very alienated from your body. I love that you identified it as somatic. It feels a little too exposed to discuss the alienation I felt from my body, but there was a lot of somatic stress there.

Was drinking a way of dealing with that? Probably.

Fair enough. Let me ask you a goofier question now. OK. [Laughs.]

Then I’m going to circle back around to heavier stuff. The plot of the film turns on a trip to Coachella. Have you ever been to the festival? I have been to Coachella. Paul McCartney was the headliner, so it was magical.

Can I tell you a quick Coachella story? It can even be long.

I used to work for music magazines, and we had to cover the festival. So one year, it was too hot; I didn’t have enough water; I was drinking beer all day, taking other stuff, and by the end of the day I was fried and physically uncomfortable — You were so tweaked out.

I was like, I got to get out of here. And we had a plan that we would meet in the press area and someone would drive us back to our hotel. But I thought: I can’t wait. I’ll walk back to our hotel — it was 15 miles or whatever in the desert at night. I left the festival and within about 10 minutes realized I’m lost in the desert. No cars are coming by. My mind is totally foggy. I’m going to die on the highway trying to walk back to my hotel. Then a car pulls up and it’s my co-worker come to save me. They rescued you!

I got in the car and was like, “Thank god, I’ve been here forever, I didn’t know what I was going to do.” Then he looks at the clock: Like 22 minutes had passed. No. [Laughs.]

I was not at risk of dying. But to you, those 22 minutes —

Longest 22 minutes of my life. Well, I’m so happy everything went OK. Coachella is very dehydrating.

Very dehydrating. You know, I feel like I’ve danced around this: I’m wondering if you can tell me more about the change in you from a stressed-out person who’s, in your words, in her own head, to the person you are now. I don’t want to go into specifics too much, because I like to keep my personal things personal, but there was a moment in my life where — I don’t know. Do you ever have this feeling where you feel like you have yourself in the future, your best possible choice, turn around and guide you? Now I’m sounding very New Age.

Explain more about what you mean. I was just stuck in this feeling. It’s that thing about, I want to achieve things, I want to grow, and you think, mistakenly, that the way you do that is to be really hard on yourself. You drive yourself by self-criticism. I won’t go into the specifics, but there was a moment in which I realized that in order to keep that narrative alive, I was going to have to deny so much. I just said: You’re just going to have to accept that if nothing else happens to you, you’ve had a really great life. You have been given gifts and opportunities. And for you to continue to walk on this path, not being grateful, I don’t think that’s really who you are. It felt like a light went on.

What are the things that you want to achieve? What are the ambitions? Honestly, I don’t want to say, because they feel great to me, and I worry if I shared them and they got shredded — I don’t want to feel bad about them.

This is another one of the potential Easter eggs or self-referential lines that I picked up on in the film: There are a couple of references to Solène’s being picked apart on the internet. Did your experience going through that inform the character? Yes.

Can you tell me in what ways? Not really. It’s in the film.

Oh, phooey. Sorry. Look, what I can tell you is that, from personal experience, I knew that everything we were saying was true.

I can’t believe I just said “phooey.” Phooey.

Phooey! Oh, bluggernston!

In this conversation I’ve tried to create a throughline or arc to your career. Do you see a throughline or arc? I like to look toward the horizon rather than back at what I’ve done. I don’t watch my films. I love that so many of my movies are the films that you cuddle up with; I’m aware of that aspect of it, but the concept of having a name is weird. The idea of having a name that signifies something that could qualify as an Easter egg, it’s not a concept that I think about a lot.

Is anything cooking with a “Princess Diaries 3”? Yep.

Can you tell me more about that? I don’t think it would be nice.

There you go. I don’t want you to think you’re trapped here. I’m not trapped.

If you’re OK to go a little longer — I can leave this dinner party at any time. Have you read the book “Acts of Service”?

No. What is it? It’s a spicy book, but that’s a great line in it. A character finds herself exploring a situation that is uncomfortable but tantalizing to her, and she keeps thinking that I can leave this dinner party at any time I want.

Wait, does that mean you find this conversation uncomfortable but tantalizing? I’m finding this conversation really lovely.

Oh, good. I’m uncomfortable sometimes because I think you want me to reveal personal things, and I’m allergic to that. But I think that we’re having a wonderful time anyway.

In an ideal world, I always want people to be as personal as possible, but I also understand that that’s something that someone might not want to do, and that’s OK. I just find it hard to imagine that people are interested. I have a hard time making that leap.

You’ve also had the experience of people not being nice to you online. So I understand that it’s not as straightforward as I’m making it out. You’re right, and again, I find it hard to imagine that people would be interested in me. That’s one reason that I don’t know that I’m a very good celebrity. I don’t really know where the walls are between being intimate and narcissism and self-regard. And because of what I went through, I’m sensitive to the way it can come across. So I’d rather be cautious. The odd thing is that as soon as you stop recording this? All the details you want. But I’m probably not the best interview.

A few weeks later, I called Hathaway back to talk more about that caution.

I have a hunch that maybe you’re a ruminator. Is there anything about our conversation to this point that you’ve been thinking about? I had a slight word-choice remorse moment. You asked me what my goals are and I decided not to share them and the reason I gave was because I’d rather not have them “shredded.” That seemed a little harsh. I regretted that.

How would you rephrase it? I think I would rephrase it by saying it’s too tender. It’s a little less self-important.

Do you think it’s telling that your mind initially went to “shredded”? Oh, yeah. I think that’s some scar tissue. I understand why I said it, but it’s not actually reflective of how I feel. It’s what I fear, but not what I feel.

Something that I wanted to return to was: What are the things that used to stress you out so much? I’m just trying to make it more tangible. My goal is to heal it and not relive it. I’m not trying to be evasive. I don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it because I feel that I found a window and I climbed through it. I work hard to just be present. Like I said, I’m more grateful. I’m more settled in myself. I’m less afraid of things not happening. You know, the time in which I was an emerging adult was a different time. We weren’t having the types of conversations that we were having now.

Can I tell you a blindingly obvious realization about my own hypocrisy? Tell me everything.

When I’m asking you to make things more tangible or to go deeper, I’m thinking about that in light of the exchange that we had about hips. You asked me a question and I got the heebie-jeebies. I thought, I’m not talking about that. No!

Is the feeling that I had the feeling that you have doing these things? You know what it does? It puts me in a defensive position. Not defensive in the sense that I feel attacked but defensive in the sense that it’s hard to say something revealing with a tape recorder there. So I feel like I become a more self-conscious, more neutral version of myself. I watch other actresses, and they’re so free, they’re so off the cuff. Not that they’re more revealing, they’re just — I don’t know. I don’t have a word for it. We don’t usually ask people such direct questions. That’s not the way conversations are usually built. Normally trust is established by sharing something about ourselves and you build up a mutual understanding. So a part of me just resists the form of this.

It’s totally weird! And also just slightly rude. [laughs] But that’s just me. I need to work on accepting that this is just the way this is built.

As someone who’s interested in the life that animates the work, I’m curious about what it’s like to be you . That interest is obviously rooted in an assumption that having some understanding of you outside your work matters in some way. Do you think it matters? I think I understand the question. That my life is somehow as interesting as my work?

Or that for people to have an understanding of who you are outside the work is meaningful. I don’t want to distract from it. Also, going back to the thing about direct questions and whether I get the heebie-jeebies, I’m just very protective. The press can be opportunistic. I have this awesome story about Nick [Galitzine] that I want to tell. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t want to tell it, because I haven’t asked him if it’s cool and I’m aware that he’d have to answer questions about it for the next three months to 30 years.

Like the way that, I’m sure somewhat annoyingly, you’re still being asked questions, including by me, about bad experiences you had on the internet a lifetime ago? No, no. I don’t find you annoying. I value what you do. Just because I’m not the most innately forthcoming person doesn’t mean I don’t think that this isn’t a wonderful forum. I’m just amazed by people who can just express themselves.

You express yourself in different ways. I love expressing myself through my characters. You know, also I think — no, nevermind.

“I think — nevermind.” Bingo! Give me another 25 years. Maybe I’ll relax a little more.

I’ll get back in touch. I want to end on something fun though.

Tell me a funny story. You know what? When I was making “The Idea of You,” I was so spoiled, staying in a beautiful house in Atlanta, Georgia, that was much larger than my needs. I would get home from work, and I’d be in this house by myself, and that was giving me the heebie-jeebies. I was trying to figure out, like, why was I feeling this so intensely? And I realized there was no laughter in the house. You have a big house like that, you need laughter. So I started to listen to stand-up specials. I would come home and put them on. I got really into Adam Sandler’s “100% Fresh.” As extraordinary, beloved and iconic as Adam Sandler is, I think he’s underappreciated. I can quote you every line from “Billy Madison” and “Happy Gilmore” and “The Wedding Singer.”

Let’s trade lines from his movies: “I eat pieces of [expletive] like you for breakfast!” “You eat pieces of [expletive] for breakfast?”

You got it! “If peeing pants is cool, then call me Miles Davis.” I think that’s the line. [Laughs.] “Shampoo is better. I go on first and leave the hair clean. No, conditioner is better. I leave the hair silky and smooth. Oh, really fool? Blech, blech, blech. ” Wait for it. “Stop looking at me, Swan!” [Hathaway’s Sandler quote here wasn’t exact, but it was close enough.]

Very good! I’m taking up your time now jabbering about Adam Sandler. But this is the part that I’m talking about: I feel much more comfortable talking about Adam Sandler, whom I’ve never met, than I do talking about what makes me tick. I just need to figure out how to practice.

I hope this has been part of that practice. Thank you very, very much. Be well. Stretch your hips out!

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow The Interview on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , YouTube , Amazon Music or The New York Times Audio app .

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Anne Hathaway

(1556-1623)

Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare. The couple married in 1582 when she was 26 and he was 18. Shortly after their marriage they had a daughter, Susanna. Around 1585, they had twins, Hamnet and Judith. Anna and her children lived at Straftord-upon-Avon while William worked in London. She died in 1623.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Anne Hathaway
• Birth Year: 1556
• Birth City: Stratford-upon-Avon
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare.
• Theater and Dance
• Death Year: 1623
• Death Country: England

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Anne Hathaway Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/historical-figure/anne-hathaway
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: July 10, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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English History

Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway was born in England in 1556. She was married to William Shakespeare in 1582, and the couple had three children together. Anne Hathaway is believed to have been a great help to her husband during his career as a playwright and poet. She was known for being a strong and intelligent woman, and she is often credited with helping her husband become one of the most famous writers of all time.

William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway at the young age of 18. The Hathaways were tenants of a small farmhouse on 90 acres of land in Shottery, close to where Shakespeare was born and raised.

The Hathaway family lived in the cottage for 13 generations until Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust bought it in 1892 and turned it into a museum.

Anne’s father was a yeoman farmer and held a good reputation in Shottery. When he died, Anne inherited some money that she could use to get married; her brother Bartholomew then bought the house and farm from his father.

Anne and William Shakespeare married in 1582 when Anne was around 26 years old and William was only 18. We’re not sure of Anne’s exact date of birth, but we do know that she was pregnant at the time of their marriage. In those days, couples sometimes participated in a handfasting ceremony on Lammas Day (August 1st) as a sort of official engagement. This ceremony included exchanging vows in front of witnesses and then consummating the marriage- all before the couple’s official church wedding.

William applied to the Bishop’s Court in Worcester to speed up proceedings and avoid scandal, as it was important for the wedding to take place before signs of the pregnancy became too obvious.

Guarantors accompanied William to court in order to ensure the validity of his marriage. If not, they would be required by law to pay the sum of £40. Shakespeare’s family home on Henley Street would become Anne’s new home following their wedding day if everything went as planned.

Not much is understood about Anne and William’s relationship. All we can be sure of is that they got married, had three children.

The couple’s first child, a daughter named Susanna, was born in 1583–half a year after William and Anne tied the knot. In 1585, they had twins: Judith and Hamnet. Unfortunately, Hamnet succumbed to the Plague at age 11. Susanna later married a local doctor called John Hall; meanwhile, Judith wed a vintner by the name of Thomas Quinney.

Anne Hathaway never went to London while her husband, William Shakespeare, worked as an actor there–or at least, as far as anyone knows. He would visit frequently but she always remained in the Henley Street house with her in-laws.

Anne Hathaway’s Stratford home life was just as difficult as her husband William’s work life in London.

In Elizabethan England, girls were not given a formal education and weren’t taught to read at home. Although some families encouraged reading among their daughters, most men did not see the importance in teaching them. Sir Thomas More’s decision to teach his daughters how to read was controversial because it departed from the social norm.

Queen Elizabeth would have received the best education available due to her status as an heir to the throne.

Anne Hathaway was expected to be a good wife even though she couldn’t read or write along with her two daughters. In those days, managing a household was much harder than it is now so people had high expectations for Anne.

Anne and William stayed together until Shakespeare died in 1616. Upon his death, he bequeathed his ‘second best bed’ to her in his will.

Anne Shakespeare died in 1623.

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Anne Hathaway Filmography

1. Mothers' Instinct

2. She Came to Me

4. Sesame Street

5. Armageddon Time

6. WeCrashed

8. Locked Down

9. The Witches

10. The Last Thing He Wanted

11. Dark Waters

12. Modern Love

13. The Hustle

14. Serenity

15. Ocean's Eight

16. Colossal

17. Alice Through the Looking Glass

18. The Intern

19. Interstellar

20. Don Peyote

22. Song One

23. Don Jon

24. Les Misérables

25. The Simpsons

26. The Dark Knight Rises

27. One Day

29. Family Guy

30. Love & Other Drugs

31. Alice in Wonderland

32. Valentine's Day

33. Bride Wars

34. Passengers

35. Rachel Getting Married

36. Get Smart

37. The Devil Wears Prada

38. Hoodwinked!

39. Brokeback Mountain

40. The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement

42. Ella Enchanted

43. Nicholas Nickleby

44. The Cat Returns

45. The Other Side of Heaven

46. The Princess Diaries

47. Get Real

48. The Idea of You

49. mother mary, more to explore, recently viewed.

All About Adam Shulman, Anne Hathaway’s Husband and Father of Her Two Children

The couple have kept their 11-year marriage very private.

From her breakout role as Princess Mia Thermopolis in 2001’s The Princess Diaries to her Oscar-winning performance as Fantine in 2012’s Les Misérables , Anne Hathaway has been a household name in Hollywood for decades. But Hathaway has made a point to keep her personal life private—including her 11-year marriage to Adam Shulman.

Now, over a decade and two children later, the couple remains strong, committed, and largely out of the spotlight. So who is Hathaway’s longtime partner? From Shulman’s career to his history with Hathaway, here is everything you need to know about the man who stole the actress’s heart.

The couple tied the knot in a low-key ceremony.

Hathaway says being with shulman changed her for the better., shulman is a “spectacular” dad, according to hathaway., he is a jewelry designer and used his skills to craft hathaway’s engagement ring., he is a film producer., he’s no stranger to the acting world., he has received the seal of approval from emily blunt, one of hathaway’s close friends., at the beginning of the pandemic, schulman maintained a sense of humor about hathaway's anxiety-driven habits., they aren’t sure if they want to have another child., shulman was hathaway’s doting plus one during her winter 2023 trip to europe., while they keep their life together mostly private, paparazzi captured them out in new york city in may 2023., they stepped out again in early 2024., shulman joined hathaway for her the idea of you screening on april 28, 2024., they support political participation together., yes, they know everyone thinks he looks like william shakespeare..

Hathaway sensed she’d marry Shulman when she first met him.

Shulman and Hathaway met at the Palm Springs Film Festival in 2008. Hathaway later told Harper’s Bazaar UK in its February 2013 cover story that she told a mutual friend of theirs at the time, “I’m going to marry that man. I think he thought I was a little nuts, which I am a bit, but I’m also nice.”

When asked if she faced any trust issues when they first started dating (Hathaway’s last ex Raffaello Follieri had been arrested for fraud), Hathaway was honest with the British publication. She said: “I was just very honest with him. I knew from the second I met him that he was the love of my life. I also knew that I couldn’t have met him at a worse time... I took my trust out for a ridiculous joyride with him. [I told him,] ‘I believe, because I need to believe, that what just happened to me was the exception and not the rule, and that people are good and you are a good person, because I feel it. And so I am not in a good place right now, but I’m going with this.’ And he has never hurt me. And I was right. It was scary. But as the days wore on it kept on getting better and better. I found that the love I found for him made me more trusting of everyone, and the more I started to see who I had become. I had lost track of myself during those years and I actually started to see who I had become and that’s... that’s when things got tricky and ugly. Having to forgive myself.”

Hathaway and Shulman had a very California wedding weekend. According to People , more than 150 guests were invited to Big Sur in September 2012. The celebrations started Friday, with a rehearsal dinner at the Ventana Inn and Spa. The ceremony took place in a nearby estate. As far as decor goes, the couple kept it classy and rustic, with decor inspired by nature, a source told People .

Hathaway credits her husband for many changes in her life, including her world view. “He changed my ability to be in the world comfortably,” Hathaway told ELLE during an interview for its Women in Washington April 2017 issue. Hathaway said she once cared too much about other people’s opinions of her. “How hard was I tryin?” the actress asked the interviewer as they read a transcript of their past interviews.

But Shulman helped her grow her own confidence: “I’m a different human than I was then,” the actress said. “I think the accepted narrative now is that we, as women, don’t need anybody. But I need my husband. His unique and specific love has changed me.”

Almost four years after the couple tied the knot, they welcomed their first son, Jonathan Rosebank Shulman. He was born in March 2016. Two months after she gave birth, Hathaway praised Shulman’s parenting skills: “As was to be expected, he is spectacular,” she told Entertainment Tonight .

The Oscar-nominated actress later surprised her fans in the summer of 2019 when she shared a rare personal Instagram post announcing her second pregnancy. “It’s not for a movie... #2,” the actress shared with her followers. The couple’s second child, a boy named Jack, was born in November of that same year.

Ever wondered who designed Hathaway’s emerald-shaped diamond engagement ring? It was Shulman. The New York-native is a jewelry designer—and he even has his own jewelry brand called James Banks Design. According to the brand’s website, the pieces are handmade from recycled material in Southern California. “Through initial discussion, pieces are dreamt of, invented, designed and then methodically brought to life,” the brand’s website says.

In 2014, Shulman collaborated with Hathaway to produce Song One , an indie drama film starring the actress. "At first, I was curious how it would go. People always say don't work with your spouse. But I loved working with him,” Hathaway told People. “ He’s really good at this, and he’s a wonderful producer. And I feel like I actually learned a lot from him in the process.”

Shulman graduated with a B.A. in theater from Brown University. According to IMDB , he has five acting credits under his belt, including his role as Paul O’Bannon in the NBC show American Dreams .

Hathaway counts her The Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt among her closest friends in Hollywood. And Blunt adores Hathaway and Shulman together. The British actress told ELLE in March 2017 that Shulman “has been Annie’s greatest achievement in many ways. He’s sort of home away from the storm of fame that she lives with. Being with the right person has been a major part of her growth, but I don’t think she cares as much anymore. That’s something both of us feel now: Who fucking cares? You get to a point where the stuff that you used to sweat just doesn’t matter. It’s a great place to be.”

Hathaway appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live in October 2020, during which the host asked how she and her family approached safety at the beginning of the pandemic. Hathaway told Kimmel, laughing, “It's so embarrassing. I don't know what I was thinking, but you know those little magical thoughts you have that keep you going, that keep your anxiety at bay, and it's like, ‘As long as I do this thing, everything's gonna be fine?’ So I decided that it would keep my family safe if I put tape around all of our light switches and our doorknobs because...these are the most oft-touched surfaces, and we'll just remember to wash our hands and put Lysol on them. And I remember I did this and my husband came upstairs, and he saw what I'd been working on, and he was like, ‘What? Why?’...And he continued to make fun of me.”

She also mentioned how “wearing a really sensible pair of heels” inexplicably made her feel safer. “[That feeling] lasted exactly five hours,” she says. “And, again, it gave my husband—my husband teased me about it yesterday.” When Kimmel asked if Schulman did anything strange during the early days of the pandemic, Hathaway responded, shaking her head, “Ugh. He's so perfect. I know I shouldn't say that; it's too much pressure. But he's a really easygoing guy, so he usually hits the bullseye pretty right. I'm the one that spins out a little bit. I'm very lucky I married him.”

During the same interview with Kimmel, Hathaway revealed that she hasn’t decided if she and Schulman will have another baby. “Yeah, I don't know,” she said. “I don’t know. Like, some minutes I'm like, ‘Yes, absolutely,’ and some minutes I'm like, “The world scares me too much,’ and I think I've got two healthy ones and that feels really great. So I don’t really know yet.”

The two were recently spotted together at a trio of events, including the opening of The Music Man on Broadway, a casual date at Soho House in New York City, and in Milan at the Giorgio Armani fashion show during Milan Fashion Week.

Shulman even posed with Hathaway during the Berlin Film Festival in February 2023:

And at Valentino's haute couture show at the end of January 2023:

Hathaway and Shulman have kept a low profile for the majority of 2023. But in early May, the couple was photographed by paparazzi walking in New York City with their family. Hathaway was outfitted in a navy blazer and jeans while Shulman was dressed in a navy top and black jacket.

In September 2023, they attended the The Albies at the New York Public Library hosted by the Clooney Foundation.

The couple were seen on January 11, heading to the National Board of Review Awards at Cipriani. Shulman wore a black suit with a matching tie, and Hathaway was in a netted black dress, a black blazer hung over her shoulders.

Shulman showed his support for Hathaway’s new romantic comedy at the end of April. The couple was photographed holding hands as they left a screening for The Idea of You at 92Y in New York City.

Hathaway shared a photo of herself with Shulman and some friends in support of the constitutional right to vote. The Polaroid shot showed the actress in a long black summer dress, with Shulman’s arm around her. he's wearing light jeans, a striped polo, and holding a black hat.

“Friends don't let friends skip elections!” Hathway wrote in the caption, along with instructions for checking registration and finding poll stations.

A fun fact about the actress is that her name, Anne Hathaway, is shared with the wife of William Shakespeare. Hathaway has always had some issues with her name, wanting to be called “Annie” as a child.

What’s in a name?

Well, in her case, there might be a hint of fate. In 2019, Hathaway addressed the viral conspiracy that Shulman resembled Shakespeare on The View, mentioning that some people joke they're the couple reincarnated.

In 2022, for Interview Mag , model Bella Hadid asked Hathaway about it again, saying, “So Anne, this is the big talk of the town. The people say that your husband Adam looks just like William Shakespeare and that you look just like his wife, also named Anne Hathaway, married in 1582. Would love and die if you could tell me here first, if you are truly a time traveler and your thoughts on this?”

“That is actually the most adorable question ever,” Hathaway replied. “And he does look like William Shakespeare, doesn’t he? Ongoing situation but will update you when I see you.”

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Actress Anne Hathaway feels she is still ‘blooming’ while romancing younger man in The Idea Of You

AUSTIN, Texas – As progressive as society’s attitudes to relationships seem these days, a large age gap still raises eyebrows – especially when the woman is older.

Debuting on Prime Video on May 2, the romantic comedy The Idea Of You explores this with a story about Solene (Anne Hathaway), a 40-year-old single mother who falls for 24-year-old Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine), the lead singer in a famous boy band.

On top of the age difference, Solene – a divorcee with a teenage daughter – also has to contend with Hayes’ celebrity, a combination that is more than she bargained for.

At the movie’s premiere at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, earlier in 2024, Hathaway, 41, explains why she was drawn to this unusual role, which sees her share many romantic scenes with Galitzine, a 29-year-old English actor.

“I wanted to make this because it’s a great part and a fun premise,” says the American star, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn in the musical movie Les Miserables (2012). She also appeared in comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and science-fiction blockbuster Interstellar (2014).

“For some reason, we talk about coming-of-age stories as something that happens in the earlier part of your life – and I don’t know about you, but I feel like I keep blooming.

“I want us to look at each other and see each other in a constant bloom, and I thought this movie had the ability to do that,” adds Hathaway, who is married to American businessman Adam Shulman, 43. They have sons aged eight and four.

Commenting on an observation a character in the movie makes – that “people hate happy women” – American film producer Cathy Schulman, 59, says: “It gets to the root of why we did this (film) in the first place.

“We really wanted to make a movie about the possibilities for women to feel love at every age and stage, and to have the courage to go back and do it again.”

Schulman – who won a Best Picture Oscar as a producer on the crime drama Crash (2004) – says that society seems to think “that once you’re a mum, you’re sort of done”.

“And guess what? We’re not done,” she says. “I think what the character was saying is that it’s too much for people to accept that a woman could be more than a mum, or to have a continued connection to her own passion, sensuality and sexuality.

“And we wanted to make a movie about a woman who had the courage to try again.”

American actress Gabrielle Union was a co-producer on the film alongside Schulman and Hathaway.

But the 51-year-old performer – who starred in the Think Like A Man romantic comedy franchise (2012 to 2014) and the drama series Being Mary Jane (2013 to 2019) – also had a special connection to the story.

She is friends with 49-year-old American actress Robinne Lee, who wrote the 2017 novel of the same name that the movie is adapted from.

They played sisters in the 2003 romcom Deliver Us From Eva and bonded over their love of American boy bands.

“She was a fan of New Kids On The Block and I was into New Edition.

“And, when she wrote the book, she allowed us to read it ahead of time and, on vacation, we passed it around – my husband and all the guys read it, and me and all the girls read it.

“Everyone had a wildly different reaction to the book, and I said, ‘Oh, this is a movie. Robinne, please let me option this (for a film).’”

Union is also married to a younger and famous man: American former professional basketball player Dwyane Wade, 42.

“I live it every day. And people question our family, they question our love and they wonder what you deserve,” says the actress, who has a five-year-old daughter with Wade.

“But it really came down to wanting to be a friend to Robinne and watching her characters come to life. And I’m more than pleased.”

• The Idea Of You premieres on Prime Video on May 2.

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Who is Adam Shulman? What to know about Anne Hathaway's husband

A nne Hathaway doesn’t share too many details about her relationship with her husband, Adam Shulman — but when she does, it’s always in glowing terms.

“We’re really just lucky that we keep growing together,” Hathaway, 41, said of Shulman, 43, on “The Drew Barrymore Show” in December.

The actor revealed that she and Shulman, who tied the knot in September 2012 and share two sons, even have matching tattoos honoring their connection. 

“The idea is that individually, we’re whole, but together, we’re more,” she said. “I don’t expect him to complete me and he doesn’t expect me to complete him.”

Read on to learn more about Hathaway’s husband of 11 years, Adam Shulman.

He’s a jewelry designer and actor 

Shulman co-owns a jewelry company, James Banks Design, with jewelry designer Heidi Nahser Fink. 

Hathaway worked with Fink while on the set of Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland," according to a profile of Shulman in 1stDibs Introspective magazine . Fink was the prop department’s master metalsmith, and Hathaway asked her to make a Christmas gift for Shulman. He loved the present and soon after met Fink, which led to them collaborating.

Hathaway was the muse for some of the brand’s signature pieces, Shulman told 1stDibs Introspective, including the company’s delicate butterfly pendants, rings and earrings.

“The inspiration for a character Annie was working on was a butterfly, and she wanted a butterfly jewel, but the only ones she could find were encrusted with gems or for children,” said Shulman, who went on to create a series of butterfly pieces in honor of his wife.

Another one of the brand’s signature designs, a vintage-style lightbulb pendant, was inspired by something Hathaway once told Shulman.

“When Annie was on a long shoot in London and I was doing theater work in New York, she told me, ‘I don’t feel like I have the lights in my life,’” Shulman said.

Shulman was also closely involved in the creation of Hathaway’s engagement ring, which was designed in part by Kwiat Jewelers.

“He had a very strong vision for what he knew Anne would love,” the jewelry company’s owner, Greg Kwiat, told People in 2011.

Shulman has also worked as an actor in the past, appearing in the likes of “The West Wing,” “American Dreams” and “The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning," according to his IMDb profile .

He has worked behind the camera as well, serving as a producer of Hathaway’s 2014 film, “Song One.”

Anne Hathaway and Adam Shulman ‘hit it off immediately’

Hathaway has talked about how the connection was instant between her and Shulman, who met through mutual friends. By 2009, they were popping up together at events.

“We hit it off immediately, but it took us a pretty long time to get together,” Hathaway told Vogue in 2010. “He thought that I had a boyfriend, and I thought that he had a girlfriend, so I thought that I’d better keep my distance because I didn’t want to be that girl. ”

When they realized they were both single, Hathaway said “things sped up a bit — and I think I’ll leave it at that."

It sounds like their spark only grew brighter over the years.

“He walks into a room, and I light up, I can’t help it," Hathaway told Harper's Bazaar in a 2013 feature. 

This meant that while she was preparing for her role in “Les Misérables,” which came out in 2012, she had to ask Shulman to leave the room so she could get into a more somber mindset for her character. 

“A few days into it I said, ‘I’m having too much fun, I just want to play with you and I need to be really sad right now,’” she said.

Anne Hathaway and Adam Shulman married in 2012 

After keeping their dating life fairly private, Hathaway and Shulman tied the knot in September 2012 in Big Sur, California.

It was a private ceremony attended by about 150 guests, according to British Vogue .

Hathaway wore an off-the-shoulder gown designed by Valentino Garavani, while Shulman sported a traditional black tuxedo. 

Hathaway once opened up about whether being married changed anything about their relationship. 

“I didn’t think it was going to, and we both talked about it beforehand and how it wasn’t going to change anything, but something shifts, and I don’t know what it is,” she told Savannah Guthrie on TODAY in 2015.

“I think I didn’t realize I was keeping a part of myself protected, and it’s kind of all on the line now," she added. "I’m his and he’s mine.”

While Shulman didn’t appear with his wife in that particular interview, Savannah read a message Shulman had shared with TODAY beforehand about his love for Hathaway: “He said, ‘The biggest surprise about being married is that he continues to fall deeper and deeper in love with you.'"

Adam Shulman shares two sons with Anne Hathaway

Shulman and Hathaway have two children: Jonathan Rosebanks, 8, and Jack, 4. 

The jewelry designer has opened up about the joy of seeing Hathaway become a mom. 

“She always amazes me,” he told People in 2020. “As a mother, she is gorgeous.”

Shulman also talked about embracing the not-so-glamorous details of fatherhood.

“I love changing diapers! It’s the best,” he said. “Every aspect of it is amazing.”

“Every day makes me appreciate her more,” he added of his wife.

Earlier this year, Hathaway revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that she and Shulman had experienced a miscarriage in 2015, prior to welcoming sons Jonathan and Jack. 

She said this experience influenced the way she announced her second pregnancy in July 2019.

“For everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies,” she captioned an Instagram selfie that showed her baby bump. “Sending you extra love.”

Adam Shulman often supports Anne Hathaway on the red carpet

Shulman and Hathaway may keep the details of their relationship largely private, but they do step out together from time to time at A-list events.

They were spotted looking cozy back in 2009 at the opening night celebration for "A Streetcar Named Desire" in New York City.

They also shared a sweet moment at the 2013 Vanity Fair Oscar Party as they celebrated Hathaway's win for "Les Misérables."

In 2023, Shulman sat between Hathaway and Anna Wintour at a Valentino couture show during Paris Fashion Week. Wintour, of course, was the rumored inspiration for Hathaway's character's boss in "The Devil Wears Prada."

Shulman and Hathaway's bond seemed as strong as ever in another photo from Paris Fashion Week in 2023.Hathaway opened up about the secret to her and Shulman's enduring connection last year on Drew Barrymore's talk show .

“He’s his own person, I’m my own person, and we choose to be together because we believe we make each other better, and this union is something we both want to participate in," she said.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com