The performance that convinced Anne Hathaway to become an actor: “I want to do that”
Ever since breaking through into the spotlight with her iconic performance in The Princess Bride, Anne Hathaway has established her position as one of the great contemporary Hollywood actors. While she has appeared in a swathe of admirable roles, none of them might have been possible without the early inspiration from a future co-star.
Moving away from her teenage roles, Hathaway successfully made the transition into playing mature characters, beginning with her effort in Brokeback Mountain. Before long, Hathaway was suddenly met with countless high-profile offers, appearing in the likes of Rachel Getting Married, Get Smart and The Dark Knight Rises.
Of course, we can’t think of Hathaway and not immediately recall her brilliant turn in the 2006 comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada. Based on the 2003 Lauren Weisberger novel of the same name, the film saw Hathaway play a recent graduate who takes on the role of junior personal assistant to Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, played by Meryl Streep.
Miranda is one of Streep’s many iconic performances, but it was one of her earlier efforts that left the deepest impression on a young Hathaway and inspired her to consider acting for the first time. Remarkably, the movie role in question actually arrived the same year Hathaway was born, in a stunning moment of coincidence.
Speaking with Black Film, Hathaway once noted, “I always dreamed about having good roles, and I never doubted when I was watching movies that, I always put myself in the position, you know, watching Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, I’m like, ‘OK, I want to do that, I definitely want to do that.'”
Sophie’s Choice is Alan J Pakula’s 1982 psychological drama based on William Styron’s 1979 novel of the same name. Streep plays Zofia ‘Sophie’ Zawistowska, a Polish immigrant in New York City who shares a Brooklyn boarding house with her fiery lover and a young writer. Sophie keeps a dark secret from her past, which is slowly revealed, and the film saw Streep win the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’.
Streep had to learn Polish and German for the role, with the former language proving rather difficult to grasp. The actor explained: “I thought it would be a piece of cake, like picking up Italian or French or something—but it’s not. It was really hard to learn. You have to parse every sentence as you speak it, and every word changes its ending according to whether it’s the object of a sentence or the subject or the indirect object.”
Still, it was a challenge that Streep took on in full force and was yet another moment through which her acting genius was realised. There’s no wonder that Streep is the most Oscar-nominated actor of all time, and Sophie’s Choice was an important part of her career, and subsequently in the career of Anne Hathaway.
Explaining what Streep’s performance showed her early on, Hathaway said, “I wasn’t really interested in sort of the whole secret life of celebrities culture, growing up, so I never, in a way, kind of even knew that it existed. I was just so focused on acting.” Fame and celebrity naturally come to the biggest movie stars, but Hathaway and Streep have always known that the most important thing is the acting itself.
