Anne Hathaway hates her name: 'Call me anything but Anne'
Every time Anne Hathaway appears at a movie premiere and people shout her name, she has flashbacks to her childhood.
“The only person who calls me Anne is my mother, and she only does it when she's really mad at me, like really mad,” the Oscar-winning actress said on Tuesday’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “So every time I step out in public and someone calls my name, I think they’re going to yell at me. People are like, ‘Anne!’ And I’m like ‘What? What did I do?’”
Hathaway’s real first name is Anne, but that’s not the moniker she uses in her offscreen life, where she’s the wife of Adam Shulman and mom to sons Jonathan, 4, and 1-year-old Jack.
When she’s worked on movies, such as Ocean’s 8, The Devil Wears Prada and Brokeback Mountain, the cast and crew have known to avoid calling her by her legal first name.
“People are so lovely, they don’t want to be presumptuous, and so I think they come up with workarounds on set because the truth is nobody’s comfortable calling me Anne ever. It doesn’t fit. I’m an Annie,” Hathaway said, apparently referring to what she’s called instead. “People call me ‘Miss H,’ people call me ‘Hath,’ so feel free, call me anything but Anne.”
Hathaway regrets tethering herself to the name when she first started in the entertainment industry.
“When I was 14 years old, I did a commercial, and I had to get my SAG card and they asked me, ‘What do you want your name to be?’” she said. “And I was like, ‘Well, it should be my name. My name’s Anne Hathaway.’ So that seemed like the right choice, but it never occurred to me that for the rest of my life, people will call me Anne.”
Hathaway won her first big break, a starring role on the short-lived 1999 series Get Real, when she was still a teenager. By 2001, she played one of her most famous parts, Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries. She was nominated for an Oscar for the first time in 2009, for the drama Rachel Getting Married. Next, she’ll star alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor in HBO Max’s Locked Down.
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