First time Academy Award nominee Anne Hathaway has fond memories of the time she spent working in Ireland before she arrived on the A-list. The actress, who'll walk the Oscar red carpet next month thanks to her star turn in "Rachel Getting Married," was more than happy to speak to Michael Dwyer, the movie critic for The Irish Times, during a promotional stop in London to plug her film. "I was so excited when I heard you were from The Irish Times ," she told Dwyer. "I'm a big fan of the paper." Hathaway spent three months in Ireland in 2004 and again in 2007 filming, respectively, "Ella Enchanted" and "Becoming Jane." Dublin, she recalls, couldn't have been more fun. "I had such a good time making those two movies, too much of a good time on 'Ella Enchanted,'" she said. "I had never encountered a place that was so much fun as Dublin and with such permissive social habits. By the time 'Becoming Jane' came around, I was much more in control." Though Hathaway had a blast over there, she did encounter a communication problem thanks to those sometimes indecipherable, Irish accents. "Dublin is a fabulous place. I highly recommend anyone going there. But if you've been to northern Dublin, you know that you can't always understand what people are saying," she said in a previous interview after filming "Ella Enchanted." "I had a wonderful driver whose name was Mark. It's kind of intimidating because he's Irish and they're very tough, so it took me about a month before I had to just admit to him that I had absolutely no clue what we'd been talking about for the past four weeks. "Then he slowed down and started enunciating. We would sign to each other, which was difficult because he was driving."