Anne Hathaway, who plays sickly prostitute Fantine in the big screen adaptation of the hit musical Les Miserables, has said that she had a gruelling time filming the movie, as she had to lose a drastic amount of weight.

She put herself on a near-starvation diet of two thin squares of dried oatmeal a day during the shoot and ended up losing 11kg. “I had to be obsessive about it - the idea was to look near death,” the Daily Telegraph quoted her as telling Vogue US.

“Looking back on the whole experience - and I don’t judge it in any way - it was definitely a little nuts. “It was definitely a break with reality, but I think that’s who Fantine is anyway,” she said. When filming finished she was in such a state of deprivation - physical and emotional. “When I got home, I couldn’t react to the chaos of the world without being overwhelmed. It took me weeks till I felt like myself again,” she said.

Hathaway said that her new husband, Adam Schulman, helped her get through the ordeal. “The first time I really threw everything into a part, which was when I did Rachel Getting Married, there was no one waiting for me when I got back. This time, Adam was there,” she said. “He gets what I do and who I am and supports me in it, and that’s pretty awesome,” she added.