Anne Hathaway won an Oscar in 2012 for her performance as the oppressed Fantine in “Les Miserables,” but she admits it wasn’t easy.

Hathaway shed 25 pounds to play the young orphan, and she tells People that she “wasn’t in a good place” at the time.

“I’d lost an unhealthy amount of weight in two weeks,” the 36-year-old said. “I didn’t know anything about nutrition. I taxed my body, and my brain bore the brunt of it for a while. I just felt very anxious and very lost at that time.”

After filming, the 36-year-old disclosed to Vogue that she shed 10 pounds through a strict cleanse before cameras began, then another 15 by consuming two thin squares of dry oatmeal paste a day for two weeks as her character approaches death. “That weight loss was not a long-term good thing for my health, and it took a really long time to come back from it,” she says. “And I was still really sick because of it.”

Anne Hathaway’s behind-the-scenes preparation for the big screen musical appears to have been as melancholy as her character. Fantine’s tremendously tough life as a French lady abandoned by the guy who impregnates her, causing her to sell her hair, teeth, and body to support her daughter, Cosette, was surely enhanced by her intense transformation. However, the toll it had on her bodily and emotional health proved to be more difficult than she had anticipated.

“I’d just turned 30, I’d just gotten married…. Even the most positive things can be upheavals to your identity. So to just have this moment and not really know who I was in the moment, where you just feel like you’re on display, it wasn’t a comfortable feeling. And I didn’t do what I hoped that I would if I ever found myself in that moment,” she said.

Hathaway was eventually able to move forward. “Life went on beyond it,” she says. “I feel much emptier now. It would have been nice if had happened then, but I’ll still take it.”

Anne is now taking a healthier approach to her life, as she recently said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that she is giving up alcohol for her son, Jonathan Rosebanks Shulman, 2. “For 18 years. I’m gonna stop drinking while my son is living in my house ,” the Serenity co-star revealed. She goes on to say that she doesn’t “totally love the way” she drinks and that her son is “getting to an age where he really does need me all the time, in the mornings.”