Anne Hathaway opens up about her struggle to get pregnant

Just as she’s fearlessly flipped between film genres, assuming characters that become characterisations of cultural phenomenons, Anne Hathaway has been bold, brave, and candid in her pursuit of motherhood.

In conversation with Vanity Fair for the April 2024 cover story, Hathaway displayed that same courage when discussing her past pregnancy journeys.

When she announced her second pregnancy, the Devil Wears Prada lead couldn’t present herself as overly happy. Instead, in her emotional Instagram announcement, Hathaway, 41, opted for honesty.

“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,” she wrote in 2019, alongside an image of her baby bump.

With the message, Hathaway subtly acknowledged her trying journey from having a miscarriage in 2015 to getting pregnant with her second son.

The One Day actress told Vanity Fair: “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.”

Hathaway was starring in a six-week run of the off-Broadway one-woman show Grounded when she had her miscarriage. The performance required her to act out a birth scene every night, and the pressure to pretend this didn’t affect her became too much.

“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 confessed. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine. I had to keep it real otherwise.”

Hathaway continued: “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.”

Opening up about her miscarriage led Hathaway to discover the devastating fact that so many women have faced the same. She found a statistic that claimed an estimated 50 per cent of pregnancies end in a miscarriage. This was enough information to motivate her to speak out in hopes others wouldn’t feel so isolated and alone.

She added: “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,” Hathaway toldVanity Fair.

According to Mayo Clinic, a smaller per centage of pregnancies end in miscarriages if you measure based on the specifics of the condition. “Miscarriage is the sudden loss of a pregnancy before the 20th week,” the report explained. “About 10 per cent to 20 per cent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the actual number is likely higher. This is because many miscarriages happen early on, before people realise they’re pregnant.”

Hathaway is the mom to two young boys –Jonathan, eight, and Jack four, who she shares with husband Adam Shulman.