Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Anne Hathaway

Anne Jacqueline Hathaway (born November 12, 1982) is an American actress. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. Her films have grossed over $6.8 billion worldwide.

This profile of Anne Hathaway covers Early Life and Family Background, 2001–2004: Early roles and breakthrough, 2005–2008: Rise to prominence, 2009–2011: Romantic comedies and hosting events and 2012–2014: Les Miserables and films with Christopher Nolan.

Hathaway graduated from Millburn High School in New Jersey, where she acted in several plays, including Once Upon a Mattress. As a teenager, she was cast in the television series Get Real (1999–2000), and made her breakthrough as the protagonist in her debut film, the Disney comedy The Princess Diaries (2001). Hathaway made a transition to adult roles with the 2005 dramas Havoc and Brokeback Mountain. The comedy film The Devil Wears Prada (2006), in which she played an assistant to a fashion magazine editor, was her biggest commercial success to that point. She played a recovering alcoholic in the drama Rachel Getting Married (2008), which garnered her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She followed this with roles in the commercially successful romantic films Bride Wars (2009), Valentine's Day (2010) and Love & Other Drugs (2010).

In 2012, Hathaway starred as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, her first of three collaborations with director Christopher Nolan. That year, she also played Fantine, a prostitute dying of tuberculosis, in the musical romantic drama Les Misérables, for which she earned multiple accolades, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Hathaway went on to play a scientist in Interstellar (2014), the owner of an online fashion site in The Intern (2015), a haughty actress in Ocean's 8 (2018), a single mother in The Idea of You (2024), a journalist in The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) and Penelope in The Odyssey (2026).

Hathaway has won a Primetime Emmy Award for her guest voice role on The Simpsons, sung for soundtracks, appeared on stage and starred in the miniseries WeCrashed (2022). She is a board member of the Lollipop Theatre Network, an organization that brings films to children in hospitals, and she advocates for gender equality as a UN Women goodwill ambassador. Hathaway is married to Adam Shulman, with whom she has two children.

Early Life and Family Background of Anne Hathaway

Anne Jacqueline Hathaway was born on November 12, 1982, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. She is of Irish, English, German and French descent. Her father, Gerald, was a labor attorney, and her mother, Kate (née McCauley), is a former actress. Hathaway's maternal grandfather was WIP (AM) Philadelphia radio personality Joe McCauley. According to The Daily Telegraph, she was named after William Shakespeare's wife. She has an older brother, Michael, and a younger brother, Thomas. When Hathaway was six years old, the family moved to Millburn, New Jersey, where she was raised.

At age eight, when Hathaway watched her mother perform in the first national tour of Les Misérables as Fantine, she instantly became fascinated with the stage, but her parents were not keen on allowing her to pursue an acting career. After this, Kate quit acting to raise Hathaway and her brothers. Hathaway was raised as Roman Catholic with what she considers to be "really strong values" and wished to be a nun during her childhood, but acting was always a high priority for her. Her relationship with the Catholic Church changed at age 15 after she learned her older brother was gay. Her family left the church, joining the Episcopal Church because of its acceptance of homosexuality, but they eventually left that church too. In 2009, Hathaway described her religious beliefs as "a work in progress".

Hathaway attended Brooklyn Heights Montessori School and Wyoming Elementary School in Millburn. She graduated from Millburn High School, where she played soccer and took part in many plays, including Once Upon a Mattress, in which she portrayed Winnifred. Later, she appeared in the plays Jane Eyre and Gigi, at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1993 and became the first teenager admitted into the Barrow Group Theater Company's acting program. She spent several semesters studying as an English major and political science minor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, before transferring to New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Between 1998 and 1999, Hathaway sang soprano with the All-Eastern U.S. High School Honors Chorus at Carnegie Hall and acted in plays at Seton Hall Preparatory School in West Orange, New Jersey. Early in her film career, her acting style and appearance would be likened to Judy Garland—whom she cites as one of her favorite actresses—and Audrey Hepburn. Three days after her performance at Carnegie Hall, Hathaway was cast in the short-lived Fox television series Get Real. She played the teenager Meghan Green, alongside Jon Tenney, Debrah Farentino and Jesse Eisenberg. Hathaway suffered from depression and anxiety as a teenager; in 2008, she stated she had "grown from" it. She missed her first college semester due to the filming schedule of her cinematic debut, The Princess Diaries (2001). According to Hathaway, she never regretted not completing her degree, as she enjoyed being with others who "were trying to grow up".

2001–2004: Early roles and breakthrough of Anne Hathaway

In 2001, Hathaway starred in the Disney comedy The Princess Diaries, based on Meg Cabot's novel of the same name, portraying teenager Mia Thermopolis, who discovers that she is the heiress to the throne of the fictional Kingdom of Genovia. Hathaway auditioned for the role during a flight layover on the way to New Zealand. Director Garry Marshall initially considered Liv Tyler for the role, but cast Hathaway after his granddaughters suggested that she had the best "princess" hair. The film became a major commercial success, grossing $165 million worldwide. Many critics lauded Hathaway's performance; a BBC critic noted that "Hathaway shines in the title role and generates great chemistry" and The New York Times' Elvis Mitchell found her to be "royalty in the making, a young comic talent with a scramble of features". She earned an MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Female Performance nomination for the role. The same year, Hathaway starred with Christopher Gorham in Mitch Davis's The Other Side of Heaven, which was also distributed by Disney. Inspired by John H. Groberg's memoir In the Eye of the Storm, the film met with mostly negative reviews and was a box-office failure.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hathaway), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.