Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman (née Hershlag, נטע-לי הרשלג, born June 9, 1981) is an Israeli-born American actress.

She has had a prolific film career since her teenage years and has starred in various blockbusters and independent films, receiving multiple accolades, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards.

Natalie Hershlag was born on June 9, 1981, in Jerusalem, to Jewish parents with roots in Poland, Austria, Russia and the United States.

She is the only child of Shelley (née Stevens), an American homemaker who works as Portman's agent, and Avner Hershlag, an Israeli-born gynecologist.

Her maternal grandparents were American Jews, whereas her paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants to Israel.

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.

Portman began her acting career at age twelve, when she starred as the young protégée of a hitman in the action film Léon: The Professional (1994).

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 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."

While in high school, she made her Broadway debut in a 1998 production of The Diary of a Young Girl and gained international recognition for starring as Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999).

From 1999 to 2003, Portman attended Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in psychology.

She reduced her number of acting roles, but continued to act in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002, 2005) and in The Public Theater's 2001 revival of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull.

In 2004, Portman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a Golden Globe for playing a mysterious stripper in the romantic drama Closer.

Portman's career further advanced with her starring roles as Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta (2005), Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), and a troubled ballerina in the psychological thriller Black Swan (2010), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Portman's directorial ventures include the short film Eve (2008) and the biographical drama A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015).

She is vocal about the politics of the United States and Israel, and is an advocate for animal rights and environmental causes.

She starred in the romantic comedy No Strings Attached (2011) and portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the biopic Jackie (2016), which earned her a third Academy Award nomination.

Portman has also featured as Jane Foster in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero 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.

Co-founding the production company MountainA in 2021, Portman produced and starred in the drama May December (2023).

She was married to dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied from 2012 to 2024, with whom she has two children.