The role that made Anne Hathaway feel “very uncomfortable”
At the beginning of the 21st century, Anne Hathaway announced herself as an actor who would stick around in the cultural consciousness for many years to come. After appearing in a handful of family movies like The Princess Diaries, Hathaway eventually transitioned to mature roles, beginning with 2005’s Brokeback Mountain.
From there, the New York City-born actor never looked back and continued to deliver some of the most memorable performances in modern cinema. A first Academy Award nomination arrived in 2008 for Rachel Getting Married, while the likes of Get Smart, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar saw widespread commercial success.
The pinnacle of Hathaway’s career, though, undoubtedly came in 2012 when she won the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for her effort in the musical Les Miserables. Well, one might have thought that Hathaway would have been over the moon with her Oscar victory, but the truth was that she had never mixed feelings over the success.
In an interview with The Guardian, Hathaway admitted that her Academy Award win made her feel “very uncomfortable”. The actor explained, “I kind of lost my mind doing that movie, and it hadn’t come back yet. Then I had to stand up in front of people and feel something I don’t feel, which is uncomplicated happiness.”
Les Miserables is Tom Hooper’s film based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Victor Hugo and its stage musical adaptation. Taking place in the early 19th century against the backdrop of the Paris Uprising, the film focuses on Jean Valjean, a man who agrees to take care of a factory worker’s daughter while being tracked down by a policeman for many years after breaking parole.
Hathaway played Fantine in the film, a woman who is forced into prostitution in order to pay for her daughter’s care. According to Hathaway, winning an Oscar and “feeling happy” should have been an “obvious thing”, but she couldn’t help but feel incredibly depressed as a result of playing such a harrowing role.
“I felt wrong that I was standing there in a gown that cost more than some people are going to see in their lifetime,” the actor explained, “and winning an award for portraying pain that still felt very much a part of our collective experience as human beings.” In playing Fantine, Hathaway went to great lengths to give the character an air of believability.
She shaved off all her fair and began a diet that she likened to “starvation”. Fantine, after all, is a woman who is severely ill and eventually collapses into death. All the while, though, she turned to sex work in order to pay for her daughter’s care, and the role was certainly one that Hathaway had to give her all to, meaning that her Oscar victory was well deserved.
Hathaway tried to put on a smile when collecting her Academy Award and spoke of her hope that Fantine’s story would inspire others to better understand her pain in the future. Even so, Hathaway felt she was “called out” on her forced happiness at the Oscars. Resilient as Fantine, though, she noted, “But what you learn from it is that you only feel like you can die from embarrassment; you don’t actually die.” In playing Fantine, Hathaway learned a great deal about the power of the human spirit.
