Anne Hathaway has admitted she felt "tormented" whenever she saw pregnant women when she was struggling to conceive. The Devil Wears Prada actress - who recently announced she was pregnant with her second child - has revealed that she went through "infertility hell" and was left feeling "broken" and "devastated". In an interview with the Daily Mail, she said: "Each time I was trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going my way, someone else would manage to conceive. I knew intellectually that it didn’t happen just to torment me, but, to be honest, it felt a little bit like it did."
The pregnant Ocean’s Eight star, who has a three-year-old son with husband Adam Shulman, added that she was "embarrassed" about feeling jealous of pregnant women because nobody ever talked about it.
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The Hollywood Academy Award-winning star also revealed she felt upset whenever she was asked when she’d get pregnant by people who had no idea about her secret battle: "What I hated was when people would say, 'What’s taking you so long?'"
When Anne announced her pregnancy on Instagram with a black and white snap of her bump on Instagram (above), she captioned it: "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."
Explaining her reasoning behind the caption, Anne said she wanted to reach out to other women who were struggling to understand why they couldn’t conceive. "When I said to them: 'This has happened to me, it broke my heart, it broke me,' so many of them said: 'It happened to me, too,' and that was the thing that allowed me to come through it, to feel my pain without having anyone rush in to define it or cure it."
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She continued: "I sometimes think Instagram makes life look really breezy, but that's not the whole story. By leaving out the sad part, we make women who are struggling with this feel isolated and lonely; we make them feel like it's all their fault. I wanted to be more sensitive than that."