Anne Hathaway

Anne Jacqueline Hathaway (born November 12, 1982) is an American actress. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. Her films have grossed over $6.8 billion worldwide, and she appeared on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list in 2009. She was among the world's highest-paid actresses in 2015.

Hathaway performed in several plays in high school. As a teenager, she was cast in the television series Get Real (1999–2000) and made her breakthrough by playing the lead role in the Disney comedy The Princess Diaries (2001). After starring in a string of family films, including Ella Enchanted (2004), Hathaway made a transition to mature roles with the 2005 drama Brokeback Mountain. The comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada (2006), in which she played an assistant to a fashion magazine editor, was her biggest commercial success to that point. She played a recovering addict in the drama Rachel Getting Married (2008), which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Hathaway had further commercial success in the comedy Get Smart (2008), the romances Bride Wars (2009), Valentine's Day (2010), and Love & Other Drugs (2010), and the fantasy film Alice in Wonderland (2010). In 2012, she starred as Catwoman in her highest-grossing film, The Dark Knight Rises, and played Fantine, a prostitute dying of tuberculosis, in the musical Les Misérables, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the latter. She has since played a scientist in the science fiction film Interstellar (2014), the owner of a fashion website in the comedy The Intern (2015), a haughty actress in the heist film Ocean's 8 (2018), a con artist in the comedy The Hustle (2019), Rebekah Neumann in the miniseries WeCrashed (2022), and an older woman dating a young pop star in the romantic comedy The Idea of You (2024).

Hathaway has won a Primetime Emmy Award for her guest voice role on The Simpsons, sung for soundtracks, appeared on stage, and hosted events. She supports several charitable causes. She is a board member of the Lollipop Theatre Network, an organization that brings films to children in hospitals, and advocates for gender equality as a UN Women goodwill ambassador.

Anne Jacqueline "Annie" Hathaway was born on November 12, 1982, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. She is of Irish, English, German and French descent, her father Gerald, was a labor attorney, and her mother, Kate (née McCauley), is a former actress. Hathaway's maternal grandfather was WIP (AM) Philadelphia radio personality Joe McCauley. According to The Daily Telegraph, she was named after William Shakespeare's wife. She has an older brother, Michael, and a younger brother, Thomas. When Hathaway was six, the family moved to Millburn, New Jersey, where she was raised.

At age eight, when Hathaway watched her mother perform in the first national tour of Les Misérables as Fantine, she instantly became fascinated with the stage, but her parents were not keen on allowing her to pursue an acting career. After this, Kate quit acting to raise Hathaway and her brothers. Hathaway was raised as Roman Catholic with what she considers to be "really strong values" and wished to be a nun during her childhood, but acting was always a high priority for her. Her relationship with the Catholic Church changed at age fifteen, after learning that her older brother was gay. Her family left the church, joining the Episcopal Church because of its acceptance of homosexuality, but they eventually left that too. In 2009, Hathaway described her religious beliefs as "a work in progress".

Hathaway attended Brooklyn Heights Montessori School and Wyoming Elementary School in Millburn. She graduated from Millburn High School, where she played soccer and took part in many plays, including Once Upon a Mattress, in which she portrayed Winnifred. Later, she appeared in the plays Jane Eyre and Gigi, at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1993 and became the first teenager admitted into the Barrow Group Theater Company's acting program. She spent several semesters studying as an English major and political science minor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, before transferring to New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Between 1998 and 1999, Hathaway sang soprano with the All-Eastern U.S. High School Honors Chorus at Carnegie Hall and in plays at Seton Hall Preparatory School in West Orange, New Jersey. Early in her film career, her acting style and appearance would be likened to Judy Garland—whom she cites as one of her favorite actresses—and Audrey Hepburn. Three days after her performance at Carnegie Hall, Hathaway was cast in the short-lived Fox television series Get Real. She played the teenager Meghan Green, alongside Jon Tenney, Debrah Farentino and Jesse Eisenberg. Despite her early success, Hathaway suffered from depression and anxiety as a teenager. However, she said in 2008 that she had since grown from it. She missed her first college semester for the filming of her cinematic debut, The Princess Diaries (2001). According to Hathaway, she never regretted not completing her degree, as she enjoyed being with others who "were trying to grow up".