Anne Hathaway reveals she had a miscarriage, while starring in a play about pregnancy

Anne Hathaway was starring in a one-woman play about a pregnant fighter pilot when she experienced a miscarriage.

“I had to give birth onstage every night,” Hathaway, 41, told Vanity Fair in a new interview.

“Grounded,” an Off-Broadway production, ran for six weeks in 2015.

Hathaway recalled releasing her emotions when friends visited after performances. Now that she has children of her own, she says she wants to share the details of her loss.

“It was too much to keep it in, when I was onstage pretending everything was fine,” Hathaway explained. “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 always have to 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,” she added.

A reported 1 in 4 pregnancies will end in a miscarriage, although that number is thought to be higher as many miscarriages occur before a person knows they’re pregnant. Hathaway said she felt compelled to open up about her miscarriage in hopes of de-stigmatizing the experience.

“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 Oscar winner said.

Hathaway and husband, producer Adam Shulman, would go on to welcome sons Jonathan, 8, and Jack, 4.

When Hathaway announced her second pregnancy on Instagram 2019, she included a powerful caption.

“It’s not for a movie…” Hathaway wrote, referring to her baby bump. “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.”

“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,” Hathaway told Vanity Fair.

Hathaway elaborated on her 2019 pregnancy announcement during a conversation with The Associated Press.

“I think that we have a very one-size-fits-all approach to getting pregnant,” Hathaway said, at the time. “You get pregnant and for the majority of cases, this is a really happy time. But a lot of people who are trying to get pregnant: That’s not really the story. Or that’s one part of the story. And the steps that lead up to that part of the story are really painful and very isolating and full of self-doubt. And I went through that.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com