Why Anne Hathaway can’t seem to shake her ‘vanilla’ image

Anne Hathaway should be riding high off the success of her latest blockbuster flick, “Les Miserables.” Nonetheless, the recently wed actress laments that she’s devoid of sex appeal, describing her overall persona as incredibly “vanilla.” And we can’t exactly argue with her. Hathaway has spent a good deal of her film career as either an adolescent or a substantially naive young adult. Here’s a bit of proof that she’ll need to work a little harder to shed her notoriously sweet image…

The “Les Miserables” Haircut

Charlize Theron made buzzed hair look tribal and cool. Natalie Portman’s “V for Vendetta” hair chop made a seamless play on the red carpet. Even Demi Moore and her “G.I. Jane” crew cut enhanced her Tough Chick movie cred. Anne Hathaway’s short haircut for lack of a better description -- made her look like a little boy, albeit an adorable little boy. So many other Hollywood stars undergoing the big hair chop have managed to make the look a polished part of their red carpet appeal, while Anne appears to have struggled; her apparent “vanilla” image merely took the cropped look to the opposite end of the sexy haircut spectrum.

The Catwoman costume…

2011’s “The Dark Knight Rises” stirred quite the hullabaloo online, incidentally, because of the “meh” reaction Anne’s Catwoman outfit created. The costume, for all intents and purposes, was pretty slick, though not quite as slick as Michelle Pfeiffer’s 1992 feline get-up. But critics not only lambasted the suit’s aesthetic changes, but also, Hathaway’s “underwhelming” portrayal of the feline anti-hero.

Not even a wardrobe malfunction could “save” her.

Having your crotch exposed for the world to see is perhaps the nightmare of every young Hollywood starlet (except for maybe a few). When Anne’s private parts were revealed as she exited a limo for the “Les Miserables” movie premiere in New York, she was reportedly devastated. Under typical circumstances, a wardrobe malfunction on any other star might incite pinpricks of arousal. (Come on, admit it.) But we cringed right along with her.

Indeed, she’s not exactly shy about baring her skin for a movie role. She went topless playing a teen in 2005 film “Havoc”; but the movie’s wayward context overrode any sex appeal to be garnered from Hathaway's racy, semi-nude scenes. She spent a good deal making googly eyes at Jake Gyllenhaal in “Love and Other Drugs” and they even rolled around naked. Alas, Parkinson’s disease is a heavy and difficult topic to make sexy. Vanilla wins again.