Anne Hathaway sat down for a chat with Jimmy Fallon this week, and she made a surprising revelation about her name. The Oscar-winning actress was born Anne Jacqueline Hathaway in 1982 – but she confirmed that is not what her friends and family call her.

“I’ve known you for a pretty long time now,” Jimmy said. “I’ve heard people call you Annie, like your good friends. Do I call you Anne or Annie?”

“Call me Annie!” the star replied with a smile. “Everybody, everybody, call me Annie – please!”

She then spoke in-depth about her moniker. “Let’s spill the tea!” she began. “So when I was 14 years old I did a commercial and I had to get my SAG card, and they asked me, ‘What do you want your name to be?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, it should be my name. My name’s Anne Hathaway.’

The star said the name ‘Anne’ just ‘doesn’t fit’

“And so that seemed like the right choice, but it never occurred to me that for the rest of my life people would call me ‘Anne’.”

The 38-year-old continued: “The only person who ever calls me Anne is my mother and she only does it when she’s really mad at me. Like, really mad! And so every time I step out in public and someone calls my name, I think they’re going to yell at me.”

She concluded, “So seriously, please, just feel free [to call me Annie]. People are so lovely, they don’t want to be presumptuous, and so they come up with workarounds on set because, the truth is, no one is comfortable calling me ‘Anne’ ever.

The actress with her husband Adam Schulman

“It doesn’t fit, I’m an Annie. And so people call me ‘Miss H’, people call me ‘Hath’, so feel free to call me anything but Anne!”

Anne has been happily married to Adam Shulman since September 2012 and together they share two young sons: four-year-old Jonathan and one-year-old Jack, who was born in November 2019.