Natalie Portman skipped The Phantom Menace premiere to revise for exams
In 1999 Natalie Portman was playing a galactic queen in a film that would gross 924 million dollars. She was also a Long Island high school senior with finals coming up, so she missed the premiere to study. That year she also entered a school paper on producing hydrogen from sugar in a national science contest.
She was born Natalie Hershlag on June 9, 1981, at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, the only child of an Ohio-born artist and an Israeli gynaecologist. Hebrew is her first language. On her father's side, her grandfather's family was murdered at Auschwitz, and her Romanian-born grandmother spied for the British in the Second World War. The family moved to the United States around 1984, living in Washington, then Connecticut, and finally Syosset on Long Island.
At ten she was approached by a Revlon agent in a restaurant. She said no to modelling but used the contact to find an acting agent, and landed an understudy role in the off-Broadway musical Ruthless! alongside another young understudy, Britney Spears. Her first film, Luc Besson's Léon: The Professional, came when she was 13; for the screen she borrowed Portman, the surname her father's mother was born with. Her parents agreed only after Besson cut the character's nudity and killings. In 2023 she described parts of the film as cringey and said her feelings about it are complicated.
Those early roles brought a stream of offers to play sexualised teenagers, which she said scared her and shaped later choices. She turned down Adrian Lyne's Lolita and was dropped from Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet during rehearsals because executives thought her too young. Instead she played Anne Frank on Broadway from December 1997, visiting the Anne Frank House twice and meeting Miep Gies, who had saved the diary. She went to school by day and performed at night.
After Star Wars she studied psychology at Harvard from 1999 to 2003 while making the next two prequels. A Golden Globe for Closer followed, then the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing a troubled ballerina in Black Swan in 2010. Her Jane Foster in the Thor films put her among the best-paid actresses in the world. She has also directed, including A Tale of Love and Darkness in 2015, and co-founded the production company MountainA in 2021.
Source: Natalie Portman
