Anne Hathaway: Hollywood’s most polarizing star
Anne Hathaway has so much trouble winning over the public. Is it a gender double-standard — or is it her face?
Topics: 2013 Awards Season, 2013 oscars, Anne Hathaway, Editor's Picks, Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence, Les Miserables, oscars 2013, princess diaries, The Dark Knight Rises, X-Men, Oscars News, Entertainment News
Anne Hathaway holds her Oscar for winning Best Supporting Actress at the 85th Academy Awards. (Credit: Reuters/Mike Blake)Anne Hathaway has it all: The movie star jumps between lucrative studio pictures like “The Dark Knight Rises” and and passion projects like “Rachel Getting Married.” She recently wed boyfriend Adam Shulman in a Valentino gown. And her occasional missteps haven’t hurt her one bit — potential career-enders like “One Day” and “Get Smart” give way to bigger and better movies. Her former boyfriend’s imprisonment for running a Ponzi scheme was brushed aside. She flopped as an Oscar host in 2011, but came back to win the best supporting actress trophy for “Les Misérables” at this year’s ceremony.
And her public finds it all so infuriating.
Hathaway is the subject of more vituperative, angry scrutiny than perhaps any actress working today. “Shut up. Shut up, Anne Hathaway. I honestly don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m jealous, but I don’t feel jealousy. I watch her in outtakes, and I feel like she’s not a real person,” wrote a blogger for women’s-interest site Crushable. “I don’t find her perfection charming. I find it annoying.”
“She always seems like she’s performing, and her favorite act is this overstated humility and graciousness,” said a blogger quoted by Brian Moylan in a piece for Hollywood.com.
The Oscars this year, far from an opportunity for Hathaway to overcome her deficit with the audience, just gave the so-called Hathahaters more ammunition — from her apparently revealing dress to her awed acceptance speech, which Hathaway began by whispering, “It came true.”
“Deep down, we loathe celebrities,” says David Thomson, film critic and author, most recently, of “The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies.”
“We envy them,” says Thomson. “We think they don’t deserve it. We hate the influence they have over us. And there have to be sacrificial lambs.” Hathaway’s role is not unlike Lindsay Lohan’s, that of punching bag on which we project our resentment of celebrities, generally speaking.
But Hathaway is not an accidental target, Thomson says. “She’s just a little too wide-eyed, too good to be true. There is an abiding youthfulness to her,” he says. “That princess image has not gone away. She does not yet quite seem a grown woman.”
Perhaps there’s a double standard at work here. Bradley Cooper comes in for criticism, too, but it has little to do with the degree to which he is or is not a grown man. “People are rougher on young female stars than they are on young male stars,” says veteran Hollywood reporter Howard Karren, who served as an editor at Premiere in the 1990s. He notes that the wealth of young actresses able to jump between popcorn and prestige films today is a very new development. When he was at Premiere, the Oscars consistently nominated older, experienced actresses like Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep.
“The closest physical parallel you could make [to Hathaway] is Audrey Hepburn, who is all about grace and poise. In many ways, she’s sort of Anne’s opposite,” says Karren. “And she’s tried to break out of that mold to be taken seriously as an actor.” To overcome her “Princess Diaries” juvenilia has taken a steely sort of ambition that bleeds through Hathaway’s teeth-gritted performances and her exuberant interviews.
As it is in any industry, ambition on a man is seen as attractive; on a woman, it’s grating, unpleasant. “Female stars, more than male stars, are supposed to be humble and not put themselves out there,” says Karen Hollinger, a feminist film scholar. “They’re supposed to break down if things don’t go their way. They’re supposed to fall and pick themselves back up. But she has a patrician quality that never works well for female stars.”
Hollinger cites the current über-star: the much-loved Jennifer Lawrence, who now has a best actress Oscar, and two film franchises — the “Hunger Games” and “X-Men.” Lawrence tripped on her way to the podium, and laughed it off at the beginning of her speech. Hathaway, though, got through her speech as smoothly as she had in past years, just as she had when she dismissed criticisms of her Oscar-hosting gig or booked a dishy, weepy cover interview in W just after her boyfriend got locked up.
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