Anne Hathaway Spoke About Her Miscarriage Experience And How It Affected Her Work
This post mentions pregnancy loss.
Anne Hathaway opened up about the miscarriage she experienced in 2015 during a new interview.
Back in 2019, Anne shared an Instagram post announcing that she was pregnant with her second child. In her post, she mentions that neither of her pregnancies was "a straight line," saying, "It's not for a movie...#2 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 💕."
And now, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Anne took a moment to discuss the Instagram post and her fertility journey. When asked about the Instagram post and her caption, Anne explained, "Given the pain I felt while trying to get pregnant, it would've felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy when I know the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone."
She also shared that she experienced a miscarriage in 2015, and at the same time, she was performing in 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 explained and added that when her friends visited her backstage, she told them about the pregnancy loss.
"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.'"
"It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong," she added.
Anne continued, saying that she was shocked to find out how many of her friends had similar fertility experiences, which led her to find a study that estimated as many as 50% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. She said, "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."
She said that when she wrote her Instagram post, "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."
Read Anne's full interview here.