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Anne Hathaway: I wasn't happy when I won my Oscar for Les Miserables

Actress suggests her attempts to mask her unhappiness led to the 'Hathahaters' phenomenon

Sunday 12 November 2017 12:54 GMT

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Anne Hathaway was in fact miserable when she won Oscar for Les Miserables

In 2013, Anne Hathaway was awarded best supporting actress for her critically acclaimed role in Les Miserables. While winning an Oscar can help to establish you as a firm favourite in the public eye (for example, Jennifer Lawrence) Hathaway's win sparked a backlash resulting in her becoming an international hate symbol.

At odds to her fellow Oscar winner Lawrence’s down-to-earth, super relatable, instantly-your-best-friend persona – this was the year she infamously tripped on her Dior dress while making her way up to the stage – Hathaway’s award season was often characterised with perceived gloating, being over the top or a characterisation as your typical run-of-the-mill drama schooled, All-American girl. A punch line from Amy Schumer’s 2015 hit film Trainwreck summarised it best when the comedian’s character teases her boyfriend (played by Bill Hader) when he wins a charity award by telling him he looks like Anne Hathaway at an Oscars party. Hathaway gracefully laughed off the joke while Schumer laid the blame for it firmly at director Judd Apatow’s door.

The Intern star has now reflected on her Oscar nod, explaining she was unhappy and uncomfortable during the ceremony and it was this fake happiness which led her to being ridiculed.

Victor Hugo: Five things you didn’t know about the French author of Les Miserables

“I felt very uncomfortable,” she told The Guardian. “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. It’s an obvious thing, you win an Oscar and you’re supposed to be happy. I didn’t feel that way. I felt wrong that I was standing there in a gown that cost more than some people are going to see in their lifetime and winning an award for portraying pain that still felt very much a part of our collective experience as human beings.”

To play the role of Fantine – a woman forced into prostitution to pay for the upkeep of her daughter and later dies from illness – Hathaway famously took method acting to the next level by cutting off all her hair and embarking on a gruelling diet. At the time she called the diet “starvation” and refused to reveal the methods which led to her losing a rumoured 25lbs for fear of glamourising it, reaffirming she was portraying a dying woman.

“I tried to pretend that I was happy and I got called out on it, big time,” she continued. “That’s the truth and that’s what happened. It sucks. But what you learn from it is that you only feel like you can die from embarrassment, you don’t actually die.”

Take the following articles from 2013: “Why is Anne Hathaway so unlikable?” from the New York Post, “Why do women hate Anne Hathaway (But love Jennifer Lawrence)? from New York magazine, “Anne Hathaway Can’t Win” by Buzzfeed and another charming Buzzfeed community post entitled: “12 reasons why everybody hates Anne Hathaway”.

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

The general, rounded-up anti-Hathaway sentiment even led to the term the “Hathahaters”, and led the 33-year-old to take time away from the spotlight. She told the Huffington Post at the time she got the impression “people needed a break from me”.

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