Anne Hathaway: a star who really suffers for her art Even so, the image of remorseless diligence and suffering-for-your-art does no harm to anyone embarking on the transition from starlet to serious actress. At 30, Hollywood starts to see you differently. The studios still say they love you, but not in quite the same way, because there is always someone younger, prettier, hotter coming up behind. It is the moment when you find out, as Kathleen Turner has said, "whether anyone thinks you can act or not." Plenty of people think Anne Hathaway can act. Among them Meryl Streep, with whom she appeared in The Devil Wears Prada, and Tom Hooper, the English director of Les Misérables, who calls her performance "breathtaking." These are the kind of opinions you can trust. The problem for Anne is that, sometimes, she trusts the wrong people. Her squeaky clean image as an all-American sweetheart - founded on her breakthrough role in Disney's tweeny hit, The Princess Diaries - was badly dented when her long-standing boyfriend, a 28-year-old Italian property developer called Raffaello Follieri, was arrested and accused of swindling prominent investors, including former US president Bill Clinton, out of millions of dollars. According to US court depositions, Follieri had used his backers" money to support "massive personal expenditure" on private yachts, luxury travel and shopping trips for himself and Miss Hathaway. Even the couple's dog, Esmerelda, was showered with goodies and treated to a five-star lifestyle. The couple met at a party in New York in 2004. She was instantly swept away, later telling an interviewer: "He was the first real man I had ever met. Until I knew Raffaello, I was just narcissistic and annoying. He told her that he was the "chief financial officer of the Vatican bank," that his activities were mostly charitable, and in support of this claim showed her the monsignor robes that hung in his wardrobe. Follieri served three and a half years in jail, and was deported back to Italy. The FBI is understood to have looked at Miss Hathaway's role in the scandal, but concluded she had simply been too trusting and "not understood" what her boyfriend was doing. At the age of 11, she says, God called upon her to be a nun. It was a call she assumed she would answer, but at 15 she discovered that her older brother, Michael, was gay and decided she couldn't accept the Church's position on homosexuality. She now describes herself "a non-denominational Christian," but insists that she hasn't completely given up the idea of entering holy orders. For now, though Hollywood must suffice. Les Mis is her most grown-up role so far, and the one that should set her up for the next stage of her career. If only we knew what that career would be. She has become worryingly keen on physics, telling GQ magazine: "Any spare time I have, I bury my head in a physics textbook. The elements at the atomic and subatomic level make up everything. You, me, the buildings, our souls, our minds. I'm reading a lot about relativity. Stand by for Einstein: The Musical.