Anne Hathaway

The daughter of a stage actress and an attorney, Anne Hathaway was born on November 12th, 1982 in Brooklyn, New York. She and her two brothers were raised in New Jersey, where she led a tomboyish childhood and broke many bones. In high school, though, she fully embraced her love and affinity for singing and acting. She remains the only teen to ever be accepted in the prestigious Barrow Group, an acting workshop in New York. She performed at Carnegie Hall in 1998 with the All Eastern U.S. High School Honors Chorus. Three days later, she was cast in the TV series Get Real, and her career was off and rolling.

Though short-lived, the family comedy-drama Get Real won a legion of committed fans, especially for Hathaway's character "Meghan Green." The young cast was nominated for a Young Star Artist Award (ensemble). Despite the minor successes, though, the show was cancelled after one season. Hathaway simply shrugged and got on with her life, enrolling at Vassar College. Though a supporting performance in the 2002 box-office disappointment Nicholas Nickleby offered Hathaway little chance to shine, a lead performance as the eponymous character in thefantasy-themed romantic comedy Ella Enchanted (2004) found her stepping into some big slippers for another Cinderella-style story not unlike the obligatory Princess Diaries 2 that same year. As if to anounce her acendancy out of the teen fantasy ghetto, Hathaway plunged into edgier territory with the gritty teen drama Havoc (also 2004), although the explicit film merited only a video release.

It was her next two roles, however, that would announce the young actor's arrival into adulthood. As one of the two quietly suffering wives in Ang Lee's acclaimed Brokeback Mountain, Hathaway exhibited an irrepressible rodeo-girl spirit broken down over the course of a sham marriage. As the co-star of the chick-lit adaptation The Devil Wears Prada in 2006, she entered the world of contemporary, high-fashion power players, suffering the slings and arrows of a deliciously evil (and Oscar-nominated) Meryl Streep. The film played throughout the summer, becoming a bona-fide sleeper hit. Although initially cast in 2007's runaway summer comedy, Knocked Up, Hathaway backed out of the role that eventually went to Katharine Heigl. She chose instead to follow the period-romance path with Becoming Jane, a Shakespeare in Love-style speculative fiction on the life and one true love of Jane Austen.

2008 turned out to be a banner year for the actress who scored a box office hit starring opposite Steve Carell in the big-screen adaptation of Get Smart, and garnered the best reviews of her career thus far for her work as a recovering addict in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married. That role earned her a number of year-end critics awards, as well as Best Actress nominations from the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy.