INTERVIEW: Anne Hathaway

From my interview with Anne Hathaway for Harpers: —

'She looses a rocket of laughter across the lounge that turns heads and lowers coffee cups: who is that? Dressed in all-black — pencil-thin trousers, camisole, a dainty silver necklace, silver nails, minimal make-up, her hair still growing out from the shoot of Les Miserables — Hathaway cuts an elfin, boyish figure, although any impression of frailty is soon dispelled by the gales of good humor she summons to pounce on anything that resembles ego or presumption in herself. She’s like a cross between a fawn and Bette Midler, or Audrey Hepburn if she’d been raised in a large, rowdy family of boys. It takes a few minutes to acclimatize to her beauty, which is almost ideographic. Up close, her face is a Rolls-Royce of expressiveness, those plush outsized features telegraphing emotion instantaneously, every smile a kilowatt smile, the slightest furrow of those eyes registering sadness as surely as a clown’s. “The corners of her mouth, turned up voluptuously, seemed to encourage audacity; but her long, shadowy eyelashes were cast discreetly down towards the lower part of her face as if to check its festive tendencies. Her whole toilette was indescribably harmonious and enchanting. [She] was beautiful, without being too conscious of it. She possessed two types of beauty — style and rhythm.” That’s Victor Hugo, describing Fantine, the tragic, tubercular heroine of his 1862 novel Les Misérables'