Anne Hathaway: The People's Princess
“It came true.” With these gently whispered words, Anne Hathaway cemented a chapter in her career. Prior to the Oscar win, she had also won a Golden Globe and every other precursor award en route to the big trophy. Oddly enough, Hathaway’s Globes speech was the most specific and impactful, despite being a Globes speech. In it, she talks about her desire to play different kinds of characters, how she tried to avoid typecasting after her breakout role as the Princess of Genovia.
I was a teenager and barely aware of an awards campaign as a concept at the time, but I remember Hathaway’s Globes speech vividly. So vividly that for years I actually thought it was her Oscars speech. She says that her Golden Globe will be a weapon for her against self doubt! I ate this up as a teenager. And there’s a way in which the whole thing felt like a fairytale. At the time, I didn’t really have the money to go to the movies regularly, and I was too afraid to watch Oscar movies anyway because they made me feel dumb. So in 2012, Anne Hathaway felt like my Oscar nominee. I hadn’t seen any of the other movies. But I knew who Anne Hathaway was. To this day, I am not sure if I imagined it or if it’s a real memory, but I still tell people that The Princess Diaries was the first movie I saw in theaters. And Ella Enchanted was the first movie that I remember speaking in a pop-cultural language that I could understand.
Though her characters in each of these three movies — Mia Thermopolis, Ella of Frell, and Fantine, who I don’t think has a last name — are markedly different, there’s a certain continuity across these roles that interests me. In two of them (Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted), Hathaway’s character is explicitly a princess. Though, she’s most damsel-y as Fantine, and this character also feels the most fabled. In terms of my own personal movie origin story, or, to paraphrase Las Culturistas, in terms of the movie that made me say movies are for me, each of these films is significant. There’s a naiveté, an optimism, and an exquisite tragedy to this trilogy of films, perfectly calibrated to appeal to my teenage self.
I had only seen Tom Hooper’s ill-conceived, closeup-heavy 2012 adaptation of Les Misérables once before re-watching it this summer. I’d had a sense before my rewatch that this film was mostly a failure. And I was beginning to wonder whether it felt right that this role should have been the one that won Anne Hathaway an Oscar.
Well. When a closeup works, it really fucking works. For four and a half minutes, the camera doesn’t move from Hathaway’s face as she performs “I Dreamed a Dream.” While the song is one of the great, powerhouse musical theater ballads, Hathaway sings it like a monologue. I was prepared to be moved by her performance, while perhaps a bit put off by the more cloying aspects of the character’s storyline. After all, in 2024, Fantine appears much less like a compellingly tragic character and much more like a man’s idea of the worst manifestation of the madonna-whore complex. Oh no, she had sex and now she is literally dying! But Anne Hathaway constructs Fantine as more of a person than as one of the most famous musical theater roles of all time.
While you get the sense that Russell Crowe is playing Javert like he’s in a Shakespeare play and Hugh Jackman is playing Valjean like a stage player assuming his place in a lineage of iconic characterizations of the same role, Hathaway plays Fantine like a film actress. What I mean is that she plays this character like she plays all of her characters, like a person that she discovered in a script that’s never been filmed before. There’s a modernity to her expressions. She doesn’t seem to be asking herself how a nineteenth-century factory worker respond when her boss begins sexually harassing her at work. Rather, she responds the way that a single mother who needs this job might respond.
I still maintain that no one has ever sung “I Dreamed a Dream” better than Ruthie Henshall. But I doubt anyone will perform it better than Anne Hathaway. Hathaway’s Fantine suggests a woman whose life has been filled with long difficult days, who is only now finding the chance to reflect on what has happened to her. Yes, she is fragile. Yes, she desires a man to save her. But Hathaway’s performance plays these desires as uniquely Fantine’s. There’s an innocence and naiveté to the character that might feel off-putting in other hands, but in Hathaway's it feels merely like a peculiarity of this specific person.
When Ruthie Henshall sings the line “I dreamed that God would be forgiving” with her full voice, trained to project to the back of a theater, you receive it as a proclamation. God has not been forgiving. When Hathaway whisper-sings it after shrugging off the lyric, “then I was young and unafraid,” you receive the line as the character’s own belief, but not one you are asked to agree with. Perhaps God has forgiven or perhaps God doesn’t care or perhaps God is only a belief the character has chosen to maintain.
The performance invites questions rather than declaring the character a tragedy in specifically prescribed ways. The difference is between self-revelation and declaration. Ruthie Henshall’s performance is brilliant in a live show. She is declaring to the audience what has happened to her. But Hathaway’s performance, with the intimacy of the camera rather than a stage, is a revelation to herself. She breaks into near-hysterical sobs, clutching her forehead, “I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I’m living,” because the character is only just now recognizing that she had this dream and that it’s dead now.
Hathaway’s performance as Fantine deserved an Oscar regardless, but an Oscar campaign also always needs a narrative. And in Hathaway’s case, that narrative was inevitably inflected by her early roles wherein dreams came true. How could it not feel poetic for the girl who twirled around to “Miracles Happen” in The Princess Diaries to win an Oscar for her wrenching performance of “I Dreamed a Dream”?
More than this, there was a fatedness to Hathaway’s early career. One could plausibly argue that neither The Princess Diaries nor Ella Enchanted would exist without the Dianamania of the 80’s and 90’s and the subsequent Tiger Beat heart-throbbiness thrust on Prince William as he came of age. Both films blend the kind of tabloid mega-celebrity of late 90’s pop icons with the elegant, yet down-to-earth glamor that made Princess Diana one of the most famous and beloved women literally ever. Yet, in both films, public adoration is also a mirror that distorts and constrains its subjects. Hathaway’s characters must learn how to truly be themselves in the face of such a public.
But a people’s princess can never get by on dreams alone. Inevitably, the culture will hunger for tragedy and scandal. As a real-life famous person, Hathaway has never been the subject of actual scandal. But, of course, it was after her Oscar win that the public thoroughly and inexplicably turned on her for several years, securing her in ingénue jail, where young and talented women go to age.
Perhaps what’s most remarkable to me about analyzing Anne Hathaway’s career from this angle is how few options women characters are afforded on screen even now. As a virginal young ingénue, a girl character is still permitted to dream and be herself, but not for too long. She’ll need to grow up and get a man sooner or later. As a single mother with no money and no more good looks, she must die tragically, for her own defiance of sexual morals but also as a lesson to society. Yet, even Hathaway’s latest role as Solène feels like another riff on the same theme. A rich single mom who’s still hot is permitted happiness, but she must pass through the gauntlet of slut-shaming first!
Of course, Hathaway’s career doesn’t represent the total breadth of roles available to women. And organizing her career into a People’s Princess trilogy doesn’t even scratch the surface of the variety of characters Hathaway has played. But it does thread a needle from her breakout role to the role that cemented her as a real actress. What this trilogy suggests for me, more than anything, is that we still can’t resist a princess, awaiting release from her tower. The story of an attractive woman’s liberation or her tragic demise remains an instant classic.