Anne Hathaway Opens Up About Having a Miscarriage While Playing a Pregnant Woman on Stage

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Anne Hathaway just revealed the story behind her vulnerable pregnancy announcement in 2019.

When pregnant with her second child with husband Adam Shulman, the Devil Wears Prada star let her followers “going through infertility and conception hell” know that “it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies.” In a new cover interview with Vanity Fair, the 41-year-old mother of two explained that she suffered a miscarriage in 2015, prior to welcoming her first son, Jonathan, in 2016, and her second son, Jack, in 2020.

“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 said of that memorable caption. She later added, “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.’ It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong.”

At the time of her pregnancy loss, Anne Hathaway was playing a pregnant fighter pilot in a one-woman off-Broadway show called Grounded. “I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night,” she said. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine.”

Ultimately she decided to tell friends who had come to visit her backstage and was surprised by how many of her friends had also experienced pregnancy loss. “I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage,” Hathaway said. “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 [revealing my fertility struggles], 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.”

Thinking back on that Instagram post from 2019, Hathaway said, “It was more about what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal.”

Originally Appeared on Glamour