Monica Schipper/Getty Images
Anne Hathaway Reveals Heartbreaking Pregnancy Loss While Playing a Pregnant Character
Anne Hathaway has revealed she suffered a pregnancy loss in 2015, one year before giving birth to her first child, and it happened while she was playing a pregnant character.
“The first time it didn’t work out for me. I was doing a play and I had to give birth on stage every night,” Anne, 41, told Vanity Fair in a cover story published on Monday, March 25.
At the time, she was starring in the one-woman Off-Broadway play Grounded, where she played an F16 fighter pilot whose career was derailed by a pregnancy.
“It was too much to keep it in when I was on stage pretending everything was fine,” Anne said of the heartbreak she went though.
“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’m with you,'” the Oscar winner explained about her message to others who have suffered a pregnancy loss.
“It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong,” Anne added.
The Devil Wears Prada star welcomed her first child with husband Adam Shulman, Jonathan “Johnny” Rosebanks Shulman, on March 24, 2016. Anne gave birth to their second child, son Jack, in late 2019.
The New York native was asked about the message she had for other couples experiencing fertility issues when announcing she was expecting baby No. 2 in July 2019.
In a black and white Instagram photo showing off her large baby bump, Anne wrote, “It’s not for a movie…#2.” She then added, ”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.”
“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,” Anne told Vanity Fair.
The Idea of You star previously touched on why she decided to be open about her struggle with getting pregnant in August 2019, one month after her announcement.
“When I said to them: ‘This has happened to me, it broke my heart, it broke me,’ so many of them said: ‘It happened to me, too,’ and that was the thing that allowed me to come through it, to feel my pain without having anyone rush in to define it or cure it,” Anne told The Daily Mail.
“I sometimes think Instagram makes life look really breezy, but that’s not the whole story,” she continued. “By leaving out the sad part, we make women who are struggling with this feel isolated and lonely. We make them feel like it’s all their fault. I wanted to be more sensitive than that.”
