Anne Hathaway has shared one weakness she faced in her childhood that shaped her career choices later in life.
The Devil Wears Prada actress was speaking of her work ethics in a recent interview when she looked back on her dancing classes she attended growing up.
“I think I just knew from a young age that although I’m really lucky in so many ways and grew up with certain privileges, there wasn’t, like, this big life that was just going to be handed to me,” the Princess Diaries star told Harper’s Bazaar.
She continued, “I’ve always just felt defined by my work ethic, because my skill set is what it is and I have to work with what I have, but how hard I can work is something that I can control. And so I never want to pull up short and feel like I could have worked harder. If I know that I’m working hard, I can live with who I am.”
The 43-year-old actress admitted that her struggle has been linked to dancing. “I couldn’t quite figure out why there was no advancement,” she recalled her dancing lessons taken in childhood.
“At a certain point, the dancers jump, right? And I was going all the time, and I couldn’t jump in both senses of the word,” she explained.
At some point, Hathaway came to terms with her struggle at dancing and mediocrity at singing.
“I just remember having that conversation with myself and being like, ‘Okay, well, I don’t think you’ll ever be a dancer, and your singing’s fine, but I don’t know that you’re ever going to be a star vocalist.’
“So, I ruled out ‘pop star’ pretty early, but I found that acting kept opening to me. I wasn’t concerned that I couldn’t keep up with Beyoncé, because she is Beyoncé.”
The actress, once again, found herself revisiting her earlier failure as she had to take dance lessons for new film Mother Mary, a psychosexual pop melodrama directed by David Lowery.
In the upcoming film, she found herself having to portray a pop star, whose comeback performance reunites her with an estranged fashion designer best friend (Michaela Coel). The role brought her to push herself beyond her previous expectations.
“It was really, really humbling to have to deal with the limitations that my body had always had, that I’d accepted as part of my identity, but now they were no longer acceptable.”
She admitted that what takes people achieve “in a shorter amount of time” without training “as hard” didn’t come as easy to her.
“So at the end of it, I couldn’t say, ‘Well, yeah, I wish I’d done this better. I wish I’d done that better.’ But I know I literally couldn’t have worked harder,” she concluded.
