In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Anne Hathaway revealed that she suffered a miscarriage in 2015 before getting pregnant with her older son, Jonathan. At the time, she was starring in the one-woman off-Broadway show Grounded, in which she played a fighter pilot whose unexpected pregnancy sends her home from the front lines. “The first time it didn’t work out for me,” she said, adding that she “had to give birth onstage every night” for the play. She opened up about her struggles with infertility a few years later, when she announced she was pregnant with her son Jack. Writing on Instagram in 2019, she said, “For everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies.”
She told Vanity Fair, “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.’” (The new profile happens to be the same one during which she walked off the set after learning about the Condé Nast union’s work stoppage.)
Hathaway has two sons with her husband, actor and producer Adam Shulman: Jonathan, 7, and Jack, 3. Reflecting on what happened after she first made her experiences with infertility public, she said, “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.” She added, “I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal.”