Anne Hathaway reveals she had a miscarriage during run of one-woman show about motherhood
The "Idea of You" star lost a pregnancy during a six-week production of "Grounded."
Anne Hathaway gave an emotional performance night in and night out during in a 2015 production of the one-woman show Grounded, but audiences didn't know she was doing so in the midst of personal tragedy.
In a new Vanity Fair interview, the Idea of You and Devil Wears Prada star revealed that during the six-week run of the Off Broadway play, she had a miscarriage. "The first time [being pregnant] didn't work out for me," she said. "I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night."
Written by George Brant and directed by Julie Taymor, Grounded saw Hathaway play an unnamed drone pilot who unexpectedly becomes pregnant and must grapple with the simultaneous challenges of motherhood and her morally dubious career. She recalled to Vanity Fair that she told her friends about the miscarriage when they visited her backstage at the theater. "It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine," she said. "I had to keep it real otherwise."
Hathaway, 41, previously discussed fertility challenges in a 2019 Instagram post announcing that she was pregnant with her second child. "For everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies," she wrote. "Sending you extra love."
The Interstellar actress wanted the post to reflect the emotional complexity of her experience. "Given the pain I felt while trying to get pregnant," she said, "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… it was more about what I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal."
Hathaway also said she was stunned to discover how common miscarriages are. (The Mayo Clinic estimates that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, though the actual rate is probably far higher since they can occur before people know they're pregnant in the first place.)
"I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated?" Hathaway said. "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 now has two sons with her husband, Adam Shulman. "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. "It's really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you're doing something wrong."
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