Anne Hathaway won her Oscar playing the role that first hooked her
At eight, Anne Hathaway sat watching her mother play Fantine on the first national tour of Les Misérables, and fell for the stage. Decades later she played that same doomed woman on screen and took home the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her films have since grossed more than $6.8 billion.
Hathaway was born in Brooklyn on November 12, 1982, to a labour lawyer and a former actress, and reportedly named after Shakespeare's wife. The family moved to Millburn, New Jersey, when she was six. Her parents were wary of an acting career, and her mother gave up the profession to raise the children. The girl who once wanted to be a nun kept performing anyway: she became the first teenager accepted into the Barrow Group Theater Company's acting programme and sang soprano at Carnegie Hall. Three days after one of those concerts she landed a part in the Fox series Get Real.
Her film debut was a hit. Director Garry Marshall had considered Liv Tyler for The Princess Diaries, but his granddaughters thought Hathaway had the best princess hair, and the 2001 comedy grossed $165 million. She auditioned during a layover on a flight to New Zealand. Studies at Vassar, later New York University, never ended in a degree, which she has said she does not regret.
Family films risked boxing her in. She passed on The Phantom of the Opera because of a clash with the Princess Diaries sequel, then set out to escape typecasting, arguing that anyone who had been a children's role model needed a break. In Brokeback Mountain she chose to read for Lureen, not the part she was offered, and claimed riding skills she lacked so Ang Lee would cast her, taking lessons afterwards.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006), where she was by her own account the ninth choice, earned over $326.5 million worldwide. Rachel Getting Married brought a best actress nomination. The year 2012 brought both her Oscar-winning Fantine and the role of Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, the opening film of three she has made with Christopher Nolan. She also holds an Emmy for a guest voice on The Simpsons, serves as a UN Women goodwill ambassador, and sits on the board of the Lollipop Theatre Network, which screens films for children in hospital.
Source: Anne Hathaway
