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Natalie Portman | |
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 Portman in 2023 | |
| Born | Natalie Hershlag June 9, 1981 |
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| Education | Harvard University (AB) |
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| Years active | 1993–present |
| Works | Full list |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | Full list |
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Natalie Portman (née Hershlag,[1] Hebrew: נטע-לי הרשלג,[a][4][6] born June 9, 1981) is an Israeli-born American actress. She has had a prolific film career from her teenage years and has starred in various blockbusters and independent films, receiving multiple accolades, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards.
Portman began her acting career at age twelve, when she starred as the young protégée of a hitman in the action film Léon: The Professional (1994). While in high school, she made her Broadway debut in a 1998 production of The Diary of a Young Girl and gained international recognition for starring as Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). From 1999 to 2003, Portman attended Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in psychology. She reduced her number of acting roles, but continued to act in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002, 2005) and in The Public Theater's 2001 revival of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull.
In 2004, Portman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a Golden Globe for playing a mysterious stripper in the romantic drama Closer. Portman's career further advanced with her starring roles as Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta (2005), Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), and a troubled ballerina in the psychological thriller Black Swan (2010), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She starred in the romantic comedy No Strings Attached (2011) and portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the biopic Jackie (2016), which earned her a third Academy Award nomination. Portman has also featured as Jane Foster in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero 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. Co-founding the production company MountainA in 2021, Portman produced and starred in the drama May December (2023).
Portman's directorial ventures include the short film Eve (2008) and the biographical drama A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015). She is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States, and an advocate for animal rights and environmental causes. She was married to dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied from 2012 to 2024, with whom she has two children.
Early life and background[edit]
Natalie Hershlag[4] was born on June 9, 1981, in Jerusalem, to Jewish parents with roots in Poland, Russia, Austria, and Romania.[7][5][8][9][10] She is the only child of Shelley (née Stevens),[11] an American homemaker who works as Portman's agent, and Avner Hershlag, an Israeli-born gynecologist.[12] Her maternal grandparents were American Jews, whereas her paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants to Israel.[13][8][14] Portman is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States.[15][16][17]
Portman and her family first lived in Washington, D.C., but relocated to Connecticut in 1988 and then moved to Long Island[18] in 1990.[19][20] While living in Washington, Portman attended Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland.[8] Her native language is Hebrew.[5] While living on Long Island, she attended a Jewish elementary school, the Solomon Schechter Day School of Nassau County.[18] She studied ballet and modern dance at the American Theater Dance Workshop, and regularly attended the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts.[18] Describing her early life, Portman has said that she was "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."[21]
When Portman was ten years old, a Revlon agent spotted her at a pizza restaurant and asked her to become a child model.[22] She turned down the offer but used the opportunity to get an acting agent.[23][24] She auditioned for the 1992 off-Broadway Ruthless!, a musical about a girl who is prepared to commit murder to get the lead in a school play.[25] Portman and Britney Spears were chosen as understudies for star Laura Bell Bundy.[26]
Career[edit]
1994–1998: Early work[edit]
Six months after Ruthless! ended, Portman auditioned for and secured a leading role in Luc Besson's action drama Léon: The Professional (1994).[24] She adopted her paternal grandmother's maiden name, Portman, as her stage name.[27][28] She played Mathilda, an orphan child who befriends a middle-aged hitman (played by Jean Reno). Her parents were reluctant to let her do the part due to the explicit sexual and violent nature of the script, but agreed after Besson took out the Mathilda character's nudity and killings that she committed.[29] Portman herself said that after those scenes were removed, she found nothing objectionable about the content.[30] Even so, her mother was displeased with some of the "sexual twists and turns" in the finished film, which were not part of the script.[22] Hal Hinson of The Washington Post commended Portman for bringing a "genuine sense of tragedy" to her part, but Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times believed that she wasn't "enough of an actress to unfold Mathilda's pain" and criticized Besson's sexualization of her character.[31][32]
"[T]here's a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one. ... It was definitely interesting to think about – why men write the female characters they do. Just like the way they write the male character. How much is wish-fulfilment fantasy, and why."
—Portman on playing sexualized youngsters as a child, 2007[33]
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.[34] She also enrolled at the Stagedoor Manor performing arts camp, where she played Anne Shirley in a staging of Anne of Green Gables.[35] 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.[36][37] 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).[30] Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Portman, a budding knockout, is scene-stealingly good even in an overly showy role."[38] She subsequently went back to Stagedoor Manor to appear in a production of the musical Cabaret.[39] 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![40]
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.[22] Luhrmann said "Natalie was amazing in the footage, but it was too much of a burden for her at that age".[41] 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.[22][30] 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".[33]
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.[42][43] 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".[44] Conversely, Ben Brantley found an "ineffable grace in her awkwardness".[45] 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.[46]
1999–2006: Star Wars, education, and transition to adult roles[edit]
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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.[47] Portman was unfamiliar with the franchise when she was cast, and watched the original Star Wars trilogy before filming began.[48] 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.[49] Filming in arduous locations in Algeria proved challenging for Portman.[50][24] She did not attend the film's premiere so she could study for her high school finals.[51] 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.[52][53]
Portman graduated from Syosset High School in 1999.[54][55][56] 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.[57] 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.[19][58] 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".[59] She received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination for it.[60]
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.[61] 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.[19] She studied advanced Hebrew literature and neurobiology,[62] and she served as Alan Dershowitz's research assistant.[23][63] 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.[64] 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".[65] Also in 2001, Portman was among several celebrities who made cameo appearances in the comedy Zoolander.[66] 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.[67] She was excited by the opportunity to play a confident young woman who did not depend on the male lead.[68] 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."[69][70] In 2002, she contributed to a study on memory called "Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy".[71][72] 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.[19][73][74]
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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.[20][75] 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.[76] Portman later said she found it upsetting to have contributed to the trope.[77] 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.[20][78] 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.[78] 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."[79][80] She won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and received an Academy Award nomination in the same category.[81][82]
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.[83] She next played a Jewish-American girl in Free Zone, a drama from Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. To prepare, she studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and read memoirs of Yitzhak Rabin, which she said allowed her to explore both the role and her own heritage.[78][26] Controversy arose when she filmed a kissing scene at the Western Wall, where gender segregation is enforced, and she later issued an apology.[84] Critics disliked the film for its heavy-handed approach to the conflicts in the Middle East.[85] 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.[86] 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."[87] She was awarded the Saturn Award for Best Actress.[88]
Portman began 2006 by hosting an episode of the television sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live.[89] One of her sketches, a song named "Natalie's Rap", was released later in 2009 on Incredibad, an album by the Lonely Island.[90] 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.[91] 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.[92] 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.[93] It received predominantly negative reviews, but Roger Ebert was appreciative of Portman for playing her dual role "with fearless conviction".[94][95]
2007–2015: Career expansion and Black Swan[edit]
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.[96] 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".[97] Her next appearance was in Hotel Chevalier, a short film from Wes Anderson, which served as a prologue to his feature The Darjeeling Limited (in which Portman had a cameo).[98] 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.[93][99] 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.[100]