Natalie Hershlag (born June 9, 1981), known professionally as Natalie Portman, is an actress and filmmaker with dual Israeli and American citizenship. She has had a screen career from her teenage years and has starred in various blockbusters and independent films. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards.
Portman was born in Jerusalem and moved to the United States when she was three. She began her acting career at age 13, starring as the protégée of a hitman in Léon: The Professional (1994). While in high school, she made her Broadway debut in The Diary of Anne Frank (1997) 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 appeared in the next two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005) and performed in a 2001 revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at The Public Theater.
Portman's 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 played Jane Foster in the Marvel Cinematic Universe 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.
Portman 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, which produced the film May December (2023) and the miniseries Lady in the Lake (2024); Portman also starred in both productions. Portman is an advocate for various causes, including women's rights, environmental issues, and animal welfare, and supports organizations such as the Human Rights Foundation and the Jane Goodall Institute.
Early life Natalie Hershlag was born on June 9, 1981, in Mount Scopus, Jerusalem at Hadassah Medical Center to Jewish parents. She is the only child of Shelley Stevens, an Ohio-born artist, and Avner Hershlag, an Israeli-born gynecologist. Portman's maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria who settled in the United States, while her paternal grandparents emigrated from Poland to the land of Israel/Palestine in the late 1930s. Her grandfather had led a Jewish youth movement in Poland and went to Palestine expecting to send for his family later, but they were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Her paternal grandmother, originally from Romania, worked as a spy for the British during World War II. Portman is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States, and her first language is Hebrew.
Portman and her family immigrated to the United States around 1984, when Portman was three. They initially lived in Washington, D.C., relocating to Connecticut in 1988 and then settling in Syosset, Long Island. While living in Washington, Portman attended Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland. 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. Portman has said that as a child she was more ambitious than her peers. She added, "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 restaurant and asked her to become a model. She turned down the offer but used the opportunity to get an acting agent. She auditioned for the 1992 off-Broadway musical Ruthless!, which tells the story of a girl who is prepared to commit murder to get the lead role in a school play. Portman and Britney Spears were chosen as understudies for the play's star Laura Bell Bundy.
Career 1994–1998: Early work Six months after Ruthless! ended, Portman 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 orphaned child who befriends a middle-aged hitman (played by Jean Reno). Her parents were reluctant to let the 13-year-old Portman play the role due to the explicit sexuality and violence in the script, but agreed to it after Besson removed Mathilda's nudity and the killings she committed. When the film was complete, Portman's mother was displeased that it contained "sexual twists and turns" which were not in the script. In a 2023 interview, Portman described some aspects of the film as "cringey", and said her relationship to it is "complicated". Hal Hinson of The Washington Post commended Portman for bringing a "genuine sense of tragedy" to her part, while Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times believed that she was not "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.
1999–2006: Star Wars, education, and transition to mature roles
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. Portman was unfamiliar with the franchise when she was cast, and watched the original Star Wars trilogy before filming began. 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. Filming in arduous locations in Algeria proved challenging for Portman. She did not attend the film's premiere so she could study for her high school finals. 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.
Portman graduated from Syosset High School in 1999. 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. 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. 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". She received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination for it.