Biography Of Natalie Portman

Natalie Hershlag

 (born June 9, 1981), known professionally as Natalie Portman, is an Israeli-born American actress. She has had a prolific screen 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 was born in West Jerusalem and raised on Long Island, New York, where she began her acting career at twelve, starring as the young protégée of a hitman in Léon: The Professional (1994). While still in high school, she made her Broadway debut in The Diary of a Young Girl (1998) 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 took fewer acting roles but continued to appear in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005) and performed in a 2001 revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at The Public Theater.

Her 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 also became a prominent figure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, playing Jane Foster in 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 has also 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, under which she produced and starred in the film May December (2023) and the miniseries Lady in the Lake (2024). Portman is an advocate for various causes, including women’s rights, environmental issues, and animal welfare, supporting organizations like the Human Rights Foundation and the Jane Goodall Institute.

Natalie Hershlag was born on June 9, 1981, in West Jerusalem, Mount Scopus,  to Jewish parents. Her mother’s ancestors immigrated from Austria and Russia to the U.S., while her father’s parents immigrated to Israel from Poland after World War II.  One of her paternal great-grandmothers, who is said to have been a spy for British Intelligence during World War II, was born in Romania.  She is the only child of Shelley Stevens, an Ohio-born artist, and Avner Hershlag, an Israeli-born gynecologis Portman is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States.

Portman and her family first lived in Washington, D.C., but relocated to Connecticut in 1988 and then moved to Long Island  in 1990  While living in Washington, Portman attended Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland.  Her native language is Hebrew.  While living 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.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." 

When Portman was ten years old, a Revlon agent spotted her at a pizza restaurant and asked her to become a child model.  She turned down the offer but used the opportunity to get an acting agent.  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. Portman and Britney Spears were chosen as understudies for star Laura Bell Bundy. 

Six months after Ruthless! ended, Hershlag 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 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.  Portman herself said that after those scenes were removed, she found nothing objectionable about the content. 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.  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.

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.

CHILDHOOD

When she was three, her family moved to the US, because her father did his residency in Maryland. At the age of four she started taking dancing lessons and she remembers “I’ve always loved entertaining people and putting on shows at home.” (TV Hits Magazine 2/1997). She also took some singing lessons, and she recalls: “I was definitely heading more down the Broadway route. I wanted to be in “Oklahoma!” or something. I wasn’t thinking of films at all.”(Star Wars Insider #44 5/1999). Nevertheless was she a big fan of Dirty Dancing. Especially Patrick Swayze left quite an impression on her, as she later would admit: “I think I became an actress just so there would be a possibility that I might meet him one day, ’cause he’s just, like, so amazing”. (Harper’s Bazaar 11/1997

Her father started his fellowship three years later in Connecticut, so they had to move again. It made her “more able to adjust to new people and to make new friends easily. It’s a lot easier to make friends when you’re younger, because kids are a lot less judgmental than adults.” Beside the moves there is not much known about her childhood. She says she’s “been brought up in what you might call a pretty conventional family.” (Interview Magazine 2/1995) But since her dad is Israeli she grew up with a different set of values than most American kids. This would become obvious in her self-confident decisions in her future career as actress. Looking back she remarks “I don’t even remember who my friends were before I was nine.” It was then that her father became a doctor and started working in New York. This led to another move, this time to Long Island. Natalie admits “I have no clear memories from before I was around 12.” (Star Wars Insider #44 5/1999) That doesn’t mean she’s had a insignificant childhood, but it shows that she couldn’t grow roots back then. The only stable constitution was her family.

This explains why there has always been a strong bond between her and her parents. Concerning this constellation, Natalie says “You really learn to function as an adult.” Even before her movie career took off forcing her family to seek refuge in their privacy, they spend a lot of time together. “I’m an only child. All my vacations are with my parents.” (Vanity Fair #465 5/1999) She visited countries like Japan and Australia with them in her childhood days, what definitely had an impact on her. Later she’d take Japanese as a subject in school.

At the age of eight Natalie stopped eating meat as a matter of conscience. “I went to a medical conference with my dad where they were demonstrating laser surgery on a chicken. I think at that point I made the connection that animals were killed for meat. I had always kind of thought that animals died and then we ate them. At first, my parents thought it was just a phase.” (Time Out New York #114 11/1997) But it wasn’t.
After dissecting a fish in the sixth grade she stopped eating fish, too. In 1995 gelatin followed, and in 1997 she stopped eating cheese, because it can contain rennet, which is taken from animals’ stomachs. This shows clearly how she struggles to stay true to her ideals. Again, her parents supported her case although they’re not vegetarians themselves.

“When I was ten [note: in some interviews she says she was 11] years old, after dance class I went to a pizza parlor and a guy from Revlon was there and he wanted me to model for Revlon. So he introduced me to modeling agents, and I told them “I don’t want to model, I want to act,” so they introduced me to acting agents.” (The Late Show with David Letterman 11/1994) Three summers she spent at theatre camps gaining her first acting experiences playing such roles as Dream Laurey in “Oklahoma!” and Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The latter one “is a good one to do, because it’s the easiest of the Shakespeares.” Around that time she skipped a grade due to her excellent grades at the Jewish school she went to until the 8th grade. “I loved school so much that most of my classmates considered me a dork,” she recalls. (Calgary Sun 4/2000)

From time to time she regrets not having siblings. Then she lamentates “I don’t like being an only child. I don’t think I would’ve been able to act, had there been other children, because it wouldn’t be really fair to them. But it’s strange for me to think that when I’m older my kids won’t have cousins from my side, and I won’t have any one to, like, be conspirators with and talk about my parents when I’m older. Because no one knows what it’s like to be in my family. I can say to someone, “Oh my God, they’re killing me!” And they’re like, ‘But your parents are so nice!’” (Jane Magazine 9/1999) At least she got a dog, a female Poodle-Schnauzer mix that was named “Noodles”. Natalie was a member of the group “World Patrol Kids” which toured through the country and released a cd called “Earth Tunes” in 1991. The whole thing was about motivating and teaching how to protect the environment.