Anne Hathaway Shares She Had A Miscarriage When She Had A Role As A Pregnant Character

Before Anne Hathaway welcomed her two children, she really struggled to conceive. In fact, the Mother’s Instinct star recently revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that she suffered a miscarriage while working on an off-Broadway play. A play where she was expected to give birth on stage every single night.

Hathaway opened up to Vanity Fair about experiencing a miscarriage while she was working on the one-woman play Grounded for six weeks. “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 magazine, adding that she kept her pregnancy a secret from the cast and only shared it with friends who visited her backstage. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine.”

When Hathaway did eventually welcome her two sons, 8-year-old Jonathan and 4-year-old Jack with husband Adam Shulman, she felt it was important to honor what she had gone through to get to where she was.

“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.’ It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong,” she told Vanity Fair.

This perhaps gives some added insight into Hathaway’s 2019 pregnancy announcement, when she shared a selfie featuring her baby bump and wrote on Instagram, “It’s not for a movie... 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.”

The mom of two has spoken in the past about her complicated feelings about pregnancy, telling the Wall Street Journal in 2022, “There’s this tendency to portray getting pregnant, having kids, in one light, as if it’s all positive. But I know from my own experience… it’s so much more complicated than that,” she explained at the time. “And when you find out that your pain is shared by others… I just feel that’s helpful information to have, so I’m not isolated in my pain.”