Have Anne Hathaway’s Haters Finally Moved On?
The year Anne Hathaway won a Golden Globe for her role in Les Misérables secured her a slot among the ceremony’s most memorable speeches; not because of what Anne had to say when she accepted her own statue, but because of when she snatched the microphone to thank a few people she had forgotten when the rest of the Les Misérables crew took the stage to accept their win for Best Musical or Comedy.
Suffice to say, it’s not common for one of the actors, much less in a supporting role, to decide that the they deserve a moment to express their gratitude over the people who are actually going to be taking the statue home – much less in Hathaway’s case when it was her second opportunity that night.
Though like any major celebrity Anne had her detractors, her “Hathahaters” were on fire after that night. Lists of reasons that Hathaway was worthy of total disdain ranged from silly Buzzfeed lists (“First of all she wears this hat and thinks it’s über-chic. It isn’t.”) to complicated take-downs of why the actress was perceived to be so out-of-touch by publications like The New Yorker and another by The New York Times.
“In recent months, the Hathahating has moved beyond garden-variety snarkiness — as seen with Gwyneth Paltrow, say, or Taylor Swift — and become a meme with unlikely stickiness. Hathahaters have spawned a Twitter hashtag (#hathahaters), a portentous debate before the Academy Awards about whether Hathahatred would hurt her chances for an Oscar, and a high-minded cultural discourse seeking to deconstruct Ms. Hathaway’s alleged powers to annoy.”
Anne definitely wasn’t impervious to the criticism. She more or less disappeared for a year, and when she came back early last year she confirmed that the reason for her departure was indeed because felt like “people needed a break” from her, Hathaway told The Huffington Post.
Those detractors have become mostly silent now, according to a string of editorials which have recently asked if Anne is still drumming up the same negative reactions she did two years ago. Most of them, like one from Anna Silman at Salon, concluded that Hathaway’s strategy of avoiding press for a while was sound; but Silman also wondered if Anne hadn’t decided to play into those Hathahater expectations a little bit when she announced a one-woman-show on Broadway, something that fed into the “obnoxious theatre kid” stereotype that many cited as the reason for their distaste for Hathaway in the first place.
“The problem before was that Anne Hathaway was perceived as being inauthentic and trying too hard; paradoxically, in playing into all the public’s expectations of her, she owns the brand that has been unwittingly thrust upon her, and comes off as more authentic, more unapologetically herself. And hey, this newly minted Hathafan can get on board with that.”
[Image via ABC]
