Smart moves

Anne Hathaway’s career path has been on the up and up. But will her role as Agent 99 in the Get Smart movie make her or break her? Georgia Lewis speculates.

March 2008

She’s American but with her English rose complexion and accomplished Brit accent, she could easily be mistaken for a lass from the other side of the Atlantic. There’s nothing blonde and brash about her, she doesn’t get photographed falling out of nightclubs, she has had the same boyfriend for ages and she shares a name with William Shakespeare’s wife. She’s Anne Hathaway and since the 2001 hit movie The Princess Diaries (which your mum, little sister or girlfriend back then may have forced you to watch), her star has been on the rise.

With a studious bent (she has been studying English at New York University) and a series of clever career choices, she has carved herself a niche as a babe with brains. Playing Lureen Newsome, the unfortunate female love interest of Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain and Andy Sachs, the fish-out-of-water magazine intern in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada were movies that both achieved the rare accolade of doing well at the box office as well as receiving critical acclaim. Then she followed up last year with another successful turn, this time as British author Jane Austen in the period piece, Becoming Jane.

Now she is doing the retro thing with a starring role as Agent 99 in Get Smart, a movie revival of the hit ‘60s TV series. The trend in Hollywood to raise an old TV show from the dead is not new and it can seem like an easy way for a lazy studio to make a quick buck without having to come up with too many original ideas. Sometimes it works – the highly successful series of Addams Family movies with Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia as a saucily spooky Morticia and Gomez is a great example. But sometimes the resultant film can stink like a dead dog in the desert. The embarrassing performance of Botox junkie Nicole Kidman in Bewitched springs to mind.

By her own admission, Anne is very choosy about the roles she takes – “it drives my agent nuts,” she has said – so her decision to play 99 to Steve Carrell’s bumbling Maxwell Smart has come as a bit of a surprise.

But the good news for Anne is that early gossip on the film is positive. A few insiders have already jumped online to say they have seen advance screenings and one armchair critic even describes her performance as “perfect” and that she has excellent on-screen chemistry with Carrell. The chemistry issue is an important one as the excellent and obvious rapport between Don Adams’s Maxwell Smart and Barbara Feldon’s Agent 99 was essential to the success of the Bond spoof TV series. Time will tell if we have another Addams Family or a wretched Bewitched on our hands. The stills that Warner Bros has released certainly show Anne looking very foxy indeed so at least we know she looks the part if nothing else.

And if the movie does bomb at the box office, Anne is safe in the knowledge that she has another three movies to follow Get Smart. She stars as Claire Summers in Passengers, an already-completed film about plane crash survivors. Then there are two more films in post-production - Dancing With Shiva, a comedy about an ex-model who has been in and out of rehab, and Bride Wars, a comedy about two friends who become rivals when they schedule their weddings for the same day (no prizes for guessing how that one might end).

So far, she is yet to make a classic bloke film – and maybe she doesn’t actually aspire to be John McClane’s love interest in Die Hard 5: Nursing Home Under Siege – but she’s still young. There’s plenty of time for her to be an action heroine as well as continuing to make films that your girlfriend will almost certainly enjoy.