Twenty-five years after The Princess Diaries made her a star, the Brooklyn native is enjoying one of the busiest and most varied stretches of her career. From the hotly anticipated sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Christopher Nolan’s massive-budget epic The Odyssey to the upcoming psychosexual thriller Verity, the Oscar winner is proving Hollywood royalty still has plenty of range.

BY WILL HARRIS

She nabbed her career breakthrough in 2001 as the titular princess in The Princess Diaries, and in 2026 she played the queen of Ithaca in The Odyssey. If this doesn’t officially cement Anne Hathaway’s spot within the court of Hollywood royalty, it’s hard to imagine what would.

It’s been 25 years since her big break, but Hathaway actually got her start as an actress well before that. She was still in single digits when she watched her mother, Kate McCauley Hathaway, perform in the first national tour of Les Misérables as Fantine, and she was still on the cusp of becoming a teenager when she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Not long thereafter, Hathaway became the first teenager admitted into the Barrow Group Theater Company’s acting program, and by the late ’90s she was singing soprano with the All-Eastern U.S. High School Honors Chorus at Carnegie Hall.
In 1999, Hathaway was cast on the short-lived Fox dramedy Get Real, a series which – although it’s but a career footnote for its cast members – provided both Hathaway and Jesse Eisenberg with their first onscreen roles. It also co-starred Jon Tenney (The Closer, Major Crimes), Debrah Farentino (Eureka), and Eric Christian Olsen (NCIS: Los Angeles). The series only survived for a single season, but by then Hathaway had been cast in The Princess Diaries, which ultimately proved to be the role that would kickstart her film career in a massive way.

After the success of The Princess Diaries came Ella Enchanted, which was followed by the inevitable sequel to her first film (The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement), but Hathaway was intent on not falling prey to fairytale typecasting.

“I’ve done a lot of characters, given a few film experiences now that people can treasure as really fun family entertainment,” she told The Independent in 2004. “But that’s not why I became an actor. And that’s not where I intend to stay.”

And, indeed, she didn’t: by the following year, Hathaway was co-starring with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, and the year after that she was co-headlining alongside Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada.

“I feel like I was everybody’s babysitter,” Hathaway mused to Harper’s Bazaar earlier this year. “And I was a child when I made The Princess Diaries. I was still a 22-year-old mess of a human when I made The Devil Wears Prada. And so, we’ve grown up together, and I’m so happy for them and how their lives are unfolding. Like, this crazy thing where people just graduate from high school and they send me their graduation announcements. People send me their wedding invitations. It’s so very sweet.”

Having proven herself capable of working within more than just the young-adult realm, Hathaway continued to further demonstrate her versatility, doing an action comedy (Get Smart), a Jonathan Demme-directed drama (Rachel Getting Married), and a romantic mystery thriller (Passengers) before dipping her toe back into fairytales by starring as the White Queen in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

P4EB76 Original Film Title: INTERSTELLAR. English Title: INTERSTELLAR. Film Director: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN. Year: 2014. Stars: ANNE HATHAWAY. Credit: WARNER BROS. / Album

Upon entering the 2010s, Hathaway really began to branch out, collaborating with Christopher Nolan for the first time in The Dark Knight Rises, tackling the same role as her mother in the film adaptation of Les Misérables (and earning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the process), then reteaming with Nolan for the sci-fi epic Interstellar.

It would be a dozen years before Hathaway would find herself working for Nolan again on The Odyssey, at which point she was pleased to discover that their working relationship hadn’t changed very much.

“One of my things that I was so happy to discover is that Chris is a remarkably consistent human being,” Hathaway told People during a joint interview with Nolan, after which she told Nolan directly, “You’ve made so many incredible movies all in different genres, but your approach to it, your respect to the crew, how arduously you prepare and think about everything, that’s all there.”

Hathaway has also continued to work alongside Hollywood legends, including in the 2015 comedy The Intern, which teamed her with Robert De Niro and for which – even at that point in her career – she had to audition, a fact that surprised De Niro when he learned it during a joint interview with Hathaway for The Independent.

“You were super supportive from day one,” Hathaway told De Niro. “I was happy to audition but scared because I didn’t want to lose the part, and it was such a good one within a great story, directed by one of my favorite directors [Nancy Meyers], starring one of my favorite actors. For me it was, ‘Please don’t mess this up, Hathaway!’”

Over the course of the last decade, Hathaway has made a point of pursuing the films that most interest her, whether or not they scream “box-office success.” In the midst of this period in her filmography are such unique projects as Colossal, where her character somehow creates a giant reptilian creature with her mind; The Hustle, a gender-swapped remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; and Locked Down, a romantic comedy-heist flick made during the pandemic.

This year, Hathaway has been busier than ever, with an astonishing five films released during the course of 2026: Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, The End of Oak Street, and – in October – the psychosexual thriller Verity, co-starring Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett. She’s also unabashedly unapologetic about her full slate of projects, which is exactly as any actor should be.

“When I got my schedule for this year from all the wonderful film studios that I’ve worked with, I saw it and I kind of thought I was being punked,” she told The Hollywood Reporter at the premiere of The End of Oak Street. “But then they showed me that no, no, no, all these [release] dates were going to hold and I just said as long as audiences don’t get sick of my face – which I wouldn’t blame them, I would not blame them if they did – let’s go.”