Anne Hathaway Opens Up About Miscarriage During Off-Broadway Show

Behind every “picture-perfect” pregnancy announcement, there’s a bigger story. For Anne Hathaway, there was a heartbreaking loss on the long road to her second child.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, the Princess Diaries actress and mom of two opened up about her 2019 Instagram announcement, in which she shared she was expecting her son Jack. Captioning a black-and-white photo of her baby bump, Hathaway wrote, "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.”

When asked about the back story behind her post, Hathaway explained, “Given the pain I felt while trying to get pregnant, it would’ve felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy when I know the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone.”

Hathaway went on to reveal that she experienced a miscarriage in 2015 while starring in Grounded, a one-woman, off-Broadway play that ran for six weeks. Despite the fact that 10-20 percent of women will experience a miscarriage in their first trimester, Hathaway described her disbelief in the lack of conversation and support available to those who had experienced a pregnancy loss.

“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,” she wrote.

“I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal,” she noted. "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,’” she told the outlet. "It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong.”

If you are struggling with a miscarriage, you can find support through The Bump’s miscarriage and pregnancy loss community forum here or learn more about how to begin healing from your loss here.