ACTRESS ISRAEL AND UNITED STATESIt’s always fun to do something different; challenge yourself in new ways.
—NATALIE PORTMAN
Natalie stepped outside into the snow and rested her mittened hands on the picket fence. In jeans and a warm plaid coat, with her brown hair pulled back from her face, Natalie looked like any other teenager on a winter morning. If she weren’t surrounded by a camera crew, someone might have said she looked like the average girl next door.
In fact, in this case, Natalie was the girl next door: she was acting in the role of Marty, the teenage neighbor of a character played by famous actor Timothy Hutton in the movie Beautiful Girls. As Natalie started delivering her lines—bantering with Hutton about his snow-shoveling abilities—her presence was confident and poised, despite the fact that she was only in her early teens.
The scene lasted just two and a half minutes, but in that short time Natalie managed to successfully establish the off-beat character that she’d play for the rest of the movie. When the film premiered, her performance earned rave reviews and even nominations for Best Supporting Actress and Most Promising Actress from the Chicago Film Critics Association! Though it wasn’t Natalie’s first movie role, it helped launch her career as one of today’s most successful movie stars.
The actress the world knows as Natalie Portman was born Natalie Hershlag on June 9, 1981, in Jerusalem, Israel. (She would later adopt the stage name Portman to protect her family’s privacy when she started acting.) Natalie’s father is a fertility doctor, and her mother an artist. When Natalie was three, she and her parents moved to the United States, where they lived in Washington, DC, Connecticut, and then New York.
Natalie showed artistic talent from an early age, starting to study dance soon after she moved to the United States. She also attended theater camps and liked putting on performances with her neighborhood friends. Even as a child, Natalie had a riveting presence, and when she was eleven, an agent approached her in a pizza parlor and asked her to model for Revlon. She turned down the offer, though, in order to concentrate on acting. Her focus paid off when she got the opportunity to star in her first movie, Léon: The Professional, when she was only twelve years old. Natalie’s debut movie tells the story of a girl who becomes apprenticed to a professional assassin after her parents are killed. While Natalie’s performance in Léon: The Professional earned mostly positive reviews, some critics felt uneasy about the role because it brought up mature and violent themes, especially given the actor’s young age.
Natalie is also a scientist! She has co-written two research papers that were published in scientific journals. She was also named a semifinalist in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search.
Soon after her movie debut, Natalie landed parts in other films. Her role as precocious neighbor Marty in Beautiful Girls came in 1996, and critics were again impressed with Natalie’s performance—a New York Times review called her “scene-stealingly good” and “a budding knockout.” By the late 1990s, Natalie was firmly established as a rising talent in the film world. Among other roles, she starred as a daughter who moves across the country with her mom in Anywhere but Here and as Queen Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. In the 2000s, Natalie starred in such movies as Garden State, Closer, V for Vendetta, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, The Other Boleyn Girl, Brothers, and Black Swan, among others. It should be noted that Natalie has played a variety of film roles, and many of these movies are best suited for mature audiences.
Natalie is such a perfectionist that she won’t cross anything out—she uses Wite-Out!
Natalie has never shied away from challenging parts, and her success in a wide range of roles speaks to her versatility as an actress. She works hard to prepare for every movie. For her part in V for Vendetta, Natalie shaved her head and studied with a voice coach to perfect a British accent, practicing by speaking with the accent all the time in her day-to-day life. For Black Swan she trained in ballet for up to eight hours a day and continued with her role despite a rib injury and a concussion. Natalie immerses herself in her roles and says, “It’s one of the best things about acting—living someone else’s life and their experiences, to see what the world is like through their eyes.”35
Natalie’s work has earned well-deserved acclaim, including an Academy Award, Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award, and many other honors. Natalie’s accomplishments extend beyond the screen to the stage, too; she starred as the title character in the play The Diary of Anne Frank and played a role in The Seagull by Anton Chekov. She has also started to work as a producer, founding a production company called HandsomeCharlie Films.
Throughout her life, Natalie has devoted herself to education, and she has excelled in her studies just as she’s thrived as an actor. She took advanced placement curriculum at her public high school on Long Island, New York, and she even missed the New York premiere of Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace to study for high school finals! Natalie went on to Harvard University, where she earned a degree in psychology and restricted her movie work to summer breaks in order to concentrate on her studies. Since graduating from Harvard, Natalie has taken classes at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She speaks Hebrew and English and has also studied Arabic, French, German, and Japanese.
Natalie is passionate about many social issues. She believes strongly in animal rights and has been a vegetarian since age eight. She avoids wearing or using animal products like fur, leather, and feathers and has even started her own shoe line featuring footwear that does not use any products from animals.
Another important cause for Natalie is helping impoverished people around the world earn enough money to take care of themselves and their families. Natalie has worked with international organizations that provide banking programs for families in developing countries. As part of their work, these groups offer small loans called microloans to help people—most often women—start their own businesses and earn a living.
Natalie has generally preferred to keep her personal life private, but it’s clear that she’s close to her parents and that family has always been important to her. At the age of thirty, Natalie started a family of her own with fiancé Benjamin Millepied, a ballet dancer she met on the set of Black Swan. The couple welcomed a baby boy in the summer of 2011.
While Natalie has now added the role of mom to her life, we can look forward to continuing to see her on the screen as well. Her work is always evolving, and with her intelligence, creativity, and love for learning, she will always be setting new challenges for herself and meeting them with success.