Anne Hathaway opens up about getting pregnant at 43 after having ‘low expectations’
Anne Hathaway says her pregnancy is a ‘blessing’ that she and her husband ‘do not take for granted’.
The actress, 43, and her husband Adam Shulman, 45, are parents to sons Jonathan, 10, and Jack, six.
She first publicly announced her pregnancy in an Instagram post shared on 19 June. It was a video of herself initially concealing and then revealing her baby bump, captioning the clip: “Baby, I’m yours.”
Shortly after the announcement, The Odyssey star opened up about getting pregnant aged 43.
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At the New York premiere of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the Homer epic, Hathaway told Access Hollywood: "There’s always hope until there’s not, but when you get to a certain age, that hope looks like one to two percent."
The actor explained she and Shulman 'just decided to see where life took' them and tried to maintain 'a very, very healthy, realistic expectation, which was very low'.
Excitingly, they then found out Hathaway was pregnant, the star adding: "We’re overjoyed because we just know from personal experience that not everybody gets this, and certainly not when you want it—sometimes not ever.”
Hathaway has been candid about her experiences of pregnancy in the past, including when she experienced a miscarriage in 2015 while starring in a six-week run of the off-Broadway one-woman show Grounded.
She reflected further on the difficulties of carrying a child when sharing the news of her pregnancy in 2019.
In an Instagram post at the time, Hathaway wrote: "It’s not for a movie... 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."
The Oscar winner later reflected on the post, telling Vanity Fair in 2024 she 'would've felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy' when 'the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone'.
Hathaway continued: "The first time it didn’t work out for me. I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night. It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine. 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.’
"It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong."
If you need support and advice following a pregnancy loss, you can contact the Tommy’s team at [email protected]. You can also call them for free on 0800 014 7800 (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm).
Topics: Celebrity
Greg Harris