Anne Jacqueline Hathaway was born in New York City in 1982. The daughter of an attorney and an actress, she first became fascinated with the stage at the age of eight when she saw her mother perform in the first national tour of Les Misérables playing the role of Fantine. Although Hathaway was raised Roman Catholic and she reportedly could have just as easily pursued becoming a nun, but the acting bug was stronger.

She took part in plays during high school, later appearing in productions of Jane Eyre and Gigi at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey as well as studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in NYC and singing soprano as part of a choir that got to perform at Carnegie Hall. It was shortly after performing at Carnegie Hall (less than a week actually) when Anne Hathaway was cast in the role of Meghan Green in the TV series Get Real, a comedy about a dysfunctional family that aired from 1999 to 2000 on FOX and featured not just the screen debut of Anne Hathaway but the screen debut of Jesse Eisenberg.

Live theater was Anne Hathaway’s first love so she would continue performing on stage whenever she got the opportunity, but she became a breakout movie star when she made her big screen acting debut in Disney’s The Princess Diaries (2001). Telling the story of a girl named Mia Thermopolis and starring Julie Andrews as Mia’s grandmother who informs her that she is the actual princess of a European kingdom called Genovia, the comedy was directed by Garry Marshall, who cast Hathaway in the role at the suggestion of his granddaughters who actually told him that Hathaway looks like a princess! Despite mixed reviews, audiences loved that movie and turned it into a box office success, although Hathaway did receive praise for her performance. In fact it was such a hit that Disney greenlit a sequel and she reprised the role in The Princess Diaries 2: The Royal Engagement (2004).

Following the huge success of that film, Hathaway was instantly typecast and offered similar princess-like roles, but she always looked for variety and had a desire to act in all kinds of movies. Douglas McGrath’s Nicholas Nickelby, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ third novel The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby starring Charlie Hunnam in the title role, received positive reviews but few audiences, and Ella Enchanted (2004), a music and comedy-filled fantasy that is completely different from the 1997 book by Gail Carson Levine that it’s adapted from, received mixed reviews. But she showed a different side when she starred in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) playing Lureen, the wife of Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Jack, showing that she can do serious adult dramas just as well as Disney movies.

A year later Anne Hathaway starred in one of her most widely acclaimed and commercially successful films The Devil Wears Prada (2006) playing the role of Andy Sachs, a college grad who moves to NYC to be the co-assistant to fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly played by Meryl Streep. Hathaway also played Agent 99 in Get Smart (2008), a film adaptation of the satirical 1960s TV series created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, and she received praise for her role in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (2008) as the narcissistic Kym who gets released from drug rehabilitation just in time to participate in the wedding of her sister played by Rosemarie DeWitt. Hathaway received her first Oscar nomination for that movie.

Hathaway next starred in a series of commercial hits including Bride Wars (2009) opposite Kate Hudson, Valentine’s Day (2010) for which she reunited with director Garry Marshall, and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) for which she played the White Queen, a role she would reprise in the 2016 sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass. She also reunited with her Brokeback Mountain co-star Jake Gyllenhaal for the well-received adult drama Love & Other Drugs (2010) and she reunited with her Get Real co-star Jesse Eisenberg voicing a macaw named Jewel in Blue Sky’s animated musical Rio (2011), which was also well-received. But 2012 was one of Hathaway’s biggest years, playing Selena Kyle aka Catwoman in Christopher Nolan’s hugely successful The Dark Knight Rises and playing Fantine in Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of Les Misérables, which earned Hathaway her first Oscar.

Hathaway would reunite with Christopher Nolan playing NASA scientist Dr. Amelia Brand in Interstellar (2014) with Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine. That film was a critical and commercial hit, but like many Hollywood actors, her films were mostly a tapestry of poorly reviewed hits and well-reviewed bombs. She starred opposite Robert De Niro in The Intern (2015), a commercially successful buddy comedy with a mixed critical reception, and she starred in the surreal kaiju comedy Colossal (2016) which was well-reviewed (although some say it’s more strange than funny) but received little fanfare at the box office to put it mildly. Although Hathaway had more luck with the heist film spin-off Ocean’s 8 (2018), in which she plays a famous and vain actress named Daphne Kluger who teams up with a group of women in an elaborate plan to rob the Met Gala. Hathaway’s performance was actually singled out a lot for being the highlight of that movie.

Hathaway received more positive reviews starring opposite Mark Ruffalo in Todd Haynes’ legal thriller Dark Waters (2019), and for starring in James Gray’s coming-of-age drama Armageddon Time (2022) about a Jewish-American boy who befriends an African-American boy against a backdrop of prejudice in 1980 Queens, New York. And she continues to do great work in the 2023 psychological thriller Eileen, set in a detention center in 1960s Boston and co-starring Thomasin McKenzie of Leave No Trace fame. Premiering at Sundance where it got a positive reception, it will receive a wider release in December.

Some people say that Anne Hathaway’s success at avoiding being typecast is a testament to how well she prepares for her acting roles through research, but while she managed to avoid being pigeonholed as a Disney princess, everyone who works with Anne Hathaway seems to attest that she comes close to it, because she is reportedly a very friendly, smart and sincere person (in other words the complete opposite of Hollywood). Matt Groening even said that she is the nicest guest star in Simpsons recording booth history. She also uses her fame for good, donating to causes important to her like humanitarian aid in Ukraine, plus she has been vocal about important political and human issues like gun control and immigrant rights, and she has used her platform to publicly call out sexism in Hollywood as well as homophobia, transphobia and White privilege, all of which are issues that I have been vocal about as well, so in my mind she is pretty much Hollywood royalty.