Anne Hathaway doesn’t often open up about her personal life. But now she’s ready to talk about a particularly vulnerable moment in her life: When she had a miscarriage back in 2015.
In a Vanity Fair interview published Monday, Hathaway, 41, shared details about her fertility struggles—something she previously alluded to in 2019. (In an Instagram post announcing her second pregnancy, she wrote at the time: “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.”)
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During the interview, she revealed that she had a miscarriage a few years prior to that post. It happened while she was performing in the off-Broadway show Grounded, where she “had to give birth onstage every night.”
At first, the Academy Award winner said she tried keeping the challenging experience to herself, but she eventually told her friends when they visited her backstage. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine,” she added. “I had to keep it real.”
Having a miscarriage (a sudden pregnancy loss before the 20th week) is more common than many people realize—a reality that even Hathaway wasn’t aware of until talking with friends who shared similar stories. “I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage,” she said. (Researchers estimate that 20 to 30% of pregnancies in the US end in miscarriage.)
The revelation that she wasn’t—and shouldn’t—feel alone is what inspired her to speak out in 2019. “It was more about what I wasn’t going to do,” Hathaway (who now shares two kids with her husband, producer Adam Shulman) said while looking back on her Instagram post. “I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal.”
When reflecting on her fertility journey, she also expressed empathy for those facing similar struggles: “You don’t have to always be graceful,” Hathaway said. “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.”
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