CAT WOMAN’S NEWEST LIFE

Anne Hathaway stars as Batman’s fine feline foe in The Dark Knight Rises

Things are looking fairy-tale fantastic for Anne Hathaway, who is in the second chapter of her post- Princess Diaries career. In the first chapter, she made her

Princess transition with young adult roles in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain and 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada.

Now, she’s onscreen as a grown-up. She earned a 2009 best-actress Oscar nomination for her performance in

Rachel Getting Married, and recently completed her role of Fantine in the movie musical Les Misérables, which opens in December.

More famously, she portrays Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman, in the much-anticipated The Dark Knight

Rises, which opened on July 20 and is expected to set box-office records.

But fame wasn’t a motivation for pursuing the part made famous on the big screen by Michelle Pfeiffer in Tim Burton’s 1992 movie

The actress wanted to work for Christopher Nolan, who co-wrote and directed his third and final Batman film, and looked forward to acting opposite Christian Bale as the superhero.

Sporting a pixie-cut hairdo for her recently wrapped part, 29-year-old Hathaway puts it succinctly during an interview in a Beverly Hills hotel suite: “I would have played a footstool in this [Batman] movie.”

Instead, she’s one of Batman’s most familiar opponents. She joins Tom Hardy, who plays Bane. He’s a powerful League of Shadows reject preparing to eliminate Gotham City by detonating a nuclear bomb.

It is Bane’s terror threat that requires the secluded Batman to return to his crime-fighting ways. And while Selina Kyle is on the fringes of the Bane army, she may prove pivotal as events unfold.

Also new to Nolan’s Gotham is beat cop John Blake (Joseph GordonLevitt), who shares the Caped Crusader’s do-the-right-thing point of view. Marion Cotillard plays wealthy environmentalist Miranda Tate, a potential love interest for Bruce Wayne.

Refusing to be intimidated by the film series’ past successes, Hathaway says she ambitiously auditioned for an unnamed Dark Knight Rises part, then waited three agonizing months before Nolan called her into his Los Angeles office for a discussion.

Initially, she figured the role would be for Joker sidekick Harley Quinn, but was told otherwise at the meeting. It was the start of an all-in journey.

“Chris said, ‘OK, there’s going to be a lot of fighting,’ ” Hathaway recalls. “He said, ‘ When we did Inception, Joe [Gordon-Levitt] went to the gym for months, so that when we did his [zero gravity] fight sequence, he did all his own fighting.’

“I went, ‘Got you — I’m reading between the lines here.’ ”

After the conversation, the actress began her daily gym regimen until the movie wrapped in November 2011. The dedication paid off. She built up her endurance for the combat scenes and kept trim to look appropriately svelte in the tight Catwoman costume.

But her Selina Kyle character, an expert jewel thief, is never referred to as Catwoman in the film; and she doesn’t use a whip as Pfeiffer did, and doesn’t have a split personality.

“I loved that the focus was as Selina,” Hathaway says. “There wasn’t a schism within her, and she didn’t change when she put on her suit. It was kind of the uniform she had to wear for her job.”

The missing Catwoman reference also took some pressure off her approach to the performance. “It allowed me to take a turn with the character that defied being held up to other actresses who played Catwoman,” she explains.

What inspired her most was Nolan’s sophisticated and understated approach to presenting her. “Certainly, I know Anne and myself spent a lot of time talking and thinking about Selina’s backstory,” the director says. “We talked about where she would have come from and who she was.”

That sort of extra effort helped in a few other ways.

“That was actually something I felt very lucky about because in a situation like this, there could be a mandate, an ideal of how you have to look,” Hathaway says. “The way I was treated was to learn how to do what you need to do, and then how you look is the way the character looks. I felt, as a woman, very protected.”

Running in very high heels as Selina was something else again.

“It’s part of being a woman,” the actress admits. “You just figure it out. And, The Devil Wears Prada was really good training for that, too.”

Meanwhile, there is her Les Misérables role. Her singing ability as Fantine, the factory worker, might surprise some, but it’s no fluke.

Her mother, Kathleen, was an understudy for Fantine in the musical’s national touring company when Hathaway was an adolescent. “It was big part of my childhood,” she says. As a teen soprano, she competed in assorted singing competitions, before The Princess Diaries changed her life in 2001.

In fact, one of her most difficult tasks in Les Misérables was performing the celebrated Fantine number I Dreamed a Dream as though it was new to her.

“I had to sing it like I’d never heard of it before,” Hathaway says.

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