Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway has been chosen to join Denzel Washington in presenting the Nobel concert in Oslo next month. Musical performers include Elvis Costello and Herbie Hancock.
Hathaway is having quite a year. It was only last week that she was depicted in the tabloids as running out, teary-eyed, from her own birthday dinner with her family.
“What?” her father, Jerry Hathaway, a respected New York attorney, said when he heard that for the first time last night at the premiere of “Love and Other Drugs.”
“We had a very nice birthday,” he insisted. He doesn’t read the rags, so he had no idea what we were talking about.
Anne chimed in, wearing a Valentino dress and drinking non alcoholic beer. “I was jet lagged, I got up from the table to answer my phone. I guess I wasn’t smiling enough!” she said, forcing a facetious smile.
Then she told her dad about presenting the Nobel prize.
Hathaway is in town to promote “Love and Other Drugs” with co-star Jake Gyllenhaal. She’s also hosting “Saturday Night Live” this weekend. Will she sing? “We’re about to find out,” she said, heading to the rehearsal from the after party at Rouge Tomate.
Considering she’s quite a bit exposed in “Love…”, Hathaway remains unaffected, chipper and gracious as always. She met everyone last night, signed everything.
In the movie, she plays Maggie, a young woman with onset Parkinson’s Disease who is determined not to let it interfere with her life. She instead has a rousing sexual affair with Gyllenhaal that turns into love. It’s like a 2010 version of Erich Segal’s original “Love Story.”
This time, the tag line could read: Love means not having to keep your clothes on.
Indeed, Gyllenhaal and Hathaway are not shy. One 15 year old girl at the party, daughter of a guest, said the movie was “a little racy.” Oh yes. But Ed Zwick is a consummate director who knows how to make this kind of film and these people come alive. After all he and partner Marshall Herskovitz created “thirtysomething” and “Once and Again.” Zwick has put a sophisticated high gloss coating on this story, and kept it several cuts above the usual three hanky chick flick. Alas, every woman in the Directors Guild Theater was crying her eyes out at the end of “Love…”
PS The film has a great soundtrack put together, ‘natch, by Randall Poster. Among the gems: the Kinks‘ “A Well Respected Man” perfectly cued up to one of Jake’s entrances.
