Natalie Portman

Natalie Hershlag (born June 9, 1981), known professionally as Natalie Portman, is an actress and filmmaker with dual Israeli and American citizenship. She has had a screen career from her teenage years and has starred in various blockbusters and independent films. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards.

Portman was born in Jerusalem and moved to the United States when she was three. She began her acting career at age 13, starring as the protégée of a hitman in Léon: The Professional (1994). While in high school, she made her Broadway debut in The Diary of Anne Frank (1997) and gained international recognition for her role as Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999).

From 1999 to 2003, Portman attended Harvard University, earning a bachelor's degree in psychology. During this time, she appeared in the next two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005) and performed in a 2001 revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at The Public Theater.

Portman's career gained further momentum in 2004 when she won a Golden Globe and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Closer. She then played Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta (2005), Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), and a troubled ballerina in Black Swan (2010), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

In the following years, Portman starred in the romantic comedy No Strings Attached (2011) and portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie (2016), which earned her a third Academy Award nomination. She played Jane Foster in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), which established her as one of the world's highest-paid actresses.

Portman directed the short film Eve (2008) and the biographical drama A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015), in which she also starred. In 2021, she co-founded the production company MountainA, which produced the film May December (2023) and the miniseries Lady in the Lake (2024); Portman also starred in both productions.

Portman is an advocate for various causes, including women's rights, environmental issues, and animal welfare, and supports organizations such as the Human Rights Foundation and the Jane Goodall Institute.

Early life

Natalie Hershlag was born on June 9, 1981, in Mount Scopus, Jerusalem at Hadassah Medical Center to Jewish parents. She is the only child of Shelley Stevens, an Ohio-born artist, and Avner Hershlag, an Israeli-born gynecologist. Portman's maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria who settled in the United States, while her paternal grandparents emigrated from Poland to the land of Israel/Palestine in the late 1930s.

Her grandfather had led a Jewish youth movement in Poland and went to Palestine expecting to send for his family later, but they were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Her paternal grandmother, originally from Romania, worked as a spy for the British during World War II. Portman is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States, and her first language is Hebrew.

Portman and her family immigrated to the United States around 1984, when Portman was three. They initially lived in Washington, D.C., relocating to Connecticut in 1988 and then settling in Syosset, Long Island. While living in Washington, Portman attended Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland. On Long Island, she attended a Jewish elementary school, the Solomon Schechter Day School of Nassau County.

She studied ballet and modern dance at the American Theater Dance Workshop, and regularly attended the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Portman has said that as a child she was more ambitious than her peers. She added, "I knew what I liked and what I wanted, and I worked very hard. I was a very serious kid".

When Portman was ten years old, a Revlon agent spotted her at a restaurant and asked her to become a model. She turned down the offer but used the opportunity to get an acting agent. She auditioned for the 1992 off-Broadway musical Ruthless!, which tells the story of a girl who is prepared to commit murder to get the lead role in a school play. Portman and Britney Spears were chosen as understudies for the play's star Laura Bell Bundy.

Career

1994–1998: Early work

Six months after Ruthless! ended, Portman auditioned for and secured a leading role in Luc Besson's action drama Léon: The Professional (1994). She adopted her paternal grandmother's maiden name, Portman, as her stage name. She played Mathilda, an orphaned child who befriends a middle-aged hitman (played by Jean Reno).

Her parents were reluctant to let the 13-year-old Portman play the role due to the explicit sexuality and violence in the script, but agreed to it after Besson removed Mathilda's nudity and the killings she committed. When the film was complete, Portman's mother was displeased that it contained "sexual twists and turns" which were not in the script.

In a 2023 interview, Portman described some aspects of the film as "cringey", and said her relationship to it is "complicated". Hal Hinson of The Washington Post commended Portman for bringing a "genuine sense of tragedy" to her part, while Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times believed that she was not "enough of an actress to unfold Mathilda's pain" and criticized Besson's sexualization of her character.

After filming The Professional, Portman went back to school and during the summer break of 1994, she filmed a part in Marya Cohn's short film Developing. In it she played a young girl coping with her mother's (played by Frances Conroy) cancer. She also enrolled at the Stagedoor Manor performing arts camp, where she played Anne Shirley in a staging of Anne of Green Gables.

Michael Mann offered her the small part of the suicidal stepdaughter of Al Pacino's character in the action film Heat (1995) for her ability to portray dysfunction without hysteria. Impressed by her performance in The Professional, the director Ted Demme cast her as a precocious teenager who flirts with her much-older neighbor (played by Timothy Hutton) in the ensemble comedy-drama Beautiful Girls (1996).

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Portman, a budding knockout, is scene-stealingly good even in an overly showy role." She subsequently went back to Stagedoor Manor to appear in a production of the musical Cabaret. Also in 1996, Portman had brief roles in Woody Allen's musical Everyone Says I Love You and Tim Burton's comic science fiction film Mars Attacks!.

Portman was cast opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), but she dropped out during rehearsals when studio executives found her too young for the role. Luhrmann said "Natalie was amazing in the footage, but it was too much of a burden for her at that age". She was also offered Adrian Lyne's Lolita, based on the novel of the same name, but she turned down the part due to its excessive sexual content.

She later bemoaned that her parts in The Professional and Beautiful Girls prompted a series of offers to play a sexualized youngster, adding that it "dictated a lot of my choices afterwards 'cos it scared me ... it made me reluctant to do sexy stuff".

Portman instead signed on to star as Anne Frank in a Broadway revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, which was staged at the Music Box Theatre from December 1997 to May 1998. In preparation, she twice visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and interacted with Miep Gies, who had preserved Anne's diary after the family was captured; she found a connection with Frank's story, given her own family's history with the Holocaust.

Reviewing the production for Variety, Greg Evans disliked her portrayal, which he thought had "little of the charm, budding genius or even brittle intelligence that the diary itself reveals". Conversely, Ben Brantley found an "ineffable grace in her awkwardness". The experience of performing the play was emotionally draining for her, as she attended high school during the day and performed at night; she wrote personal essays in Time and Seventeen magazines about her experience.

1999–2006: Star Wars, education, and transition to mature roles

Portman began filming the part of Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy in 1997, which marked her first big-budget production. The first film of the series, Episode I – The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, when she was in her senior year of high school. Portman was unfamiliar with the franchise when she was cast, and watched the original Star Wars trilogy before filming began.

She worked closely with the director George Lucas on her character's accent and mannerisms, and watched the films of Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, and Katharine Hepburn to draw inspiration from their voice and stature. Filming in arduous locations in Algeria proved challenging for Portman. She did not attend the film's premiere so she could study for her high school finals.

The critical response to the film was mixed, but with earnings of $924 million worldwide it was the second highest-grossing film of all time to that point, and it established Portman as a global star.

Portman graduated from Syosset High School in 1999. Her high school paper, "A Simple Method to Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar", co-authored with scientists Ian Hurley and Jonathan Woodward, was entered in the Intel Science Talent Search. Following production on The Phantom Menace, Portman initially turned down a lead role in the coming-of-age film Anywhere but Here (1999) after learning it would involve a sex scene, but the director Wayne Wang and actress Susan Sarandon (who played Portman's mother in the film) demanded a rewrite of the script.

She was shown a new draft, and decided to accept the part. Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon called Portman's performance "astonishing" and added that "unlike any number of actresses her age, she's neither too maudlin nor too plucky". She received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination for it.

Portman's sole screen appearance in 2000 was in Where the Heart Is, a romantic drama filmed in Texas, in which she played a pregnant teenager. After finishing work on the film, she began attending Harvard University to pursue her bachelor's degree in psychology, and significantly reduced her acting roles over the next few years.

At Harvard she served as Alan Dershowitz's research assistant for his book The Case for Israel. Both spoke highly of each other and described themselves as close friends, with Dershowitz calling her a "terrific student." She then studied advanced Hebrew literature and neurobiology, In the summer of 2001, she returned to Broadway (at the Delacorte Theater) to perform Chekhov's drama The Seagull, which was directed by Mike Nichols and co-starred Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Linda Winer of Newsday wrote that the "major surprises come from Portman, whose Nina transforms with astonishing lyricism from the girl with ambition to Chekhov's most difficult symbol of destruction". Also in 2001, Portman was among several celebrities who made cameo appearances in the comedy Zoolander.

The following year she reprised her role of Amidala in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, which she had filmed in Sydney and London during her summer break of 2000. She was excited by the opportunity to play a confident young woman who did not depend on the male lead. When asked about balancing her career and education, she said, "I don't care if [college] ruins my career.

I'd rather be smart than a movie star." In 2002, she contributed to a study on memory called "Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy". Portman graduated from Harvard in 2003 and her sole screen appearance that year was in the brief part of a young mother in the war film Cold Mountain.

She described this period as the "most difficult time" in her life, noting that she wasn't getting work and felt criticized for her performances in Star Wars. After taking time off, she begged for the Cold Mountain role, which Mike Nichols helped secure, offering her a letter of support that helped her regain confidence.

Portman began 2004 by featuring in the romantic comedy Garden State, which was written and directed by its star Zach Braff. She was the first actor to sign on to the film after finding a connection with her part: a spirited young girl suffering from epilepsy. Her role in it was described by Nathan Rabin of The A.V.

Club. as a prime example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character type – a stereotypical female role designed to spiritually help a male protagonist. Portman later said she found it upsetting to have contributed to the trope. She followed it by playing a mysterious stripper in Closer, a romantic drama directed by Mike Nichols based on the play of the same name, and co-starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Clive Owen.

Portman agreed to her first sexually explicit adult role after turning down such parts in the past, saying it reflected her own maturity as a person. She had also performed her first nude scenes for the film, but they were deleted from the final cut when she insisted that they were inessential to the story. Closer grossed over $115 million worldwide against a $27 million budget, and the critic Peter Travers took note of Portman's "blazing, breakthrough performance", writing that she "digs so deep into the bruised core of her character that they seem to wear the same skin." She won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and received an Academy Award nomination in the same category.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, the final installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, was Portman's first film release of 2005. It earned over $848 million to rank as the second-highest-grossing film of the year. She next played a Jewish American girl in Free Zone (2005), a drama from Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai.

During the project, which was shot in Israel—particularly in the spring of 2004—she spent six months taking graduate courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studying subjects such as the anthropology of violence and Middle Eastern studies. In 2005, she read the memoirs of Yitzhak Rabin and a novel by David Grossman, which she said helped her explore both the role and her own heritage, and remarked that, "living in Israel is really beautiful.

One of the most shocking things is how peaceful it feels." Critics disliked the film for its heavy-handed approach to the conflicts in the Middle East.

Portman's final film role in 2005 was that of Evey Hammond in the political thriller V for Vendetta, based on the comics of the same name, about an alternative future where a neo-fascist regime has subjugated the United Kingdom. She was drawn to the provocative nature of the script, and worked with a dialect coach to speak in an English accent.

In a scene in which her character is tortured, her head was shaved on camera; she considered it an opportunity to rid herself of vanity. Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle deemed it Portman's strongest performance to that point, and remarked that she "keeps you focused on her words and actions instead of her bald head." She was awarded the Saturn Award for Best Actress.

Portman began 2006 by hosting an episode of the television sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. One of her sketches, a song named "Natalie's Rap", was released later in 2009 on Incredibad, an album by the Lonely Island. In the anthology film Paris, je t'aime, consisting of eighteen short films, she had a role in the segment named "Faubourg Saint-Denis" from director Tom Tykwer.

Later that year, she starred in Miloš Forman's Goya's Ghosts, about the painter Francisco Goya. Forman cast her in the film after finding a resemblance between her and Goya's portrait The Milkmaid of Bordeaux. She insisted on using a body double for her nude scenes after discovering on set that she had to perform them when they were not originally in the script.

It received predominantly negative reviews, but Roger Ebert was appreciative of Portman for playing her dual role "with fearless conviction".

2007–2015: Career expansion and Black Swan

Portman began 2007 by replacing Jodie Foster in Wong Kar-wai's romantic drama My Blueberry Nights, which was his first English-language film. For her role as a gambler, she trained with a poker coach. Richard Corliss of Time magazine believed that "for once she's not playing a waif or a child princess but a mature, full-bodied woman" and commended her "vibrancy, grittiness and ache, all performed with a virtuosa's easy assurance".

Her next appearance was in Hotel Chevalier, a short film from Wes Anderson, which served as a prolog to his feature The Darjeeling Limited (in which Portman had a cameo). In the short, she and Jason Schwartzman play former lovers who reunite in a Paris hotel room. For the first time, Portman performed an extended nude scene; she was later disappointed at the undue focus on it and she subsequently swore off appearing nude again.

Keen to work in different genres, Portman accepted a role in the children's film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, playing an employee of a magical toy store. She also appeared in Paul McCartney's music video "Dance Tonight" from his album Memory Almost Full, directed by Michel Gondry.

Scarlett Johansson and Portman portrayed rival sisters Mary and Anne Boleyn, respectively, in the period film The Other Boleyn Girl (2008). She was excited by the opportunity to work opposite another actress her age, bemoaning that such casting was rare in film. The film had modest box-office earnings. Derek Elley of Variety was critical of Portman's English accent and wrote that she "doesn't quite bring the necessary heft to make Anne a truly dominant power player".

She served as a jury member of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and also launched her own production company, named handsomecharlie films, after her late dog. Portman's directorial debut, the short film Eve, opened the short-film screenings at the 65th Venice International Film Festival. It is about a young woman who goes to her grandmother's romantic date, and Portman drew inspiration for the older character (played by Lauren Bacall) from her own grandmother.