Actress Anne Hathaway recently shared a personal struggle she faced on her journey to motherhood.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, she revealed that she experienced a miscarriage in 2015 while performing in a play where her character had to give birth onstage every night.
"The first time it didn't work out for me. I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night," Hathaway disclosed.
The miscarriage occurred during a six-week run of the one-woman off-Broadway show "Grounded."
"It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine," she admitted.
She further stressed the importance of being honest with her friends about her struggles, even if it meant showing vulnerability.
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Reflecting on her journey, Hathaway acknowledged the difficulty of longing for something so deeply and questioning oneself.
"It's really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you're doing something wrong," she said.
The actress, who has two children with her husband Adam Shulman, also opened up about her second pregnancy announcement on social media in 2019.
She wrote, "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."
Addressing the stigma surrounding miscarriage, Hathaway highlighted the importance of sharing experiences and breaking the silence.
"Given the pain, I felt while trying to get pregnant... it would've felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy when I know the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone," she said.
Statistics from the Mayo Clinic reveal that about 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, a fact that Hathaway found surprising.
"Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That's where we take on damage. So I decided that I was going to talk about it," she remarked.
Hathaway's decision to speak out about her miscarriage has brought comfort to many women who had gone through similar experiences.
She recounted how women approached her, sharing their stories and finding comfort in her openness.
"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 revealed.