We don’t mean to alarm, but you’ve probably been calling Anne Hathaway by the wrong name for her entire career. But don’t feel like you’re alone in committing such a gaffe, as all of Hollywood has apparently been getting it wrong for decades too. According to Hathaway herself, while her name is technically Anne on her birth certificate, she actually only goes by Annie.
During a recent appearance on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, the host queried how he should address the actress. “Call me Annie – everybody, call me Annie, please,” Hathaway replied, before continuing, “Can we talk about my name for a second? When I was 14 years old I filmed a commercial and I had to get my SAG card and they asked me, ‘What do you want your name to be?’ I’m like, ‘Well it should be my name, my name is Anne Hathaway.’ That seemed like the right choice, but it never occurred to me that for the rest of my life people would call me Anne.”
The 38-year-old, who was there to promote her new film, Locked Down, revealed that hearing someone call her Anne instead of Annie makes her feel like they’re upset with her. “The only person who ever calls me Anne is my mother, and she only does it when she’s really mad at me, like really mad,” she explained. ” So every time I step out in public and someone calls my name, I think they’re going to yell at me….People are like, ‘Anne!’ And I’m like, ‘What? What did I do?’”
Instead, Hathaway would rather you call her anything else, which has spurred those in her orbit to invent nicknames instead. “People are so lovely, they don’t want to be presumptuous and so they come up with workarounds on set because the truth is nobody’s comfortable calling me Anne ever – it doesn’t fit! I’m an Annie. People call me ‘Miss H,’ people call me ‘Hath,’ so feel free, call me anything but Anne.”
Talk about taking the 2021 rebrand to new heights – Miss H it is.
