Anne Hathaway is getting candid about her previous fertility struggles. In a new interview with Vanity Fair, the actress opened up about the pain she felt when trying to conceive, as well as revealed she had a miscarriage in 2015.
“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 recalled, referring to her six-week run of the off-Broadway one-woman show Grounded. Off-stage, however, Hathaway had to "keep it real" with her friends. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine," she remembered.
She and her husband, Adam Shulman, have since had two sons, Jonathan, born in 2016, and Jack, in 2020. When Hathaway announced her second pregnancy in 2019, however, she posted an Instagram expressing that her journey to that point had been "hell."
“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," she wrote at the time. "Sending you extra love.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the star reflected on her decision to share her struggles with her followers. "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,'" she said.
After speaking with other women, Hathaway said she discovered that many others have experienced the same thing. “I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage," she said after finding a study that estimated as many as 50% of pregnancies result in a miscarriage. "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.”
This isn't the first time that Hathaway has been open about her "complicated" feelings toward pregnancy. In a 2022 with the Wall Street Journal, the actress said she found it "helpful" to share her experience with others. "There's this tendency to portray getting pregnant, having kids, in one light, as if it’s all positive. But I know from my own experience… it's so much more complicated than that," she said at the time. "And when you find out that your pain is shared by others… I just feel that’s helpful information to have, so I’m not isolated in my pain," the actor added, referencing how, for centuries, women have been forced to deal with miscarriages and fertility issues alone."
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