You would think Anne Hathaway — her real name — would tire of the Shakespeare gags. But no. Especially when she comes to Britain. “It’s actually quite nice,” she insists. “If I check out of a hotel, a porter will say, ‘So how do you feel about being left the second-best bed?’ (The Bard’s will and testament bequeathed his foremost flop to another.) I’m thinking, ‘ It’s so cool you know that!’ Most everybody in America thinks I’m named after the Beverly Hillbillies” — which has a character called Jane Hathaway.
This rose by any other name would still smell as sweet. In a hotel room overlooking Central Park, not far from Hathaway’s home, the tall, gangly, raven-haired actress tucks her legs under her on the sofa and does some rearranging of her tank top: “I hope you don’t mind that my bra straps are showing.” Hathaway is pathologically perky, with the pouting, oversized features of a pre-drugs Judy Garland: you can see why Hollywood has gone a bundle on her. The recent American success of her film The Devil Wears Prada has confirmed she can not only headline a mainstream flick, but hold her own against a co-star as formidable as Meryl Streep.
If there are those still scratching their heads, wondering who the hell Hathaway is, they will swiftly be enlightened by the legion of tweenies who, over the past five years, have lapped up the actress’s Cinderella turns in The Princess Diaries (1 and 2) and the delightfully Shrek-ish Ella Enchanted. Huge hits among the My Little Pony brigade, they have earned the best part of $1 billion at the box office and on DVD, making her possibly the most successful screen teen since Liz Taylor.
But, at 23, Hathaway wants to sit at the grown-up table. Last year she displayed her credentials with an understated turn in Brokeback Mountain. And with Sandra Bullock and Renée Zellweger creaking into middle age, and Lindsay Lohan proving no respecter of an early bedtime, Hathaway has arrived just as Hollywood is seeking a new American Sweetheart.
Despite a bit of saucy playfulness (me: is there any type of film you wouldn’t do? Her: “Porn, definitely, hardcore”), so girl-next-door is Hathaway that you are half inclined to ask whether she minds feeding the cat when you’re on holiday. In this respect, The Devil Wears Prada is a perfect vehicle. Adapted from the bestseller by Lauren Weisburger, it casts Hathaway as Andrea “Andy” Sachs, a Dorothy in Oz whose first venture into a career in “serious” journalism amounts to an internship as a PA at a fashion magazine and, moreover, unquestioning, 24/7 servitude to its despotic editor, Miranda Priestly (Streep).
Though Hathaway claims that in a previous job (baby-sitting, what else?) she had “this one tyrannical three-year-old, I’m not kidding, who was the most like Meryl’s character of anyone I’ve ever worked with”, it’s unlikely anyone could match the cool hysteria of Priestly — a part given extra spice by the fact that Weisburger’s novel is assumed to be a hiss-and-tell payback (officially denied) for the author’s time spent as a dogsbody to the Vogue editor Anna “Nuclear” Wintour.
At the fictitious glossy Runway, the hardwood floors are strewn with eggshells as Andy is forbidden to go to the loo, sleep or eat, sure in the knowledge that a fur coat will be flung at her should she fail in a simple task such as procuring, at five minutes’ notice, the Fort Knox-guarded manuscript of the unpublished new Harry Potter so Priestly’s kids have something to read on holiday.
The film was made by the team behind Sex and the City, and its sartorial bent is being heavily marketed. The day of this tête à tête, Hathaway has been forced to dress to the nines, fielding interminable questions about haute couture from impossibly effete European journalists. Now her stilettos are parked by the door, her designer togs strewn in favour of something more casual. “A fashionista like Mischa Barton really should have been the one to play this role,” she quips.
Forget Wintour. When it comes to a harsh taskmistress, there is none more fearsome than Streep, it turns out. For the first read-through, Hathaway says she was summoned (fortified with Dutch courage) to Streep’s New York town house. “She kind of pulled me into this really warm hug and said, ‘I think you’re perfect for the role, and I’m so happy we’re going to be working on this together. But I warn you, that’s the last nice thing I’m going to say to you.’ It was.”
Hathaway and Streep have a lot in common — “Jersey girls done good,” Hathaway yelps, with such exuberance, you wouldn’t be surprised if she whipped out a pair of pom-poms. Both hail from the professional suburbs of the Garden State (Hathaway is from Milburn); both attended the elite Vassar college. Hathaway’s mother, Kate McCauley, a musical stage performer, propelled Annie (as everyone still calls her) towards showbiz from a tender age. By her teens, she was a trained soprano performing at Carnegie Hall. “Honestly, this movie thing is really cool, but I don’t quite know how it happened,” she muses.
She was a caterpillar-eyebrowed 17-year-old when she got the lead in The Princess Diaries, off the back of a teen TV show she had ended up in, bagging the part by falling off her chair at the audition. Unveiled by the director Garry Marshall as a cross between Julia Roberts, Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland — “Ha, ha ... I paid him $15 to say that, $5 for each actress” — Hathaway was a hit as the San Franciscan lass who discovers, via her grandma (Julie Andrews), that she’ s the crown princess of a country called Genovia. “What I can’t believe is that it’s never gone away,” she coos. “Now girls are giving it to their little sisters, so it’s becoming a classic.”
Hathaway is not quite as fluffy as this fairy tale suggests. An earlier assertion that she has “no regrets” about anything in her career is undone by sticking the boot into the sequel, Princess Diaries 2. “I was contractually obligated to do it,” she huffs. “I did Ella Enchanted not knowing I was going to have to do another ‘tiara flick’.” (One assumes she still banked the cheque.) Her chief gripe seems to be that it denied her the chance to star in the film version of The Phantom of the Opera, a role she had coveted. But other musical ventures are on the horizon.
More shocking to her core audience seems to be that in both the little-seen gang flick Havoc and Brokeback Mountain, Hathaway eagerly took off her top, prompting comparisons with Andrews, who got her boys out in the 1981 film SOB, then seen as a gratuitous bid to be taken seriously. “She’d been Mary Poppins for 20 years. I’d been the girl from the Princess Diaries for 10 minutes,” Hathaway says dismissively. “Films are letting me get older, which is really nice, because there was always this fear of what happens when I stop being a teenager. But for everyone else, it was kind of a sharp left.”
It should not detract from her turn in Brokeback Mountain, where, as the rodeo-queen wife of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist, Hathaway aged from 20 to 40 and did some of her own stunt riding. “The most overlooked performance of last year,” Streep tells me later. And you imagine she knows what she’s talking about.
Hathaway seems to have things mapped out. In her next outing, Becoming Jane, she will be pursuing the well-worn route to big-league affirmation by playing English, as none other than Jane Austen. In this UK Film Council romp, shot in Ireland, she stars as the young author opposite James McAvoy’s Irish lawyer, Tom Lefroy — their doomed affair purportedly launching Austen on her literary trajectory. A sort of Shakespeare in Love take on proceedings, Hathaway says.
Here’s where things get tricky, for the “Austenites”, as she calls them, are already mobilising, crying excessive artistic licence. “We don’t have documented evidence. What we do have is the letters and hearsay, and probably, on our behalf, some invention. A few things are out of sequence. But everything that we see between Jane and Tom could possibly have happened.” She knows it will be her biggest challenge yet.
With Zellweger playing Beatrix Potter, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf and, reportedly, Brokeback’s Michelle Williams about to do Charlotte Brontë, can we not find one of our own to play our literary heroines, especially with lottery cash at stake? But you can’t blame Hathaway. “I tried to be method,” she jokes. “I applied for a British passport before we made the film, and they said no.”
She should have told them the one about the second-best bed.
The Devil Wears Prada opens on October 5
