Natalie Portman

• 1. Introduction

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  Natalie Portman was born on the 9th of June 1981, in Jerusalem, at Hadassah Medical Center. She has spent most of her life navigating two worlds: the concentrated pressures of global stardom and the layered complexities of her Israeli-American identity. At twelve she was already on film sets. By her early twenties she had a Harvard degree. By thirty she had an Academy Award. The question her career keeps posing is not how she got there, but how she kept pushing into stranger, harder territory after she arrived. What drives someone to shave her head on camera, direct a film in Hebrew, co-found a soccer team, and decline a two-million-dollar prize on principle? The answer is threaded through the choices she has made at almost every turning point.

• 2. Roots and Early Formation

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  Natalie Hershlag spent her first three years in Jerusalem before her family moved to the United States, settling first in Washington, D.C., then Connecticut, and eventually Syosset on Long Island. Her father, Avner Hershlag, is an Israeli-born gynecologist. Her mother, Shelley Stevens, is an Ohio-born artist whose own parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria.

  The family history carries a particular weight. Her paternal grandparents emigrated from Poland to Palestine in the late 1930s. Her grandfather had led a Jewish youth movement in Poland and expected to bring his family over after him. They were killed at Auschwitz. Her paternal grandmother, originally from Romania, worked as a spy for the British during World War II. These were not abstract historical facts to a child who would later twice visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and meet Miep Gies, the woman who had preserved Anne's diary.

  Portman has described her early self as "different from the other kids. I was more ambitious. I knew what I liked and what I wanted, and I worked very hard. I was a very serious kid." That seriousness showed early. She studied ballet and modern dance at the American Theater Dance Workshop and attended the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. When a Revlon agent spotted her at a pizza restaurant when she was ten and offered her modeling work, she turned it down. Instead, she used the opportunity to obtain an acting agent.

• 3. A Striking Debut

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  Six months after appearing as an understudy in the off-Broadway musical Ruthless! alongside a young Britney Spears, Portman auditioned for and won the lead role in Luc Besson's action drama Léon: The Professional (1994). She was twelve. She adopted her paternal grandmother's maiden name, Portman, as her stage name for the film.

  Her parents were reluctant to allow it. The original script contained nudity and killings involving the character Mathilda, a child who befriends a middle-aged hitman played by Jean Reno. Besson agreed to remove those elements. Even so, Portman's mother was unsettled by "sexual twists and turns" that appeared in the finished film but had not been in the script she reviewed. Critics were divided. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post found that Portman brought a "genuine sense of tragedy" to the role, while Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times argued she was not "enough of an actress to unfold Mathilda's pain".

  The film's legacy for Portman was double-edged. It established her as a talent worth watching but also prompted a wave of offers to play sexualized young girls, which she later said "dictated a lot of my choices afterwards 'cos it scared me." She turned down the lead in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, where studio executives deemed her too young. She declined the lead in Adrian Lyne's Lolita on the grounds of its sexual content. The pattern of refusal was itself a kind of self-definition. Those experiences, she said, made her "reluctant to do sexy stuff".

  Director Michael Mann, impressed by her work in The Professional, cast her in the action film Heat (1995) specifically for her ability to portray dysfunction without hysteria. Ted Demme followed, casting her in Beautiful Girls (1996). Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Portman was "scene-stealingly good even in an overly showy role."

• 4. Anne Frank and Education

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  Portman prepared for her Broadway role as Anne Frank by visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam twice and meeting Miep Gies in person. Gies had preserved the diary after Anne's family was captured, and the encounter resonated directly with Portman's own family history.

  The production ran at the Music Box Theatre from December 1997 to May 1998. Reviews were split. Writing for Variety, Greg Evans felt her portrayal lacked the "charm, budding genius or even brittle intelligence that the diary itself reveals." Ben Brantley found an "ineffable grace in her awkwardness." Portman attended high school during the day and performed at night. She described the experience as emotionally draining and wrote personal essays about it in Time and Seventeen magazines.

  She graduated from Syosset High School in 1999 and enrolled at Harvard University to study psychology. A high school paper she co-authored with scientists Ian Hurley and Jonathan Woodward on the enzymatic production of hydrogen from sugar was entered in the Intel Science Talent Search. At Harvard, she served as research assistant to Alan Dershowitz for his book The Case for Israel, studied advanced Hebrew literature and neurobiology, and contributed to a memory study titled "Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy." Dershowitz called her a "terrific student." She graduated in 2003.

  During her college years, she performed in a 2001 revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the Delacorte Theater, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring 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." When asked publicly about balancing study with her career, she said: "I don't care if college ruins my career. I'd rather be smart than a movie star."

• 5. Star Wars and Turning Points

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  Portman began filming the role of Padmé Amidala in 1997, the same year she was preparing for Anne Frank on Broadway. She was unfamiliar with the franchise when cast and watched the original trilogy before shooting began. She worked directly with director George Lucas on her character's accent and mannerisms, and studied films featuring Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, and Katharine Hepburn as reference points for voice and posture.

  Star Wars: Episode I , The Phantom Menace was released in 1999 and earned $924 million worldwide, the second highest-grossing film of all time at that point. Portman did not attend the premiere because she was studying for her high school finals. She later described the years during and after Harvard as the "most difficult time" in her life, when she wasn't finding work and felt her performances in the Star Wars films were being criticized. It was Mike Nichols who helped her secure a small role in Cold Mountain (2003), offering a letter of support that helped restore her confidence.

  The transition out of that difficult period came through two very different projects. In Garden State (2004), written and directed by Zach Braff, she played a spirited young woman with epilepsy. Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club later identified the character as a prime example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, and Portman said she found it upsetting to have contributed to that trope.

  The more transformative role came in Mike Nichols's Closer (2004), opposite Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Clive Owen. She agreed to her first sexually explicit adult role after years of avoidance, regarding it as a reflection of her own maturity. Nudity she filmed for the project was later cut at her insistence. Closer grossed over $115 million against a $27 million budget. She won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and received an Academy Award nomination in the same category. Peter Travers wrote that she "digs so deep into the bruised core of her character that they seem to wear the same skin."

• 6. Black Swan and Its Aftermath

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  Darren Aronofsky's psychological horror film Black Swan required Portman to train as a ballerina for five to eight hours daily over six months. She worked with professional ballerina Mary Helen Bowers and lost 20 lb during preparation.

  The film cost $13 million to produce and earned over $329 million worldwide. It became a sleeper hit. Dan Jolin of Empire described her performance as "simultaneously at her most vulnerable and her most predatory, at once frostily brittle and raunchily malleable." The Academy Award for Best Actress followed.

  Controversy followed the awards season. Dancing double Sarah Lane claimed Portman performed only about five percent of the full-body shots and said she had been asked by producers not to discuss the matter publicly during the campaign. Aronofsky maintained that Portman performed 80 percent of the on-screen dancing.

  In the years directly after Black Swan, Portman described the romantic comedy No Strings Attached (2011) as a "palate cleanser." She signed on to Thor (2011) before she received a script, drawn by the prospect of Kenneth Branagh directing a large-budget film with an emphasis on character. She prepared by reading the biography of scientists including Rosalind Franklin. Richard Kuipers of Variety credited her with "sterling work in a thinly written role." The film earned $449.3 million worldwide. In 2012, Forbes ranked her at the top of its listing of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, and two years later estimated her previous year's income at $13 million.

• 7. Directing and Producing

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  Portman's directorial debut, the short film Eve, opened the short-film screenings at the 65th Venice International Film Festival in 2008. She drew inspiration for the older character, played by Lauren Bacall, from her own grandmother. She launched her own production company that same year, naming it handsomecharlie films after her late dog.

  A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015) was a far more ambitious undertaking. Based on Amos Oz's autobiographical novel set in Jerusalem during the last years of the British Mandate of Palestine, the film was shot in Hebrew and starred Portman in the lead role of a mother. She also co-wrote and produced it. She had wanted to adapt the book since she first read it, but waited until she was old enough to play the part herself. She worked closely with Oz, showing him drafts of her script throughout the process. While the Israeli government provided partial funding, Portman was direct about the film's intent: "absolutely not" pro-Israeli or patriotic. A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it a "conscientious adaptation of a difficult book."

  Portman co-founded the production company MountainA in 2021 with producing partner Sophie Mas, signing a first-look television deal with Apple TV+. The company's first film, May December, directed by Todd Haynes and co-starring Julianne Moore, premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Portman played an actress researching a woman whose marriage to a much younger man had been publicly controversial. Geoffrey Macnab of The Independent believed the film had been "galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore." MountainA also produced the HBO documentary series Angel City, which followed the inaugural season of Angel City FC, a soccer team Portman co-founded in July 2020.

• 8. Activism and Identity

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  Portman became a vegetarian at eight years old after witnessing a laser surgery demonstration on a chicken at a medical conference she attended with her father. She became a vegan in 2009 after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals and later produced a documentary by the same name. In 2007, she launched a brand of animal-friendly footwear and traveled to Rwanda with Jack Hanna to film the documentary Gorillas on the Brink.

  In 2004 and 2005, she traveled to Uganda, Guatemala, and Ecuador as Ambassador of Hope for FINCA International, an organization focused on micro-lending to support women-owned businesses in developing countries. She later visited university campuses including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia to encourage students to join the Village Banking Campaign.

  At the 2018 Women's March in Los Angeles, Portman spoke about her experience at thirteen following the release of Léon: The Professional. She told the crowd: "I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually I would feel unsafe and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort." She donated $50,000 to the Time's Up initiative in January 2018.

  Portman's relationship with Israel is one she has described as complex: "like family, you love it more than anything else in the world, and you are also more critical of it than anything else in the world." In November 2017, she was announced as the recipient of the Genesis Prize for 2018, which carries $2,000,000 in prize money. In April 2018, she announced she would not attend the ceremony, citing discomfort with recent events in Israel. The ceremony was canceled. The Israeli Culture Minister and other politicians condemned the decision. A Knesset member called for her Israeli citizenship to be revoked. Portman clarified her position: "I am not part of the BDS movement and do not endorse it. Like many Israelis and Jews, I can be critical of Israel's leadership without wanting to boycott the nation." Her next scheduled project is Fountain of Youth, directed by Guy Ritchie, continuing her work under the Apple TV+ partnership she built with MountainA.