Anne Hathaway has opened up about her miscarriage and feeling “unnecessarily isolated.”
As Vanity Fair’s April 2024 cover star, the Oscar winner reflected on the post she shared when she announced that she was expecting her second child in July 2019.
The actress wrote: “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.”
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Nearly five years later after giving birth, the actress told Vanity Fair about her reasoning behind the message.
Anne said: “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.”
“I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal.”
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The actress also revealed that she suffered a miscarriage a few years before giving birth in 2015.
Anne also revealed how the painful experience was made so much worse by having to “pretend to give birth” every night as she played a pregnant character on Broadway.
The 41-year-old performed the show Grounded for six weeks at the time in a one-woman off-Broadway show based on a female U.S. Air Force pilot who is grounded when she gets pregnant.
“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 told the outlet.
Backstage after shows, she shared the personal news with friends who came to see her: “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,'” she shared.
“It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong.”
The A-lister gave birth to her second son, Jack, at the end of 2019.
