Natalie Portman

Autobiography

Natalie Portman was born Natalie Hershlag on June 9, 1981 in Jerusalem, Israel. Her father, Avner Hershlag is an Israeli doctor who specializes in reproductive endocrinology while her mother, Shelley Stevens, is an American homemaker who now works as her daughter’s agent. Portman’s family roots are of Jewish ancestry for which her maternal ancestors are from Austria and Russia while her father’s were Jewish immigrants who came from Poland and Romania and eventually settled in Israel. Her grandfather’s parents were victims of the holocaust and died inside the notorious concentration camp of Auschwitz while her Romanian great-grandmother worked as a spy for the British during World War II.
Both of Portman’s parents met at a Jewish student centre at the Ohio State University but Avner had to return to Israel but were soon reunited and they got married when Shelley went there a few years later. In 1984 when Natalie was only three-years old that the Hershlag family decided to leave Israel and settle in the United States where her father pursued further medical training. They stayed in Washington D.C. where Portman studied at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School until the family relocated in 1988 and lived in Connecticut for two years, until the Hershlag household settled permanently in Long Island, New York in 1990.
Portman was excelling in her studies pretty well, often topping the class list as a straight-A student. Although she admitted that her family wasn’t that religious, she continued to attend Jewish school where she got her primary education at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Glen Cove in New York and finished secondary schooling at a public high school in Syosset High School. It was reported that Portman did not attend the premiere of Star Wars Episode I to study for her final exams. She was balancing her studies and her busy schedule as an actress when in June of 2003, she graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and later went to Jerusalem in the Spring of 2004 where the actress pursued graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During her stay at Harvard, she worked as a research assistant for Alan Dershowitz and was also a research assistant in a psychology lab. Portman was a guest lecturer at the Columbia University where she talked about terrorism and counterterrorism that coincided with her movie V for Vendetta back in March of 2006. Aside from being a bilingual who knew how to speak Hebrew and English, she studied other languages like French, German, Arabic and Japanese.

Her love for the arts and acting was starting to show when she was a child and Portman would attend dance lessons at the age of four. Her big dream was to make it big in Broadway as she continued to profess her love for dancing by joining local dance troupes. At age ten she was discovered at a pizza parlor by a Revlon agent and was asked if she wanted to become a commercial model, but she refused the offer and told the agent that she wanted to pursue a career in acting. She later auditioned for Ruthless! Where the role called for a girl who was ready to commit murder just to get the lead in a school play, unfortunately she became an understudy for Britney Spears. Her first big break in acting came in 1994 when she auditioned for Luc Besson’s film Leon (or popularly known as The Professional), during her first audition she was turned down but after consistently attempting several times to audition, she eventually won the part as an orphan who befriended an older guy who is working as an assassin in the movie. The movie premiered on November 1994 which was her first acting debut at age 13. The 90’s marked Portman’s launch into Hollywood stardom when she got to play roles for such movies like Heat, Everyone Says I Love You and Mars Attacks! She too had a major role in the movie Beautiful Girls. Her acting abilities were starting to get noticed when the guys at 20th Century Fox made Natalie their first choice to star in the lead role of Juliet in the modern film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo +Juliet but the producers felt that Portman’s age wasn’t suitable enough and the role was later given to Claire Danes as Romeo’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) onscreen partner. Later on, she was offered to play the lead role in the movie Anywhere But Here but after reading the script, she turned down the movie because it called for her character to have a sex scene in the film. Actress Susan Sarandon and director Wayne Wang have demanded that the script be re-written and as soon as the entire script was revised, they showed it again to Natalie and the actress joined the project. Her portrayal of Ann August in the movie earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress and critics were commenting on her acting in the movie as astonishing.

Her biggest and most significant movie that launched her to Hollywood stardom came in the late 90’s when she played the major role of Padme Amidala in George Lucas’ record-breaking film comeback of the Star Wars Trilogy. The first movie installment, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, was a huge success when it opened in early 1999 and this made Portman an instant celebrity. Later that year, she also signed up for the movie about a teenaged mother in Where The Heart Is. After filming Where The Heart Is, she told the press that for the next four years she would not act and instead concentrate on her studies in getting a degree in Psychology at Harvard University. During her summer break of 2000, she began working again on Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones in Sydney, Australia and London, England. In 2001, she appeared in a play of Chekov’s The Seagull playing the role of Nina and starring opposite Kevin Kline, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Also from that same year she made a cameo appearance on the comedy flick Zoolander with Ben Stiller that opened worldwide in 2002. Portman also had a small role in the movie Cold Mountain along with Jude Law and Nicole Kidman.
The actress dabbled into independent films and starred in Garden State and Closer. Garden State was an official entry in the Sundance Film Festival and bagged the Best First Feature award at the Independent Spirit Awards while her portrayal as Alice in the movie Closer won her a Best Supporting Actress trophy in the Golden Globe Awards and a nomination at the Academy’s for the same movie and category. After the release of the final installment of the Star Wars Trilogy in 2005, Portman was embarking on a new film project based on Alan Moore’s graphic novel entitled V for Vendetta where the actress had her head shaved completely bald as she played the role of Evey Hammond. Portman was also included in Maxim magazine’s Hot 100 ranking number 33.

She was last seen in the children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium with Dustin Hoffman which was released on November 2007 and starred in the historical drama movie playing the lead role of Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl with co-stars Eric Bana and Scarlett Johannson. Portman also appeared in Paul McCartney’s music video “Dance Tonight” from the former Beatle’s 2007 album “Memory Almost Full”.