Anne Hathaway: Oscar contender who is the real deal

Last June, Anne Hathaway, the 25-year-old film actress, found herself at the centre of a white-hot tabloid story. Having lasted seven spotless years in the limelight since her film debut opposite Julie Andrews in 2001's The Princess Diaries, Hathaway discovered her boyfriend of four years (with whom she had just broken up), an Italian businessman called Raffaello Follieri, had been arrested and charged with money-laundering and fraud. The case was a vintage scandal blending heady elements of Hollywood high life, Vatican connections and big-business names. Follieri ended up pleading guilty to the 14 counts against him and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison late in October.

When I meet Hathaway, on her visit to the London Film Festival a few days before Follieri's sentencing, she does not resemble a young woman floored by this still-unfolding sequence of events. Wearing a cap-sleeved white blouse and dark denims, her bare feet drawn up beneath her, she is resolutely on the rails. Her face – with those enlarged eyes and mouth that seem to have been precisely crafted for the cinema screen – does not show any obvious strain. Hathaway goes so far as to describe her current position as particularly fortunate, as she promotes her role in Jonathan Demme's affecting family drama Rachel Getting Married. Her powerful performance has already secured her a Golden Globe nomination.

'Born under a lucky star, Hathaway!' she exclaims. 'This moment, when I could have become a tabloid bit of fodder, I am actually being singled out as an actress. I can't believe that this is the film that I get to answer all that with.'

Hathaway plays Kym, a recovering drug addict, all sawn-off bob and kohl-ed eyes, who comes out of rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), at the family home in Connecticut. Kym is remarkably hard to like – annoying, even. She begins the film spitting mordant one-liners and exhibiting wince-inducing levels of self-absorption: when Rachel chooses to announce that she is pregnant in the middle of a highly charged argument, Kym's reaction is, 'That's so unfair!'

Hathaway remembers vividly her first reading of the script (by Jenny Lumet, daughter of Sidney): 'I was in my old apartment in the West Village [Manhattan], just pacing back and forth between the kitchen table and the couch. I somehow wound up on the floor sobbing by the last page.'

The film runs the full gamut of messy, intense family relationships, and Hathaway shrinks from nothing in her portrayal of Kym, the hurtling force at its centre. 'Kym's saving grace is that she doesn't know what's about to come out of her mouth,' Hathaway says. 'She's an overwhelming person; she's overwhelmed by herself.'

Hathaway grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of a lawyer and a stage actress (her Shakespeare-referencing name is intentional). She began her professional career at 16, first in the television drama Get Real, then on the big screen soon after in The Princess Diaries. 'I don't know what made me so arrogant and so focused,' she says, 'but I always thought, I will be an actor.'

Hathaway became synonymous with bright-eyed, somewhat prim roles: she followed her turn as the accidental princess Mia Thermopolis with a modern-day Cinderella in Ella Enchanted (2004) and a modern-day Ugly Duckling, the browbeaten fashion magazine assistant in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Though not quite a child star, Hathaway faced a similar tricky transition in order to work in films beyond the family market. It was a transition that she began in earnest with her supporting role as Lureen Newsome, the rodeo queen wife of Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain, and that, with her new film, she has successfully completed.

'Rachel Getting Married is far sweeter because I know the type of films that people thought that I was capable of making were films like The Princess Diaries,' she says. But her challenges to date must pale against the one she faced last June. Her break-up with Follieri and his arrest came in the middle of her worldwide promotional tour for the spy comedy Get Smart, which co-starred Steve Carell. Between break-up and arrest she had also attended a Paris launch in her capacity as the new face of the Lancôme fragrance Magnifique. The moment that – given the choice – she would have turned off her phone and hid under the duvet for a few weeks, Hathaway was contractually obliged to do the precise opposite.

She had, by her own account, been wildly in love with Follieri since they met through a friend in 2004. Follieri's business had been based on acquiring properties, largely from the Catholic Church in America – he boasted of links to the Vatican that might give him special rights to buy such assets. He had impressed enough to make some powerful business associations, forming a joint venture in 2005 with Yucaipa, an investment firm run by the billionaire supermarket mogul Ron Burkle, a friend of Bill Clinton. Follieri had even set up a charitable foundation in his name with Hathaway on its board, which in 2006 began a programme of vaccination against hepatitis A in Nicaragua. On one occasion he was publicly thanked by Clinton for pledging $50 million from the foundation to the Clinton Global Initiative (a donation that has not been paid). But from May 2007, when Yucaipa filed a suit against Follieri for 'systematically misappropriating the assets' on maintaining an A-list lifestyle with Hathaway ('five-star lodging', 'inappropriate jet travel'), Follieri's dealings came under increasing scrutiny. He settled the $1.3 million Yucaipa suit, but in April 2008 he had to visit a New York police station to address the matter of a $215,000 bounced cheque, a prelude to the charge sheet brought against him in June (among other things, he was accused of hiring two monsignors to accompany him to business meetings and, once, of asking a monsignor to wear the robes of a more senior clergyman in order to make Follieri's Vatican connections appear more important.)

After the accusations became public, Hathaway could easily have acted defensively, and demanded that her publicist dismiss all journalists who touched on the subject. Instead – while avoiding specific inquiries of what she may have known and when – she managed to field questions about Follieri with a winning brand of gallows humour. She appeared on the satirical television show Saturday Night Live, lampooning herself as all too gullible and sweet-natured. On David Letterman's chat show she threw her hands up and laughed: 'As far as relationships crashing and burning go, I did pretty great. I mean, scorch that earth!'

While poking fun at her situation played well in the media, it also kept whatever unhappiness she was experiencing relatively private. She mentions how important it was to have her older brother, Michael, who has worked as her assistant for the past two years, at her side throughout the experience (she also has a younger brother, who is at university). 'It was meant to be that he was there. It's very cool to know that all the seams are absolutely closed up. I can trust him with anything.'

Her grace under pressure engendered a groundswell of support. Even her fashion choices met with approval, whether she was the epitome of controlled elegance in a fuchsia wrap dress, or unapologetic in skintight leather-look trousers. 'Chic is the best revenge' ran the line beneath Hathaway's porcelain image on the cover of the fashion magazine W. She reflects, 'I have no complaints with the way I've been treated [by the press]. I was expecting Schadenfreude, and I got understanding and kindness. I would wake up every morning expecting to be flogged and I would arrive home feeling like I'd been kissed all day long.'

The past 18 months could now be cast as an extraordinary coming of age for Hathaway. There is a sense that she is growing into her considerable intelligence, an attribute that she has in the past worn rather heavily. While doing press interviews for The Princess Diaries 2 (2004), she namedropped Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – there is but a tiny glimpse of this tendency during our interview, when she quotes Viola in Twelfth Night. In her work, she has always been 'a very thorough, determined actress', as Julian Jarrold, who directed her as Jane Austen in Becoming Jane (2007) recalls – even rather a swot in her preparation for roles. 'She became a complete expert on Jane Austen. You could never accuse her of not working hard.'

But on Rachel Getting Married, which Demme shot over 33 days in the autumn of 2007, she says that a significant shift took place. 'Before, I felt so vulnerable that I kept myself almost hermetically sealed. I wanted to be absolutely together and professional and in control,' she observes. 'I had been trying to play the idea of what an actor was, as opposed to actually being myself. There was definitely a change in me that Jonathan inspired.'

She also notes that she had a tendency to be 'a little abrasive' in how she communicated with people 'in general'. 'I had never meant to actively offend anyone,' she says, 'but I probably had been doing that, so Jonathan gave me a much more constructive way to communicate with people and I was grateful for that lesson.'

Demme, in turn, is overflowing with admiration for Hathaway – 'She's so bright, she's so clearly big-hearted, she's so modern') – and remarks on her behaviour on the set: 'I kept waiting for her to act her age and disappoint on some level. She just seemed a little too good to be true. But never a prima donna moment, ever. I was impressed again and again by what she didn't do off camera as much as what she was doing on camera,' he says. 'And here we are a year later and she's better than one even knew, in every way.'

The pair have forged a close bond, with Hathaway considering Demme a mentor, and Demme referring to Hathaway as 'my new daughter'. 'As smart as she is, I feel like Anne's vulnerable,' he says. 'She's got a very special gift. If she chooses well, her body of work will soon be being measured alongside the greatest of the greats. I'm quick to express my disapproval or approval: "Don't do that film, because you won't be available to do something more worthy of you…" '

She had been planning to spend some time in November shooting documentary footage with Demme in New Orleans, but had to change her plans to film her role as the White Queen in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland ('which, PS, I heartily approve of,' Demme says). Straight after finishing Rachel Getting Married, she filmed Bride Wars ('hideously commercial – gloriously so'), in which she stars alongside Kate Hudson as lifelong friends (a sweet schoolteacher and go-getting lawyer respectively) who turn into warring Bridezillas when they discover their wedding days clash. 'I play this very nice, uncomplicated girl who is allowing herself to see that she might be more complicated than she ever believed. That part really appealed to me at that moment, but we won't go into why,' Hathaway says gnomically.

At present she is spending her time adjusting to her new life. She has just moved into a new flat. 'When I first got an apartment I was 21 and I didn't know what I wanted in the slightest, so I was left with a load of stuff I kind of liked,' she says. Now she's trying to fathom her own taste: 'I don't know what my aesthetic is. I like things that are umm… industrial, contemporary, romantic and useful. But you would not notice that if you went into my apartment.'

Once she has made the place more homely, worked out how to open the windows more than a few inches so that people can smoke, she can't wait to invite in her friends. 'The living-on-my-own part is not new because I travel so much, but when you're actually in your house by yourself it is a different feeling. Some days it doesn't bother me, and other days it's like, "I just want someone to hold me right now, wouldn't that be lovely?" ' She adds, 'But I'm sure I'll have that again in my life, and there's a reason why I don't have it right now.'

Her closest friend in the industry is the British actress Emily Blunt, her Devil Wears Prada co-star ('I'm so jealous she's working with Bill Nighy, who I have such a crush on… cow!'). 'It's so nice to have someone you can speak with in shorthand,' Hathaway says, 'about directors, or annoyances, or when things are going well.'

With her mother, a former actress who attends an occasional audition these days, she is more likely to discuss other people's performances than her own: 'We have a different approach, different styles of acting so sometimes it's difficult to discuss [work]. But it's great to have her as someone to go and see a film or a play with and take it apart.'

Hathaway gives a strong impression of a young woman looking forward. After Alice in Wonderland (she goes all high-pitched with delight at the prospect of working with Burton: 'I'm making a White Queen playlist right now!'), there is the thrill of the awards season. She describes the Oscar buzz surrounding her as 'lovely. It's like when you find out that a boy you like has a crush on you back, but he hasn't asked you out yet.'

* 'Rachel Getting Married' is released on January 23




- telegraph.co.uk