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Purveyors of popular culture will know that sometimes the world just decides to hate on a famous woman for being too popular. There are few more obvious examples of this than Anne Hathaway.
The Devil Wears Prada star had a string of hits in the late 2000s and early 2010s, culminating in an Academy Award nomination and then later a big Oscar win (at a ceremony she was also hosting). However, after that, her career seemed to stall, just when it should have been shooting into the stratosphere.
Hathaway has recently diagnosed the problem as her being a victim of her own success, which led to what some would define as oversaturation. The toxicity and hate online was something we’ve come to know intimately nowadays, but back then it was a shock, with Hathaway being labelled annoying for simply existing.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, the Princess Diaries star has claimed that “a lot of people wouldn’t give me roles, because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online.” And, given her talent and the fact she had just won film’s highest honor, it’s hard not to agree with that assessment.
But what was the film that gave Hathaway her biggest high, yet played a part in her rut? Read on to find out.
What did Anne Hathaway win an Oscar for?
Hathaway won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for the tragic role of Fantine in Les Miserables. Fantine is a working class girl who becomes pregnant during a relationship with a rich student, who then abandons her to raise their child alone. The beautiful but naive young woman is forced into a life of prostitution to try and raise her child, but is slowly worn away by the horrors of that world, eventually dying from tuberculosis.
It’s a famously tough role that had previously been played on stage by greats like Patti Lupone, and while nowadays we might consider it a bit of a cliche — the character was very much a 19th century literature archetype that fed into an idealized notion of sex workers with a heart of gold, also seen in books like Crime and Punishment — Hathaway did an excellent job, and was well worth her win.
What happened to Anne Hathaway after Les Miserables?
As per the interview, Hathaway claimed she struggled to get roles, even though for most actors winning an Oscar is basically a golden ticket. She told Vanity Fair that Christopher Nolan (who had previously hired her as Catwoman) was her savior when he brought her onboard for Interstellar:
“I had an angel in Christopher Nolan…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.”
The Hathaway hate was incredibly strong after the Oscars, with a number of so-called journalists basically writing troll posts about her. One writer at The San Francisco Chronicle claimed she was “the most annoying celebrity” that year, and even the usually sedate New Yorker wrote a piece on the topic. Shock jock and all round terrible human Howard Stern also got in on the act, although that shouldn’t have surprised anybody.
In her interview, Hathaway admitted she felt humiliated when she should have been at her peak. But she also had a message of resilience:
“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?”
Nowadays, virulent misogyny for no reason is the norm online, whether it’s people sexualizing everything a famous woman does, or the sort of needless hate that Hathaway suffered for simply being in the public eye. Whether or not this changes is down to a lot of things, but it’s safe to say that Hathaway, like most women in the public eye, hasn’t seen the last of her trolls. And that’s something for all of us to be ashamed of.