Alexi Lubomirski

I'm about to meet Anne Hathaway at a restaurant in her New York neighborhood when a strange number comes up on my cell phone. "Hey, it's Anne Hathaway. Look, I really need a pedicure," she confesses, laughing. "I've been taking all these dance classes, and my feet are really a mess. ..."

I have a lot of questions for the 28-year-old actress. First, there is her controversial debut as cohost of this year's Oscars with James Franco, then his weird post-show remark on Letterman when he compared her to the Tasmanian Devil. Add to that her decisions to take on such a demanding job as the Oscars, appear nude in a movie about a Parkinson's sufferer (last year's Love & Other Drugs), and play an awkward English miss in this month's romance One Day. All suggest not so much calculation on her part as impatience with constraints.

We have met, briefly, before — in 2007 at Valentino's anniversary in Rome, an unforgettable weekend of glamour. Anne attended with her then boyfriend, a handsome entrepreneur named Raffaello Follieri, who has since landed in prison on wire-fraud and money-laundering charges. Anne had already left him when he was arrested in June 2008 and was never implicated in Follieri's dealings.

Now, three years later, she has not lost her ability to be trusting — enough to admit to a virtual stranger that she has nasty feet. She bounds through the door of the salon dressed in skinny jeans and a chunky gray sweater. After a quick greeting, she holds out two bottles of polish. "Which color is trendier?" she asks intently.

The choice is between burgundy and neon pink. Somehow she doesn't seem the neon-pink type: too classic, the Anne of the red carpet, sheathed in Paris couture. Without makeup, without an audience to dazzle, her features soften. You might assume her to be a grad student. I vote for burgundy. Anne, who has removed her shoes, ponders. "My feet are so pale, the dark red will just make them look more so. I'll go with the pink."

Anne's preparation for her role as Catwoman in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, the next Batman installment (currently filming in Pittsburgh), has been more than cosmetic. She has been working out five days a week — rigorous exercise and stunt training followed by an hour and a half of dance. "I've always thought that skinny was the goal, but with this job I also have to be strong," she says. Anne has always been slim, but if you look at clips of her in her early 20s, when she made The Devil Wears Prada and Brokeback Mountain — films that first gave a clue of her dramatic range — the difference is she stands taller now and with more confidence.

Surely the Oscars gig was a turning point for the actress, one of several in a decade that began with fairy-tale parts. She was 21 and best known for The Princess Diaries when director Ang Lee cast her as the slowly calcifying Lureen in Brokeback Mountain. "I think people assumed that I was a girl searching for a happily-ever-after, when for me that's the least interesting part of the story," she says. "With Brokeback, I got to go beyond that." Outwardly, she was a beautiful star with the extravagant mouth and energy bubbling up like Old Faithful, but Anne was filled with self-doubt. "I could have traveled the world with a backpack and would have gotten nothing from it," she says with a rueful laugh. "I was just this lost, timid person."

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Alexi Lubomirski

That puts perspective to the Oscars and the impossible task of making the show fresh. While Anne was dancing as fast as she could, her laconic cohost seemed sleepy. "How did I take it?" she says mildly about Franco's comments on Letterman. "I let James know that a whirling dervish is a more flattering comparison than a Tasmanian devil. I called him, and we e-mailed a bit." She is sanguine about the whole experience. "In the grand scheme of things, I got to have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I met great people, wore beautiful clothes. And I got to put on a show. I don't see a downside. Anyone who disliked my personality probably disliked my personality before the Oscars."

In truth, as Anne's longtime manager, Suzan Bymel, tells me, the Oscars allowed Anne to show her full range as a performer. She's a physical comedienne in the Lucille Ball tradition, and of course we know she has pipes. In 2009, the Weinstein Company optioned the rights to Get Happy, a biography of Judy Garland, with Anne slated to play the singing legend.

Anne loves a strong story and isn't afraid of ones that end badly for the women involved, and she urges me to read Annie Proulx's story of abandonment "Tits-up in a Ditch." ("It ain't hopeful. It ain't pretty.") This might explain some of Anne's more recent choices, notably her Oscar-nominated role in Rachel Getting Married and, though not in the same league, Love & Other Drugs, in which she played a vibrant young woman losing control of her body. She says she wasn't nervous about the amount of full-on nudity. "I don't get hung up on nudity. To me, it was just an extension of who she was. It was real."

Her latest film, One Day, again finds Anne in a role with plenty of contemporary scar tissue. Based on the well-loved novel by David Nicholls and directed by Lone Scherfig (An Education), it follows two college classmates, Emma and Dexter (played by Jim Sturgess), over the course of 20 years of love and betrayals of every kind, with the narrative pegged to one day each year. Anne's Emma is frustrating, unbendable, and highly gratifying to watch, a complete personality if not a completely happy woman. As with Kym, the recovering addict in Rachel Getting Married, Emma allowed Anne to explore new and legitimate territory, often without looking her best. "Every girl feels she's Emma Morley," she says. "There's so much growth that happens in your 20s. To me, the character felt very authentic to that experience."

Feet restored, with Anne's looking ridiculously cheerful, we go off to have lunch at a vegan spot. She orders a plate of basil soy protein with an unfathomable eagerness. A vegetarian, she started eating meat while dating Follieri because, as she once said, it was "easier for the lifestyle at that time."

Anne isn't keen to talk about her ex-boyfriend, and I don't blame her; it happened a while ago, and she was very young. But I'm curious about a tendency she seems to have to be a people pleaser. She doesn't flinch. "There's something very addictive about people pleasing," she says. "It's a thought pattern and a habit that feels really, really good until it becomes desperate. It's one of the reasons that relationship ended. I wasn't able to grow or foster anything. I think a lot of girls have that story. It's a big moment when you step away from that and say, 'I'm going to be exactly who I am. And I'm going to be brave enough to only be with someone who wants me the way I am.'"

With her current boyfriend, actor Adam Shulman, she seems to have a good relationship. "So far, it's worked out great," she says matter-of-factly, observing that she used to get caught up in the intensity of a romance. "Which has its wonderful side, of course," she adds with a half shrug, "but also it was exhausting, and sometimes it would freak me out. Mellow doesn't always make for a good story, but it makes for a good life."

Her calm is matched by her eagerness to learn. When I casually ask what she is reading, she tells me The Edge of Physics. "It's about this one man's explorations around the world to visit all the experiments being done to further cosmology," she explains. "It's fascinating! All about neutrinos and dark matter." Anne, who was attending Vassar when The Princess Diaries was released in 2001, says that if she ever returned to college, "I would probably focus on philosophy, theology, and physics."

Anne will worry later that she has exposed too much of her "inner nerd." On the contrary, my impression of this lively woman is she doesn't want to be fenced in or defined by the media. Talking about fashion, Anne says she "feels like the luckiest girl in the world when I get to wear all these glamorous clothes," but away from the red carpet, she is decidedly more moderate, insisting on wearing pieces that she owns, especially favorites like Isabel Marant and Vivienne Westwood. "I've become a lot more specific about what I love and why I'm doing it," she says.

Anne has also gradually come to realize one of the great lessons of one's 20s: Don't let another living soul boss you. I wonder whether her parents, a lawyer and onetime actress who live in New York and with whom she is very close, have noticed any changes in her, given her newfound independence.

Anne laughs. "Oh, yeah," she says. "They've pointed out that they see me again."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

She describes having dinner with friends just before New Year's when her parents, driving through the city, stopped by to say hello. "I was wearing some zany outfit, and my mom just smiled at me," Anne recalls. "And I said, 'What?' She said, 'It's you. You look like yourself.'" Underneath the table, those hot-pink toes suddenly make a lot of sense.

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