Anne Hathaway has revealed that she suffered a miscarriage in 2015 when she was starring in an off-Broadway play in a candid new interview.

The 41-year-old opened up about the ‘pain’ of trying for a baby in the April issue of Vanity Fair – explaining the story behind a 2019 Instagram post where she had first referenced going through ‘infertility and conception hell’.

Hathaway and husband Adam Shulman have been married since 2012 and have two sons: Jonathan, seven, and Jack, three.

‘The first time it didn’t work out for me. I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night,’ she told the magazine, referencing the storyline of her character having to give birth in the play.

Hathaway was starring in Grounded, a one-woman play about a female U.S. Air Force pilot who is grounded when she gets pregnant.

Although it is not clear when the miscarriage happened, the play – written by George Brant – ran for six weeks in April of 2015.

Anne Hathaway, 41, reveals she had a miscarriage while starring in off-Broadway play in 2015 – as she recalls the ‘pain’ of trying for a baby 

‘It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine. 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’ve been you.”‘ she said.

Getting emotional with tears in her eyes per the report, she said: ‘It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong.’

Hathaway decided to talk about the experience after feeling there was a lack of information about miscarriages leading women to feel ‘isolated’.

‘I thought, where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated?’ Hathaway said.

‘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.’

Anne pictured at the opening night for Grounded at the The Public Theatre in 2015, around the time she suffered her miscarriage 

Hathaway and husband Adam Shulman have been married since 2012 and have two sons: Jonathan, seven, and Jack, three (the pair pictured in 2015)

Hathaway pictured in November 2015

Hathaway first hinted at her fertility struggles five years ago in July 2019 when she revealed she was expecting her second child.

‘It’s not for a movie…,’ she captioned a snap of herself with a baby bump.

‘#2 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.’

Elsewhere in the wide-ranging chat, Hathaway also reveals she was told in her early days of working as an actress that she really did not have any sex appeal.

‘I was like, “I’m a Scorpio. I know what I’m like on a Saturday night,”‘ she told the magazine as she graced the cover in a black bra with her hair up.

But she added things were different 20 years ago.

‘The male gaze was very dominant and very pervasive and very juvenile,’ added the Oscar winner who admitted that she worried about how she came off to the world.

The star – who is promoting her new romantic comedy The Idea Of You about an older woman who hooks up with a younger pop star – played the part of a femme fatale for photographer Norman Jean Roy for the publication as she modeled black leotards and a nearly see through dress.

At the time, Hathaway was starring in Grounded, a play about a female U.S. Air Force pilot who is grounded when she gets pregnant

Hathaway, 41, first hinted at her fertility struggles in a 2019 Instagram post (pictured above)

The former teen star also talked about her mental health.

She told writer Julie Miller that she used to be full of anxiety which caused her problems on movie sets – she is known for the movies The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada.

And the star added that she felt ‘humiliation’ too much.

She also said she was grateful to director Christopher Nolan for believing in her and giving her a beautiful movie that proved her acting chops.

She starred in his 2014 movie Interstellar.

The former stage star also said that she was told she needed to ‘protect herself’ at all costs, but now she is ‘not armored’ as in she does not have a public shield, she said in a revealing sit down with the Oscar winning actress.

Anxiety used to eat her up.

‘Part of the way I can tell myself that I am okay is by having such a complete level of preparation that if I get a critical voice in my head, you can quiet it down by saying that you did everything you could to prepare.’

Early in her career, she says ‘I had a horrible anxiety attack and I was by myself and didn’t know what was happening. I certainly couldn’t tell anybody, and it was compounded by thinking I was keeping set waiting. Now I feel much safer going to someone in charge, pulling them to the side, and explaining, “I’m going through this right now.”

‘Most people will sit there with you for the ten minutes it takes for you to come back down.’

She has a way to cope now: ‘I make a lot of my lifestyle choices in service of supporting mental health. I stopped participating in things that I know to be draining or can cause spirals.’

Hathaway said that she was told to be very careful when she was younger.

‘All the advice that you’re given is to protect yourself,’ Hathaway tells Vanity Fair.

‘Everybody’s dangerous and everybody’s trying to get something from you.’… People were advising me that I armor myself and keep that distance, and that I have two selves…I found that terribly confusing so I don’t do it that way. I’m not armored.’

And she touched on those years she was slammed online for being prissy.

‘A lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online.

‘I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who did not care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve had in one of the best films that I’ve been a part of,’ Hathaway said.

‘I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect and my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.’

For many years Hathaway was a joke online with trolls attacking her left and right for almost nothing.

‘Humiliation is such a rough thing to go through,’ she said.

The former stage star also said that she was told she needed to ‘protect herself’ at all costs, but now she is ‘not armored’ as in she does not have a public shield, she said in a revealing sit down with the Oscar winning actress; Anne is also in Mother’s Instinct with Jessica Chastain

‘The key is to not let it close you down. You have to stay bold, and it can be hard because you’re like, “If I stay safe, if I hug the middle, if I don’t draw too much attention to myself, it won’t hurt.”

‘But if you want to do that, don’t be an actor. You’re a tightrope walker. You’re a daredevil.

‘You’re asking people to invest their time and their money and their attention and their care into you.

‘So you have to give them something worth all of those things. And if it’s not costing you anything, what are you really offering?’

The headline of the story is Anne Hathaway on Intensity, Anxiety, and Refusing to Hide Her True Self and is in the April issue.

She also shared she has really come around in her 40s: ‘This is the first time I’ve known myself this well. I don’t live in what others think of me. I know my own mind and I am connected to my own feelings.

‘I’m way quicker to laugh now.’

And she talked her new movie: “The idea of anything you say being picked to define you is daunting,” she says. She’s not as serious as interviews make her seem, she tells me. But as we first start talking at least, she’s definitely careful—present and engaged but also pausing to mentally scan answers for web-flammable sound bites before sharing them.

“You don’t want to say anything to provoke any kind of reaction, but you also don’t want to say something that could be misinterpreted,” she says as we begin. “I’m feeling a little goldfishy.”