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The Anne Hathaway diaries
submitted by: Lisa D.
source: Scripps Howard News Service
Date: August 1, 2001
By BETSY PICKLE
LOS ANGELES - Anne Hathaway says she didn't have to search very hard to find her inner geek for her character in "The Princess Diaries."
"I just had to go to seventh grade," says the 18-year-old actress. "I had an awkward phase that lasted seven years, easy. If I'm honest, it lasted eight, but I don't have to go there.
"I don't believe that people should be defined in terms of 'geek' or 'popular person.' I think we all have geeky sides to ourselves as well as we can all be elegant and popular. We all have it within ourselves to do whatever we want."
"The Princess Diaries" casts Hathaway as Mia Thermopolis, a high-schooler raised in San Francisco by her divorced artist mom. When her paternal grandmother (Julie Andrews) comes from Europe to visit for the first time, Mia is stunned to learn that her father was a prince and her grandmother wants to groom her to be a princess.
Working with a legend like Andrews - whose films "The Sound of Music" and "Mary Poppins" are a requisite part of childhood - was every bit the thrill that one might imagine, Hathaway tells reporters in an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.
"This is gonna sound so corny, " says the Brooklyn-born actress, "but Julie Andrews is practically perfect in every way."
Hathaway, a soprano who performed at Carnegie Hall as a member of the All-Eastern U.S. High School Honors Chorus, says she didn't ask for singing tips from Andrews and wasn't "presumptuous" enough to sing in front of her.
"But there was this one day that I was sort of singing to myself, and I didn't know that she was standing behind me," she recalls. "When I finished, she just said, 'Annie, you have a beautiful voice!'
"And to hear that from Julie Andrews - who has been one of my heroes since I was 3 years old - was one of the defining moments of my life. And I know that, whatever happens, I will always have that moment and I will always have her belief in that side of me, and that's just incredible."
Hathaway took a semester off from college to shoot her first film, and she isn't sure how balancing her education and acting is going to work. But being cast in "The Princess Diaries" shows that many people believe in her, even though her only previous professional experience was playing Meghan Green in the short-lived 1999 television series "Get Real."
The film's director, Garry Marshall, was looking for an unknown, but he says he "cast somebody who can be a star." Although Hathaway is in every scene, she says she didn't think of her role as carrying the movie.
"With Garry Marshall directing, it's kinda hard to carry anything because he's at the helm the whole time," she says. "He's such a brilliant man and so great at comedy that, really, anything you see up there is just a result of me trusting him completely."
Hathaway inherited her love of acting from her mother, who retired from the stage 10 years ago after performing in the national tour of "Les Miserables" to stay home with her three children.
"Now that I'm acting, I understand what a huge sacrifice it was for her to make because I love this, and I know how much she loved it," says Hathaway.
"So I know how hard it must have been, and I think it really speaks about the sort of bond my family has."
Hanging around backstage as an 8-year-old is how Hathaway caught "the bug," but her parents didn't want her suffering the rigors of being a child actor.
They let her take acting classes at the local theater in the northern New Jersey town where she grew up, but it was more a hobby than an ambition.
It was only a year and a half ago, she says, "that I decided this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life."
Compared with her teen co-stars - Heather Matarazzo, whose credits include "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and a dozen other films, and Mandy Moore, the pop singer who has released three platinum-selling albums and is the host of her own MTV show - Hathaway is a novice in show business. The "Princess" set, however, wasn't the scene of glaring egos and blinding career maneuvers.
"Garry made the set so relaxed and so wonderful, it was kind of like summer camp in a way," she says. "While, of course, everybody was worried about, 'What's my next job; what am I doing next?,' you didn't care so much because you just had so much fun where you were at that moment."
She thinks that fun will translate for audiences.
"Everyone who's seen the movie ... has come up to me and said how much it spoke to them," she says. "That's people from age 8 to age 80. And they just say how nice it is to see a G film that is hip, that's edgy, that you can really become absorbed in and that you really wind up cheering for the character.
"So many people have come up to me and said, 'They just don't make films like this anymore. I'm so glad that they have.' And I think it really speaks to people of all generations because it doesn't appeal to their most base sensibilities but it really treats people like they're an intelligent audience."
(Betsy Pickle is film critic at the Knoxville News-Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service)
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