Can Hathaway swipe Oscar from under Winslet’s nose?

For someone dumb enough to spend four years as the girlfriend of an Italian conman, Anne Hathaway is proving remarkably smart as the outside chance for this year's Best Actress Oscar.

The raven-haired, porcelain-skinned, doe-eyed star with the startled expression is coming up fast on Kate Winslet, Oscar-winner in waiting since her Titanic debut, and Meryl Streep, a veteran with two gold statuettes already on her mantelpiece.

It might be quite a night. Most film critics tip Winslet, but her movie, The Reader, is being questioned because the character she plays, a former Nazi camp guard, is deemed insufficiently repentant.

Streep, who terrorised the ingenue Hathaway in her break-out movie, The Devil Wears Prada, is as good as ever in Doubt, but the movie lacks glamour in the multiplexes and, well, there wouldn't be much of a frisson if her name came out of the envelope again.

Hathaway's role in Rachel Getting Married is the most interesting, which should be a good start. She is the tormented ex-junkie who gets out of rehab to attend her sister Rachel's wedding, and manages to dominate the Big Day with her narcissistic outpouring of family tensions and recriminations. This offers her a role with which to plumb her emotional depths for a potentially career-making performance.

Hathaway may have that important Hollywood quality, a manipulative nature

Of course everybody knows that there's more to winning an Oscar than acting, and it is off-stage that Hathaway is finding her form. There are encouraging signs that beneath the veneer lies something dark and strange, and that Hathaway is blessed with that important Hollywood quality, a manipulative nature.

Hathaway knows when to switch on the klieg lights, and when to play the innocent we first met as a teenager in The Princess Diaries. She has the knack of combining both personae, on-screen and off.
 
All this might be confined to the Arts Page if it were not for the tabloid tale Hathaway launched into the headlines last summer: her relationship with that Italian conman.

In 2004, when she was just 23, Hathaway fell for a handsome Italian emigre, Raffaello Follieri, as smooth a fellow as a girl could hope to meet. Part of the appeal was that he had nothing to do with stage or screen. He was the real thing: a multi-millionaire of impeccable manners and breeding, dark hair swept back with almost arrogant poise, a man who could make a fortune in the property business on the basis of his close relationship with the Vatican, no less.
 
Hathaway's career had begun as the little American girl who discovers that she is really a European princess, and here she was living out the real thing! What's more, it seems Follieri lived-up to his national stereotype as a stud: a cache of nude photos and hot videotapes are known to be in the custody of the FBI.

The happy couple lived in a $40,000-a-month Trump Tower penthouse with a Labrador dog named Esmeralda, and Hathaway sat on the board of his personal Follieri Foundation, fashionably distributing aid to Third World children.

But it was all fake. Last autumn, Raffaello was jailed for four-and-a-half years on all sorts of fraud charges, owing half-a-million to American Express and another $450,000 for private charter jet flights. He even wrote a dud cheque for $215,000 on an account holding $39.98.

Hathaway was smart enough to dump Raffaello just before he was arrested

Raffaello was a 'performer', a man who saw no distinction between the smoke-and-mirrors of Hollywood and a world of Popes and real estate of his own invention but played for real. The performance must have been the lure for Hathaway, who, after all, was named for Mrs William Shakespeare and, with an actress for a mother, had aspired to nothing beyond greasepaint and cameras all her life.

She was smart enough to dump Raffaello just before he was arrested. She told Vogue that it was not a "huge, dramatic break-up" and that they had been "winding down". Even her landlord, Donald Trump, commented that she was "not very loyal".

Hathaway kept her mouth shut with the tabloids, while offering her thanks in better quality magazines to her family. Accepting her Critics Choice award for Rachel, she triumphed as the betrayed lover saved by the love and gratitude she felt as a daughter. Her father was her protection. "He has shown me," she said, “"there are good men in the world and lets me know every day that I am worthy of the love of good people."

The jury is still out on Hathaway as an actress, but she has shown a terrific talent as a movie star. If anyone can snatch that Oscar from Winslet, it will be her. ·