Anne Hathaway has opened up about suffering a miscarriage in 2015 while acting as a pregnant woman in a play.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, the actress, 41, said her first pregnancy "didn't work out", adding: "I was doing a play and I had to give birth on stage every night."

Hathaway, who has since had two sons, says that during the six-week show, she "pretended everything was fine".

But she says she told her friends the truth when they visited her backstage.

"It was too much to keep it in," she said.

Hathaway played a pilot who falls pregnant in the one-woman off-Broadway show Grounded, which ran for six weeks in 2015. The performance required her to act out going through childbirth every night.

It was during this time that Hathaway experienced a miscarriage.

The Devil Wears Prada star went on to welcome her first son, Jonathan, with husband Adam Shulman in March 2016.

In an Instagram post in July 2019, Hathaway announced she was pregnant again. But she also used the post to indicate her fertility struggles.

"It's not for a movie," she wrote, alongside a photo of her baby bump. "All kidding aside, for everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love."

'Not ashamed'

In the interview, Hathaway explained her reasoning for writing that post.

"Given the pain I felt while trying to get pregnant," she said, "it would've felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy when I know the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone."

She added she "wasn't going to feel ashamed" of something that seemed "statistically to actually be quite normal".

After suffering her miscarriage, Hathaway said she was stunned to find out how common miscarriages are. She also found out that many of her friends had had similar experiences.

"I thought, where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That's where we take on damage. So I decided that I was going to talk about it."

She said that for years after her Instagram post, women would regularly come up to her in tears.

"And I would just hold her, because she was carrying this [pain] around and suddenly it wasn't all hers anymore."

The couple's second son, Jack, was born in November 2019.

"When it did go well for me, having been on the other side of it, where you have to have the grace to be happy for someone, I wanted to let my sisters know, 'You don't have to always be graceful,'" she said.

"'I see you and I've been you.'"