She's about the same age as Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, but don't expect any public breakdowns or erratic behaviour from Anne Hathaway. The former Disney star is clear about her career path, she tells Donald Clarke
When I was 24 I rarely got up before lunchtime. I lived mainly off spiceburgers and could go for weeks without prising the weevils from my filthy flesh. Britney Spears, who was 25 in December, has shaved her head and had some new obscenity tattooed on her body. Lord knows what else Lindsay Lohan will get up to on the way towards her mid-20s.
Then there is Anne Hathaway. We first became aware of her in 2001, when, cavernous mouth overpowered by eyes the size of rowing boats, she played an ordinary girl elevated to royalty in Disney's The Princess Diaries.
Hathaway, who was then 18, radiated the crisp, bleached wholesomeness that works well in teen films but is of limited use in pictures aimed at adults. Still, Hollywood being what it is, she would surely get to marry and divorce half a dozen country-and- western singers over the next five years and, in so doing, would attain the damaged gravitas grown-up stars now require.
Not a bit of it. Hathaway has managed the tricky business of remaining utterly respectable while building a good career in serious films. She was terrific as Jake Gyllenhaal's snooty wife in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. She held her own against Meryl Streep in the hugely popular The Devil Wears Prada. "Meryl blew my expectations out of the water," Hathaway says. "She was both frightening and so likeable. I am a puppy around her."
Now she takes on the role of a young Jane Austen in Julian Jarrold's impressive Becoming Jane.
Sitting pertly on a mountainous sofa, Hathaway - carved, it seems, from a tiny bar of ivory soap - speaks with the rich patrician voice you might expect to emerge from a pocket Katharine Hepburn. She is terrifying in her togetherness. She is, I suspect, no friend to disorder. "I am a very in-control person," she says. "But I have to be. I am not much fun to be around when I am not." I sense steel.
Becoming Jane, which follows Austen's romance with James McAvoy's Anglo-Irish adventurer, is the second film Hathaway has shot in Ireland over the past four years. I find it hard to believe she knocked back many pints when making the featherweight Ella Enchanted here, in 2003, but she claims that, despite her ordered demeanour, she was no stranger to the saloon bar.
"I remember showing up at work on the first day of shooting for Becoming Jane and many of the crew I had worked with on Ella Enchanted had their eyes raised," she says. "I said: 'Don't worry. I got all that out of my system last time.' Oh, I lived it up on Ella. You know what they say: 'Welcome to Ireland, here's two stone.' This time I allowed myself a half-pint at the weekend. I am an older woman now. Creaky knees and all that."
Really? I read an interview that suggested she deliberately got herself good and drunk the night before she was due to shoot a scene featuring Austen as an older, sicker woman. "Oh, that interview made it seem much more sinister than it actually was," she says. "I drank a little bit more than normal because, the next day, we had these scenes that everybody looked too young for. We all did it. It was a group hangover. Well, maybe James McAvoy didn't, because he is too good an actor."
Hathaway's supernatural sense of discipline may be linked to the fact that she has been in training for the job since birth. The daughter of a lawyer and an actress, she was, indeed, named after that other Anne Hathaway who married Shakespeare and lived in a nice cottage. Some reports suggest that she once intended to be a nun but turned away from the Catholic Church after discovering her brother was gay.
Raised in New Jersey, the young Anne spent some time at Vassar College before switching to New York University and a place with Barrow Group Theatre Company's acting programme. Work in television followed, then international fame with The Princess Diaries. Garry Marshall's harmless flick, which also starred Julie Andrews, was a huge hit with teenage girls.
"It maybe still hasn't hit me that I am really famous," she says. "But people still come up to me and say: 'Are you the girl from The Princess Diaries?' They often don't know my name. In those circumstances I sometimes just say no. I have signed enough autographs as Princess Mia. If you don't know my name, maybe don't bother to ask for an autograph."
In the succeeding years Hathaway appeared in a few more jolly teenage pictures, including a perfunctory sequel to The Princess Diaries. In 2005, however, she seemed to be making a positive effort to advance into the adult world. Barbara Kopple's fitful Havoc, featuring Hathaway as a decadent Los Angeles socialite, sank without trace. But her performance in Brokeback Mountain opened many critics' eyes to her versatility. So were these films part of a campaign to leave behind teen cinema?
"People keep saying this, and I have refuted it every time," she says. "I knew I was a real bitch on the inside, so it was only a matter of time before that came out. I couldn't be a cute little button forever. My goal was never to be the princess; it was to be an actress. There was never a conscious decision to move away from anything."
The US can still be a puritanical country, and some eyebrows were raised when Hathaway, to this point a pure Disney heroine, appeared topless in both Havoc and Brokeback Mountain. I wonder what conversations she had with herself when considering whether to agree to those scenes. As I finish the question, Hathaway stiffens theatrically and allows an icy silence to fall over the room. She sighs. "Do you ask every actor that question?" she nearly spits.
She is, of course, within her rights to take offence. Sex scenes are a necessary part of modern cinema, and reasonable viewers should not be surprised that actors no longer demand that a sheet conveniently adhere to their intimate parts. But not all actors start off in sweet little Disney pictures. And, er, um, sorry.
She takes pity on me. "It is not upsetting. You asked the question in a very tactful way," she remarks kindly. "But often people will suggest I was trying to prove I was an adult
actress by taking off my clothes. And I resent that, and I don't know why that keeps getting asked. Nudity is a divisive issue, particularly among Americans. I never had to have that conversation with myself about it, because I have never had a negative reaction to nudity in a script."
Hathaway's talent for stability extends to her personal life. For some years she has been dating Raffaello Follieri, an Italian property developer with an admirable philanthropic streak. Hathaway and Follieri - he is five years her senior - spend a significant portion of every year helping to inoculate children in the Third World. It is easy to be cynical about film stars paying lip service to a cause, but Hathaway seems prepared to get properly dirty helping the less fortunate.
"My boyfriend and I share a particular need to help children, and he saw an opportunity to use his connections and set up the Follieri Foundation," she says. "This is just one less thing the kids have to worry about. Of course they hate having it done. The first time I did it this kid peed all over me. I thought: 'Oh, yeah, this is glamorous.' "
Still, despite making time to get peed on together in Nicaragua, the couple must find it difficult to maintain a relationship. Hathaway, who is in considerable demand, is shooting two films back to back, and Raffaello has to tend to his financial interests in Italy.
Unsurprisingly for such an organised young person, Hathaway has established a principle to ensure she and her beau do not drift too far apart. "We have a rule," she says firmly. "We can't go more than two weeks without seeing one another. If that does happen I end up throwing the phone against the wall in fury and end up having to go down to the cell-phone store an embarrassing amount of times. We are each other's main priority."
She then begins drifting into the sweetest of romantic reveries. Eyelids flicker and fingers dance along imaginary keyboards as she describes the bliss of life with Follieri. "I was watching Woody Allen's Manhattan the other day," she says. "And at the end he explains how we all use romance as a distraction from the bigger questions. Nowadays we don't even need romance as a distraction. We have cell phones and the internet. We have Paris Hilton. You find individual examples of romance around here and there, but we seem to have got rid of it from society."
This is, of course, a commendable sentiment (and one that Becoming Jane, a very decent film, illustrates quite nicely). But Hathaway delivers it with such prim ardour that it sounds ever so slightly like a command. I enjoy hearing how close she is to her boyfriend, but I can't quite purge from my mind the vision of her smashing the phone against the wall. Nobody would wish her to follow the trail mapped out by Lohan and Spears. It might, however, be nice if she loosened up a little and had more than a half-pint on her weekends off.
"I don't really have a public persona," she counters. "So people have supplied one for me. I have no need to prove to the world who I am by dancing publicly on tabletops. Why would that make me any more adult?"
So how does she let off steam? "I do everything you do. I dance on my own tabletops." Yeah, but I bet she gets the Pledge and the J Cloth out straight afterwards.
Becoming Janeopens on March 16th