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Anne Hathaway is very open about the fertility struggles she endured amid conceiving her two sons Jonathan and Jack whom she shares with husband Adam Shulman. The popular actress and devoted mother-of-two barred her soul to Vanity Fair for the magazine's April cover story, revealing details about what it felt like to go through a miscarriage while playing a character who gave birth on stage every single night.
"It's really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong." Hathaway acted in a play in 2019 in which her character continually gave birth, all-the-while she was suffering a physically and emotionally damaging miscarriage.
"The first time it didn’t work out for me I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night." Friends would console the actress backstage when it became too much for her to hold in.
"It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine. 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’ve been you.'"
After feeling isolated for years, Hathaway discovered that miscarriages were tragically common and, from then on, used her voice to support women going through similar experiences.
"I thought, 'Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated?' 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 brought four-year-old Jack into the world in 2019 and advocates for women struggling with fertility issues to this day.