Anne Hathaway had a miscarriage while acting as a pregnant woman onstage

By Amarachi Orie, CNN

(CNN) — Anne Hathaway has recounted a difficult moment in her journey to motherhood, saying she suffered a miscarriage in 2015 while acting in a play where she 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,” the Oscar-winning actress and mother-of-two said in an interview with Vanity Fair published Monday.

Her miscarriage occurred during a six-week run of the one-woman off-Broadway show “Grounded,” according to Vanity Fair.

Hathaway said she “had to keep it real” with her friends when they would visit her backstage after performances. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine.”

“So 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,’” she continued, welling up.

“It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong,” she added.

The 41-year-old, who said she has become gentler since becoming a mother, has two children with husband Adam Shulman.

When announcing her pregnancy with her second child in 2019, she wrote in an Instagram post, “It’s not for a movie…#2,” adding: “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.”

Commenting on that moment, the “Les Misérables” star said, “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.”

“I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal,” she added.

About 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and the actual figure is likely higher, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Hathaway said she was shocked to learn that many of her friends had gone through similar experiences.

“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 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.”

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