Why all the Hathahate?

She was too happy, too earnest, too confident, with a face 'reminiscent of the recession'. What did Anne Hathaway do to deserve such vitriol?

- ROBBIE COLLIN

We humans are suspicious of perfection: when we can’t easily spot someone’s flaws, we’ll often come up with some ourselves, just to be on the safe side. Looking back, that now seems to be what went wrong 10 or so years ago for Anne Hathaway, who, on the press tour for her film Mothers’ Instinct, reflected on the extraordinary blasts of online and offline vitriol that blew her career off course in the 2010s.

It was a precarious moment for Hollywood stardom in general, with both #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite rumbling away – though Anne’s supposed crimes (a) could hardly be described as crimes at all, and (b) seemed to change depending on who and when you asked. One moment she was too enthusiastic, too earnest, too humble for comfort; the next she was inauthentic, entitled and insincere.

She was both the soul-baring, Oscar-grabbing star of Les Misérables – so pretentious! – and the millennial Julia Roberts knockoff of Valentine’s Day and Bride Wars – so superficial! She was essentially living out America Ferrera’s Barbie' monologue 10 years before it was written, and apparently lost out on work as a result.

‘A lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online,’ she told Vanity Fair. Mercifully not everyone, though: Anne went on to describe Christopher Nolan as ‘an angel’ for casting her in Interstellar at a particularly low point, paying no heed to the blare of bad press.

‘I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time,’ she went on, ‘but it had that effect. And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.’ Even so, only Nancy Meyers took a chance on her as a lead (in 2015’s underrated The Intern