Natalie Portman

Early life

Natalie Hershlag was born on June 9, 1981, in Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 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.

Portman and her family migrated to the United States when she was three, first living in Washington, D.C., but 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. 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 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.

Career

1994–1998: Early work

Six months after Ruthless! ended, she 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".

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.

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. 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. At Harvard she served as Alan Dershowitz's research assistant for his book The Case for Israel. Both spoke highly of each other and described themselves as close friends, with Dershowitz calling her a "terrific student." She then studied advanced Hebrew literature and neurobiology, 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. 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". Also in 2001, Portman was among several celebrities who made cameo appearances in the comedy Zoolander. 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. She was excited by the opportunity to play a confident young woman who did not depend on the male lead. 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." In 2002, she contributed to a study on memory called "Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy". 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. She described this period as the "most difficult time" in her life, noting that she wasn't getting work and felt criticized for her performances in Star Wars. After taking time off, she begged for the Cold Mountain role, which Mike Nichols helped secure, offering her a letter of support that helped her regain confidence.

2007–2015: Career expansion and Black Swan

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. 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". Her next appearance was in Hotel Chevalier, a short film from Wes Anderson, which served as a prolog to his feature The Darjeeling Limited (in which Portman had a cameo). 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. 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. She also appeared in Paul McCartney's music video "Dance Tonight" from his album Memory Almost Full, directed by Michel Gondry.

Scarlett Johansson and Portman portrayed rival sisters Mary and Anne Boleyn, respectively, in the period film The Other Boleyn Girl (2008). She was excited by the opportunity to work opposite another actress her age, bemoaning that such casting was rare in film. The film had modest box-office earnings. Derek Elley of Variety was critical of Portman's English accent and wrote that she "doesn't quite bring the necessary heft to make Anne a truly dominant power player". She served as a jury member of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and also launched her own production company, named handsomecharlie films, after her late dog. Portman's directorial debut, the short film Eve, opened the short-film screenings at the 65th Venice International Film Festival. It is about a young woman who goes to her grandmother's romantic date, and Portman drew inspiration for the older character (played by Lauren Bacall) from her own grandmother.

A poorly received adaptation of Ayelet Waldman's novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, entitled The Other Woman, marked Portman's first film role of 2009. She appeared in a faux perfume commercial called Greed, directed by Roman Polanski, and in the anthology film New York, I Love You, she directed a segment and also starred in a different segment directed by Mira Nair. Portman next took on a role opposite Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal in the drama film Brothers, a remake of the 2004 Danish film of the same name. Her role was that of a war widow, for which she spoke with military wives to prepare. The film was shot during the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike, and Portman found it challenging to shoot certain scenes without a written script. Claudia Puig of USA Today found her to be "subdued and reactive in a part that doesn't call for her to do much else".

2016–present: Jackie and production ventures

Portman portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the Pablo Larraín-directed biopic Jackie (2016), about Kennedy's life immediately after the 1963 assassination of her husband. She was initially intimidated to take on the part of a well-known public figure, and eventually researched Kennedy extensively by watching videos of her, reading books, and listening to audiotapes of her interviews. She also worked with a dialect coach to adopt Kennedy's unique speaking style. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter termed it an "incandescent performance" and added that "her Jackie is both inscrutable and naked, broken but unquestionably resilient, a mess and yet fiercely dignified". She won the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She also served as producer for the comedy horror film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, directed by Burr Steers, and starred in Rebecca Zlotowski's French-Belgian drama Planetarium. The 2017 experimental romance Song to Song marked Portman's second collaboration with Terrence Malick, which like their previous film polarized critics. That year, Portman revealed that she has experienced sexual harassment or discrimination in almost every project she has worked on, despite initially believing she had avoided such experiences.

In 2018, Portman starred in the science fiction film Annihilation, based on Jeff VanderMeer's novel. She played a biologist and former soldier who studies a mysterious quarantined zone of mutating organisms. She was pleased to headline a rare female-led science fiction film, and she moved her family near Pinewood Studios during filming. For the action sequences, she underwent movement training with the dancer Bobbi Jene Smith. Benjamin Lee of The Guardian took note of Portman's "strong, fiercely compelling presence" and commended her for playing the part without unnecessary sentimentality. It only received a limited theatrical release and was distributed on Netflix internationally. Her next appearance was in Xavier Dolan's first English-language film, the ensemble drama The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (2018), which was termed a "shocking misfire" by Eric Kohn of IndieWire. She then starred as a troubled pop singer in Vox Lux, sharing the part with Raffey Cassidy. She was drawn to the idea of showcasing the negative effects of fame, and in preparation, she watched documentaries on musicians and listened to the music of Sia, who wrote her songs in the film. For the climactic dance routines, she trained with her then-husband, Benjamin Millepied, who choreographed the sequence. It received mixed reviews from critics, but Portman's performance earned praise. Comparing it to her performances in Black Swan and Jackie, Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph wrote that "this role has a similar audacity and extravagance that few actresses would dare attempt, let alone be allowed to get away with".

Endorsements

Beyond her acting career, Portman has been a longtime ambassador for Dior. She signed with the brand in 2010 and has starred in multiple advertising campaigns. In March 2011, Portman began voluntarily promoting a fundraising campaign for Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. The campaign was aimed at raising funds for the construction of the Sarah Wetsman Davidson Tower, a new hospitalization tower at the hospital's Ein Kerem campus, which was open in 2012. The campaign was a joint effort with the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization of America, which owns the hospital. Later in October 2012, Britain's Advertising Standards Authority banned a Dior advertisement that featured Portman wearing Dior mascara after a complaint from Dior's competitor, L'Oreal, saying that the advert "misleadingly exaggerated the likely effects of the product". The ASA ruled that "the ad was likely to mislead". Portman is the face of one of the company's fragrances, Miss Dior, inspired by Catherine Dior. She has starred in campaign videos for the fragrance, and promoted a new version of the fragrance, Rose N'Roses, in 2021.

In July 2020, she became one of the leaders of the creation of NWSL soccer team Angel City FC and also became one of the owners of the team.

Activism

Animal and human rights

Portman has long been an advocate for various causes, including animal rights. She became a vegetarian at age eight after witnessing a demonstration of laser surgery on a chicken during a medical conference with her father. She became a vegan in 2009 after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals and later produced a documentary on factory farming systems in the U.S. by the same title. In September 2017, she was recognized for her work on the film by the Environmental Media Association Awards with the Ongoing Commitment Award. She does not wear animal products and has praised animal-friendly products designed by Stella McCartney and Target. In 2007, she launched her own brand of animal-friendly footwear. In 2007, Portman traveled to Rwanda with Jack Hanna to film the documentary Gorillas on the Brink. Portman has been an advocate of environmental causes since childhood, when she joined an environmental song and dance troupe known as World Patrol Kids.

Portman has also supported anti-poverty causes. In 2004 and 2005, she traveled to Uganda, Guatemala, and Ecuador as the Ambassador of Hope for FINCA International, an organization that promotes micro-lending to help finance women-owned businesses in developing countries. In an interview appearing on the PBS program Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria, she discussed microfinance. Host Fareed Zakaria said that he was "generally wary of celebrities with fashionable causes", but included the segment with Portman because "she really knew her stuff". On This Week with George Stephanopoulos in April 2007, Portman discussed her work with FINCA and how it can benefit women and children in Third World countries. In fall-2007, she visited several university campuses, including Harvard, USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton, New York University, and Columbia, to inspire students with the power of microfinance and to encourage them to join the Village Banking Campaign to help families and communities lift themselves out of poverty.

Portman is a supporter of the Democratic Party, and for the 2004 presidential election she campaigned for Senator John Kerry. Prior to the 2008 presidential election, she supported Senator Hillary Clinton of New York in the Democratic primaries. Portman later campaigned for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. In a 2008 interview, she also stated: "I even like John McCain. I disagree with his war stance – which is a really big deal – but I think he's a very moral person." In 2010, her activist work and popularity with young people earned her a nomination for VH1's Do Something Awards, which is dedicated to honoring individuals who do good. In 2011, Portman and her then-fiancé Benjamin Millepied were among the signers of a petition to President Obama in support of same-sex marriage. She supported Obama's re-election campaign in 2012.

Views on sexuality and social issues

Portman also explained that being sexualized as a child affected her relationship with her own sexuality, saying that "at that age, you do have your own sexuality, and you do have your own desire" and "you do want to explore things, and you do want to be open," but that she did not feel safe when older men expressed interest in her. She also described developing a serious public image as a way of protecting herself, saying, "That kind of projection of seriousness protected me in a way," and that it acted as "almost a warning signal" to discourage unwanted attention. Portman had also said that she wondered about her sexuality while growing up but had never dated a woman. In a 2002 interview with Rolling Stone, Portman explained that she believes love is about the individual rather than gender, asking why someone would close themselves off to half of the people they could potentially love. She added that she has often found it easier to connect with men socially while valuing her friendships with women.

Views on Israel

Haaretz has described Portman as "one of Israel's outspoken supporters"; advocating through academic articles, lectures, and public declarations. Haaretz cited Portman raising funds for the reconstruction of northern Israel after the 2006 Lebanon War as a notable example of her support. The Forward reports that many Jews and Zionists, along with figures like Mik Moore, see Portman as a Liberal Zionist, as she believes in Israel's right to exist but is critical of its government, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu. However, Portman herself has described her relationship with Israel as complex, "like family—you love it more than anything else in the world, and you are also more critical of it than anything else in the world."

In 2002, at Harvard, Portman wrote a letter to The Harvard Crimson in response to an essay critical of Israeli actions toward Palestinians, arguing that it misleadingly compared the situation to racial apartheid and that instead "most Israelis and Palestinians are indistinguishable physically". She has criticized the Israeli government, specifically Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, being critical of his re-election in 2015, saying she was "disappointed" and found his comments racist. In November 2017, Portman was announced as the Genesis Prize recipient for 2018, which includes $2,000,000 in prize money. The following April, Portman announced that she did not plan to attend the awards ceremony scheduled for June, citing "recent events in Israel" that left her feeling uncomfortable attending public events there, leading to the ceremony being canceled.

The statement did not specify which events, but was suggested as referencing the killings and wounding of Palestinian protestors by Israeli fire during the 2018–2019 Gaza border protests. Portman's decision sparked backlash from Israeli politicians, including Culture Minister Miri Regev, Minister of Public Security and Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan and American rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who accused the actress of being influenced by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The Likud party condemned Portman's position, with Knesset member Oren Hazan calling for her Israeli citizenship to be revoked.

Portman clarified that she was not boycotting Israel, stating, "I am not part of the BDS movement and do not endorse it. Like many Israelis and Jews, I can be critical of Israel's leadership without wanting to boycott the nation." She explained that she did not want to "appear as endorsing" Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was scheduled to speak at the ceremony, and emphasized that "the mistreatment of those suffering from today's atrocities is not in line with my Jewish values." She added, "Because I care about Israel, I must stand up against violence, corruption, inequality, and abuse of power". Later in 2018, Portman criticized the passing of the highly controversial and widely criticized Nation-State Bill, describing the law as "racist, and there's nothing else to say about that." She was also a member of the One Voice movement.

Personal life

Portman speaks English, Hebrew, French, German, Japanese and Arabic, to various degrees. In 2006, Portman expressed a strong connection to her Jewish identity, particularly in Israel, and shared her desire to raise her children Jewish: "A priority for me is definitely that I'd like to raise my kids Jewish, but the ultimate thing is to have someone who is a good person and who is a partner."

Portman has dated Zach Braff, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Devendra Banhart. She married French dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with whom she shares two children. The couple met in 2009 while working together on Black Swan, and wed on August 4, 2012, in a Jewish ceremony in Big Sur, California.

In 2013, she was living in Los Angeles. After Millepied was appointed director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet, the family relocated to Paris in the autumn of 2014, where Portman also expressed interest in obtaining French citizenship. In January 2014, Millepied announced that he was in the process of converting to Judaism. From 2017 to 2021, Portman owned a home in Montecito. She still owns a home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. In early 2023, reports surfaced alleging an extramarital affair by Millepied. The couple never publicly addressed the claims. On March 8, 2024, it was announced that Portman and Millepied had divorced. Portman began dating French music producer Tanguy Destable in March 2025, announced that she was pregnant with her third child in April 2026 and gave birth in September 2026.

Filmography and awards

Portman's most acclaimed and highest-grossing films, according to the online portal Box Office Mojo and the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, include Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), Closer (2004), Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005), V for Vendetta (2005), Black Swan (2010), No Strings Attached (2011), Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Jackie (2016), Annihilation (2018), and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022).

Portman has received numerous accolades for her work, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award.