The Rehabilitation of Anne Hathaway

Hathaway agrees to go for a walk, and you can see how unguarded she can be. She takes long, confident strides in downtown New York, seemingly oblivious to her own celebrity. She stops by a craft store where you can paint your own pottery, and she decides she wants to do it. But first she'd like to get a bottle of wine to take inside with her. The task devolves into a 90-minute trek: she ducks into a furniture store to see if it has a cover for a sofa she gave her brother, she stops at a newsstand to buy an art magazine and also picks up another magazine because it includes a photo spread of her. All along the way, she's constantly shaking hands with people and introducing herself as "Annie." She doesn't have a problem marching up to strangers in the street for directions. "Excuse me, officer," she says to a cop in a bodega, "do you know where a liquor shop is?" The officer, who looks about 19, shakes his head, either unfazed or unaware that the star of "The Princess Diaries" is hitting him up for booze.

She finally finds the liquor store, but her fame catches up with her. Two paparazzi are camped out on the sidewalk. They hover around her like the evil monkeys in "The Wizard of Oz," snapping photos until Hathaway hails a cab and makes her escape. She's a little tense, until she makes sure they aren't chasing her on a motorcycle, which sometimes happens. "I'm very good at forgetting I'm a public person, and then stuff like that happens and you're reminded," she says. Back at the pottery store, there's another entourage waiting for her. This one is easier to handle: a father of a young girl says his daughter loves "Ella Enchanted" and asks for an autograph. Hathaway gets up to meet her fan, but the little girl is so terrified, it's as if Cinderella herself had made an appearance. Hathaway laughs, sits back down and works on her mug. She paints it blue, with the word SATISFIED across the base. And then on the handle she draws a question mark.

Is Anne Hathaway satisfied? You might have gotten a different answer earlier this year, but she seems to have found her voice. "In the last two months, I've really been myself," she says. "I can honestly say I'm balanced and grounded and happy right now." Hathaway has a tendency to break out into song at a moment's notice. She once serenaded "Rachel" director Jonathan Demme in a canal in Venice, and she cheerfully sings a song about wigs from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and a bittersweet ditty from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that was her old Broadway audition song.

The new Anne also thinks about love differently. "The romantic I-knew-it-at-first-sight thing? No, I'm not really open to that," she says, though that's how she once described meeting Follieri. "But the hey-let's-stick-around-and-get-to-know-each-other, no-surprises love—yeah, I believe that exists." She says the topic was on her mind recently when she read a book called "Freddy and Fredericka," a satire about a fictional prince and princess of Wales who married for political reasons. "It just led me to think, 'What is love?' " Hathaway says. "You're given examples all the time. The Greeks had so many words, but honestly love is knowing someone's faults and sticking around." She pauses. "And I'd argue there's an addendum to that. Love is letting someone else see your faults and letting them stick around." It's not your classic fairy-tale definition, but it feels right, for a girl who's retired her tiara.

© 2008