Anne Hathaway is opening up about her fertility journey.
The Oscar winner—who shares sons Jonathan, 8, and Jack, 4, with husband Adam Shulman—recently reflected on her difficult road to motherhood, detailing how she experienced a miscarriage amid her nearly six-week run in the 2015 Off-Broadway play Grounded.
"The first time it didn't work out for me," Hathaway told Vanity Fair in a cover story published March 25. "I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night."
Though she didn't share the news with the public at the time, it was important for The Princess Diaries star to share insight into her journey with her friends.
"It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine," Hathaway explained. "I had to keep it real otherwise….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.'"
As she put it, "It's really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you're doing something wrong."
Hathaway went on to welcome Jonathan in 2016. And in the years since, she's been candid about her difficulties—including when announcing she and Adam were expecting Jack.
In her 2019 Instagram post, the actress gave a heartfelt shoutout to those struggling to get pregnant by expressing "please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies."
Looking back at that moment, Hathaway said she wanted to be honest with her followers about what she had been through.
"Given the pain I felt while trying to get pregnant," The Devil Wears Prada alum told Vanity Fair, "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."
And after learning how common miscarriages are, Hathaway hoped to remind anyone who's gone through a similar experience that they are not alone.
"I thought, Where is this information?" she continued. "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. 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."
So when it came to her post, Hathaway added, "It was more about what I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal."
And since welcoming her boys, the 41-year-old has made sure she continues to spread this message.
"Each time I was trying to get pregnant and it wasn't going my way, someone else would manage to conceive," Hathaway recalled in a 2019 interview with The Daily Mail. "I knew intellectually that it didn't happen just to torment me, but, to be honest, it felt a little bit like it did. What made matters worse was that I was embarrassed to feel like that because there was no conversation to be had about it. This is something people don't talk about, and I think they should."