Anne Hathaway's 'Ocean's Eight' character is how she imagines she'd be if she took fame too seriously.

Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway

The 35-year-old star portrays an "awful" actress in the heist movie and while her alter ego isn't based on a real-life Hollywood figure, she drew inspiration from thinking about what could have been her fate if she was a different person.

She said: "She's called Daphne Kluger, she's an actress and - well, she's awful. She's won two Academy Awards and seven Golden Globes, she has two ex-husbands.

"She's very, very full of herself and doesn't care in the least about what people think about her because she doesn't care about other people."

Asked if she was based on anyone in particular, she added: "Not really. It was just an idea I had about how I might have been if, at the beginning of my career, I'd taken fame very seriously.

"And what would have happened if I'd cared about myself more than I care about other people."

The movie has a largely female cast, which includes Cate Blanchett, Awkwafina, Sandra Bullock, Sarah Paulson, Mindy Kaling, Helena Bonham Carter and Rihanna, and Anne made a lot of "very good" friends on set, insisting no one was a diva.

She said: "We became very good friends. I genuinely love all those women.

"Of course I've seen people behave badly in my life, but I've seen more people behave badly in the real world than on set.

"If you behave like that you probably won't have a very long career anyway, because at a certain point people can choose who they work with and most of the people who are at the top are lovely."

And the actress was pleased she could take her and husband Adam Schulman's son Jonathan, now two, to work with her if she wanted."

She told Britain's HELLO! magazine: "[Cate and Sandy] were very warm and welcoming to all of us and they made sure to let me know that this was a family-friendly set and that I could bring my son there any time.

"I didn't do it very often because he was six months at the time and crawling, and there are a lot of nails lying around on a set so it wasn't the ideal combination.

"But it meant a lot that they let me know I could."