I love that we can finally cut through the bulls***!” says a beaming Anne
Hathaway, her famously wide cartoon smile at full beam, her saucer eyes
aglow. “And that I can say, ‘I know you didn’t think I had this one in me,
and I’ve never given you any reason to believe it!’ ” The star of The
Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada leans forward in her
seat and continues excitedly. “But thank you! Thank you for hanging in
there!”
Hathaway, a portrait of understated chic in skinny jeans, fitted blue shirt
and whipped-back hair, is directing her giddy thanks to the invisible
legions of critics, journalists and cinemagoers everywhere who doubted,
perhaps prematurely, that this wholesome champion of girlie blockbusters
could ever produce the type of raw and excoriating performance that she
delivers in the forthcoming family melodrama Rachel Getting Married.
Here, as the neurotic former drug addict Kym, on leave from rehab for the
weekend wedding of sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), she is a cyclone of
self-hatred. In between verbally diarrhoeic rants about the insincerity she
sees around her, she beds the best man, begins a maid of honour speech with,
“I am Shiva the destroyer” and regularly winds herself and her entire family
into a thorny tangle of crippling guilt. Naturally, it’s the kind of
firecracker turn that’s been generating breathless Oscar buzz, and
ultimately raises the prospect of a three-way Meryl Streep (for Doubt),
Kate Winslet (for Revolutionary Road) and Hathaway smackdown in this
year’s Best Actress bout.
“I’m 26 years old and I’ve done work that people are saying should be
nominated for an Oscar,” Hathaway says, with a self-deprecating shrug. “Just
the compliment of that attention is more than I think I ever imagined for
myself, and certainly more than anyone ever imagined for me.”
In person, Hathaway has more of the complex Kym about her than the cutesy
goofball heroines of smash hits such as The Devil Wears Prada. She
is, for instance, fantastically articulate, and speaks in fast yet perfectly
modulated sentences. A former literature student of both Vassar College and
New York University, she will later say that this love of “the excavation
process of words” comes from her father, Gerald, a lawyer who made her
“hyper-aware of stating terms, and of how I’m saying things, and if, or not,
I’m using the most succinct way to express myself.”
But for now she is happy to describe Rachel Getting Married as “a
neo-Chekhovian American family drama” and to talk about the movie’s “heavy
gravitas and broadstrokes storytelling”.
But she hangs back pointedly when it comes to promoting her other new project, Bride
Wars. This chick-flick is a mildly diverting misfire on its own terms
but, when compared with Rachel Getting Married, a complete dog.
Hathaway is coolly circumspect about her part in the production. “In the
past I would have taken more of the film on my shoulders, but I learnt on
this film that that’s not my job as an actor. So if things weren’t coming
together I wouldn’t speak until spoken to. I’d just stand back and let
things happen.”
And then, of course, there is the unavoidable sense that Hathaway, the actress
and the woman, is utterly and profoundly changed, having emerged from her
very public split from the Italian property developer and convicted
fraudster Raffaello Follieri (serving four-and-a-half years in prison). He
falsely claimed connections with the Vatican in order to woo gullible
investors with the promise of low-price deals on church property in the US.
During his four-year romance with Hathaway, he enjoyed a lifestyle of private
jets, luxury holidays and a glamorous Manhattan Trump Tower apartment. At
the time Hathaway was besotted, and repeatedly spoke of the transformative
effect that Follieri had had on her life. “Before I met him I was just
annoying and narcissistic,” she told one interviewer. “But he’s brought out
so many positive attributes I never had before.”
Her life, it seemed, had previously boasted a fairytale arc, like something
straight out of Ella Enchanted (another one of her girlie-themed
crowd-pleasers).
Raised in New Jersey by her lawyer pop and stage actress mom, Hathaway is the
middle sister to elder brother Michael (now her assistant) and younger
Thomas. A gifted student, she was allowed to skip a year in school to . . .
“No, no, no, let’s put everything in its proper place,” she interrupts.
“Yes, I did skip a grade, but the grade I skipped was kindergarten. So
please, there’s nothing extraordinary about my intellect, believe me.”
By 16 she was a natural soprano and performing with a school’s chorus in
Carnegie Hall (typically she describes herself as “actually a pretty
mediocre singer”). At 18, her debut movie, The Princess Diaries,
about a gawky high-schooler who discovers that she’s an heiress to a
European throne, became a $150 million box-office sensation. Directed by Pretty
Woman’s Garry Marshall and co-starring Julie Andrews, the movie
immediately earned Hathaway hot buzz tags as both the “next Julia Roberts”
(they share the same megawatt smile) and the “next Julie Andrews” (she acts,
she sings, she appeals to children).
It was a dream ticket for Hathaway, and she followed it with a series of roles
that deftly balanced flat-out commercial gloss (The Princess Diaries 2,
The Devil Wears Prada) with subtler hints of light and shade (playing
a wild child in the indie drama Havoc, or the long-suffering rodeo
wife in Brokeback Mountain). Directors gushed about her star
charisma, while her Devil Wears Prada co-star Meryl Streep simply
mused: “She is the most beautiful creature on film right now.” Nothing, it
appeared, could go wrong. Then came Follieri.
I tell her that her performance in Rachel Getting Married — a
mesmerising open wound of a turn — speaks of an actress who has suddenly
matured in the limelight of emotional trauma. And that the Follieri crisis
(they split last June, while he was being investigated by America’s Internal
Revenue Service and just weeks before he was arrested), must surely have
informed her work. “Actually, that’s a very romantic theory,” she says,
before giving a slight, smirking shrug of disappointment. “But it’s just a
few beats off — we shot the movie well before that all happened.”
And besides, she says, lots of things, and not just pain, inform her work. “It
can be the memory of a smile on the subway, or it can be the absolute and
complete combustion of a relationship. You never know what’s going to stay
with you.”
And yet, she says, amid the incessant media attention and public scrutiny,
there have been memories that are hard to forget. “There was one time, just
after Raffaello and I had broken up, and before he was arrested. I was at LA
airport and there was a price on my head for a paparazzi photo of me crying.
I was with my elder brother [who is openly gay] checking into security and
one of the paparazzi said to me: ‘Anne, is your brother a fag? Is your
brother a fag, Anne?’ And I turned around to punch him, but everyone around
me just held me and said, ‘No, if you react to this now you are simply
putting money in his pocket’. And they basically pushed me through the line
and got me to a place where I could burst into tears.”
That was then, of course. Now the Manhattan-based Hathaway, still single, says
that she is in a happy place, spending time with friends and finally able to
put the Follieri affair in some sort of perspective. “I can see the light at
the end of the tunnel,” she says. “And it’s not just about using what I’ve
been through in my work. I think it’s much greater than that.”
Meanwhile, her thundering career juggernaut continues apace, with a coveted
role in Tim Burton’s high-profile Alice in Wonderland — playing
the White Queen opposite Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter and Michael Sheen’s
Cheshire Cat. “I’m sooo happy I can finally talk about it,” she says. “I
couldn’t mention it for weeks and weeks, and kept having to say, ‘No, I
swear, I’ve got something really cool coming up!’ And now I start shooting
in two weeks!” She thinks about it for a moment and then, suddenly, lets out
a wild Valley Girl shriek of excitement. “AAAhhhhhhh! Oh my God! I’m
shooting in two weeks! F***!!!!”
After that, she says, there is still so much for her to do — like finishing
her literature degree at NYU (abandoned for The Devil Wears Prada).
She misses, she says, being in a world where “the currency is ideas without
judgment”. Why does she miss that? “Because when you step outside that world
there’s no safety net any more. And you have to trade in dollars, success,
perceptions and politics.”
She stops herself for a moment and, with the wisdom of someone who’s
simultaneously tasted the top of the Hollywood heap and the bottom of the
personal pits, clarifies: “When you step outside that world it gets
complicated. But I guess that’s life.”
Bride Wars is released tomorrow. Rachel Getting Married is released on Jan
23
