Anne Hathaway’s Shame Over Body Image

Anne Hathaway, who famously lost weight for both “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Les Miserables”, says she still battles with body image, something she thought she would have grow...
Anne Hathaway’s Shame Over Body Image
Written by Amanda Crum
  • Anne Hathaway, who famously lost weight for both “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Les Miserables”, says she still battles with body image, something she thought she would have grown out of by now.

    “I still feel the stress over ‘Am I thin enough? Am I too thin? Is my body the right shape?’” she says in a recent Glamour interview. “There’s an obsessive quality to it that I thought I would’ve grown out of by now. It’s an ongoing source of shame for me.”

    Of course, as with any female in the spotlight, body image can be a tricky thing. With so many people examining everything one does/wears at any given moment, it’s easy for celebrities to fall prey to the idea that they aren’t good enough, that things could use some tweaking even if millions of others would kill to have their bodies. It’s not a new problem, and unfortunately as long as gossip magazines and internet trolls exist, it’s not something that will go away anytime soon.

    Actress Ashley Judd recently wrote an essay for The Daily Beast in which she took on the people who were dissecting her “puffy appearance” and accusing her of having had plastic surgery. She says she was simply showing the effects of being sick and on steroids, and was appalled at the reaction to her brief, less-than-perfect appearance.

    “Who makes the fantastic leap from being sick, or gaining some weight over the winter, to a conclusion of plastic surgery?” Judd asks in her essay. “Our culture, that’s who. The insanity has to stop, because as focused on me as it appears to have been, it is about all girls and women.”

    Hathaway says that the media’s critical eye still scares her and inhibits her, because she’s afraid to be herself in public.

    “I know it makes me sound weak, but rather than make myself happy and wear the silly hat and say, ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ I actually really don’t feel like getting made fun of,” she said. “So I put on something boring and navy and go out and try to disappear.”

    However, she also says that chopping off her hair for “Les Miserables” had a profound effect on her, because now she can’t hide behind her long strands.

    “…On days when I didn’t want to deal with the world, I’d wear a hat and pull my hair around me and hide,” she said. “I can’t do that now. I have to be me all the time.”

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