Anne Hathaway’s gotten smart about many things, but especially Hollywood.

A bona fide A-lister, the range of roles she’s chosen—and nailed—are making her a star for the ages. Anne Hathaway arrives for lunch with her brother and a thick, dog-eared copy of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography. Her brother leaves, Gandhi stays, and both signify.

Hathaway, who turns 26 this month with 16 films on her résumé, is in the throes of a career rise that’s meteoric in more ways than one.

Those aren’t just any films. To surf from the instant fame at 19 of The Princess Diaries (2001) and its sunny follow-ups to the sophisticated challenges of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Julian Jarrold’s Becoming Jane (2007), Peter Segal’s Get Smart (2008), and Jonathan Demme’s newly opened Rachel Getting Married could give any young actor a DUI-inducing case of ego bends. Not Hathaway.

At the mention of prestigious A-listers Lee and Demme in the same sentence, she lets out a laugh as healthy as it is incredulous and says, “Can you believe it?” One can, not least because of Hathaway’s talent, which has been blossoming so fast it looks like a time-lapse effect in a nature documentary.

In Demme’s excellent film, her lead performance as Kym, an upscale Connecticut junkie on leave from rehab long enough to embarrass everyone but her oblivious self with an interminable, self-centered toast at her sister’s wedding, is a tour of human complexity, at once comic, awful, raw, and wrenching.

Hathaway has held her own opposite such top shelf stars as Julie Andrews, Meryl Streep, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Steve Carell. She did memorable work in Brokeback as an exuberant if pampered daddy’s girl who goes burnt around the edges when the Mr. Right she marries becomes Mr. Incredibly Wrong.

By contrast, she was deft and graceful in Prada, playing the earnest, fresh-faced foil to Streep’s seen-it-all comic dragon. Still, she’s never done anything so alarmingly fine as the fierce, damaged Kym, repeatedly going down in spectacular flames only to struggle up from the ashes like a bedraggled phoenix with the world’s worst haircut ...

Read more about Anne Hathaway at Elle