ANNE Hathaway was willing to suffer for her art when she took on the movie role of a desperate prostitute.

She had her beautiful, luxuriant hair cut off for a scene in the new film version of Les Miserables.

But Anne was horrified when she looked in the mirror and burst into tears.

She described the result of her transformation … as looking like her gay brother.

Anne, 30, whose character Fantine is a destitute single mum who has to sell her hair – and her teeth – to survive, said: “It was done and I took a few beats and then looked into the mirror.

“I called my husband (fellow actor Adam Shulman) and was on the phone with him. I looked in the mirror and I said, ‘I look like my gay brother. I’m just Man Hathaway’.”

Anne, who had never had short hair in her life, said she wept uncontrollably.

“I realised I couldn’t take it back,” she said. “It had the effect of changing my identity. I was reduced to a mental patient level of crying … I was inconsolable.”

Anne has appeared nude on screen, done her own stunts and even hosted the Academy Awards. But she says having the haircut for Les Mis, which hits cinemas on January 11, was the hardest moment of her career.

She added: “I put it up there with the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do, which I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t think I was that vain.

“There was nothing I could do to prepare for it. You train the stunt, you sing the song, you train your voice.

“This was just letting it happen and accepting whatever the results were going to be.”

Anne insists it was her own choice to have the snip for the film version of the smash hit stage show and classic novel, directed by King’s Speech Oscar winner Tom Hooper.

“I offered Tom the option of cutting my hair,” she explained.

“It was always something that I knew in the back of my mind I’d be willing to do for a character if it was ever right.

“So when I got cast and I read the script, and I knew they were keeping the hair cutting in, and then I read the book and it’s such a devastating scene, I thought doing it for real might raise the stakes a bit.

“And I guess in the back of my mind, I thought it if was a painful experience watching her haircut, then watching her teeth get pulled would be really painful. And then, of course, when she becomes a prostitute, I just thought they’re going to be with her feeling that alongside her.

“And as an actor, it was great to be able to authentically communicate a physical transformation.”

Dedicated Anne also went on a “near-starvation diet” of just hummus and radishes to bring authenticity to her portrayal of the dying French prostitute, losing 25lb and dropping two dress sizes in just a matter of weeks.

“I had to be obsessive about it,” said Anne, who is being tipped to win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance.

“The idea was to look like death.”

The actress burst on to the Hollywood film scene as a fresh-faced 19-year-old in 2001’s The Princess Diaries.

She grew up in New York with her lawyer father, actress mother and two brothers, and won awards for her performances in school plays before training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her squeaky-clean imagine was tarnished in 2008 when her then-boyfriend, Italian property developer Raffaello Follieri, was jailed and deported for swindling investors – including former US president Bill Clinton – out of millions of dollars.

Investigators claimed Follieri used his backers’ money to pay for “massive personal expenditure” on private yachts, luxury travel and shopping trips for himself and Anne, but concluded that the actress had “not understood” what was going on.

She went on to star in acclaimed films such as Brokeback Mountain, The Devil Wears Prada and Bride Wars, played Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises and won an Emmy Award for her voice-over of Princess Penelope in The Simpsons.

She married Dukes of Hazzard star Shulman, 31, in California in September.

Despite her success, Anne admits she at first wondered how she would ever manage to step into the shoes of tragic heroine Fantine in dark drama Les Miserables.

Naive factory worker Fantine is forced to turn to prostitution as she struggles to care for her illegitimate young daughter in 19th century France.

Anne said: “There was no way I could relate to what my character was going through. I mean, I have a very successful happy life and I don’t have any children that I’ve had to give up or keep.”

When researching the role, Anne read up on modern sex slavery and it deeply affected her.

She said: “I started Googling and I read things that are unimaginable, and you think that these human beings have experienced them.

“I remember a piece where a woman kept repeating, ‘I come from a good family. We lost everything and I have children so now I do this’.

“She then let out this sob that I’ve never heard before. It was the most despairing gesture I’ve ever seen.

“And that was the moment I realised I wasn’t playing a character – this woman deserves to have her voice heard and I needed to re-create that feeling.

“I realised I had been thinking about Fantine as someone who lived in the past but she doesn’t. She’s living right now. This injustice exists in our world.

“I just thought this isn’t an invention, this isn’t me acting, this is me honouring that this pain lives in this world.”

The stage musical has been seen by more than 60million people in 42 countries and the film version, which also stars Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, is tipped to break box office records.

Anne, who only appears for the first 30 minutes, says she became so immersed in the world of Les Miserables author Victor Hugo that she found it hard to switch off after filming wrapped.

“I was in such a state of deprivation – physical and emotional,” she added.

“When I got home, I couldn’t react to the chaos of the world without being overwhelmed. It took me weeks till I felt myself again.”

She recently admitted she acted “like a witch” to Adam, who flew to Britain to help her through the gruelling schedule of filming and dieting.

“I just wasn’t that much fun to be around. I mean, I was dealing with a lot of darkness and I was starving,” Anne said.

“There was one day when, I kid you not, I picked a fight with him because he wouldn’t watch a sunset with me.

“I realised that I was being really unfair to him and that even though I was in a negative place, I couldn’t let it affect our relationship.

“Also, I needed to go further into that negative place to play my character, and I love him so much that I was like, ‘You’re making me happy. You’re keeping me up and I’m clawing to the sides of my life and I need to fall into a pit and you need to go, honey’.”

Another issue arose when she was called to sing Les Mis’s most famous anthem, I Dreamed a Dream – because she knew she could never compete with Britain’s Got Talent superstar Susan Boyle.

In the end, director Hooper decided she should perform it differently from the Scots singer.

“It’s not the song Susan Boyle sang because I can’t sing like Susan Boyle,” said Anne.

“There was just no way I was going to match it. The only way I could do it was do it differently and really get inside it.”

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Source: Tampa Bay Times