Anne Hathaway quietly endured a medical issue for a decade before opting for surgery to address it.
In an episode of The New York Times’ podcast “Popcast,” the 43-year-old star of “Devil Wears Prada 2” disclosed she experienced being “legally blind” in one eye throughout her 30s, caused by an early-onset cataract.
“I might be oversharing,” she admitted. “I spent ten years with significantly impaired vision.”
“The condition affected my sight to the point where I was practically legally blind in my left eye, and I eventually underwent surgery,” she explained. “I hadn’t realized the extent of the impairment until I regained full vision.”
“Since then, I’ve found a sense of calm,” Hathaway remarked. “I didn’t know how much it was straining my nervous system.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, a cataract is the clouding of the lens of the eye.
“For people who have cataracts, seeing through cloudy lenses is often like looking through a frosty or fogged-up window. Clouded vision caused by cataracts can make it hard to read, drive a car at night or see the expression on a friend’s face.”
Hathaway said her current vision is a “miracle.”
“I appreciate vision because I literally feel like every day, I wake up and I get to see the way that I do, it’s a miracle,” the actress continued. “I actually am like, ‘Oh, two generations back, that wouldn’t have been an option for someone like me.’ So, I actually do feel very connected to that kind of a miracle.”
Most recently, Hathaway fired back at plastic surgery rumors circulating online despite having a “preference” to “never comment on anything” and “not draw attention” to herself.
“We’re at a time when people feel very confident in assuming what they think is fact, and sometimes what they think is accurate and sometimes it’s not,” Hathaway said.
“The speculation has gotten so loud that you do feel the need to just get your truth out there,” she continued. “And I’ll probably always wonder, ‘Should I have posted that or not? Should I have just kept going and done the thing that makes me happy and makes me feel more confident on the red carpet?’ But I felt like the conversation was becoming distracting.”
“Also, by the way, these are huge medical decisions that people are presuming,” she added. “I wanted to show that like, no, I didn’t make a huge medical decision. It’s just two braids.”
She then confessed, “By the way, the other thing about all this is, I might still get a facelift someday.”