Natalie Hershlag [ a ] born June 9, , 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.
From to , 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 and and performed in a revival of Anton Chekhov 's The Seagull at The Public Theater.
Her career gained further momentum in when she won a Golden Globe and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Closer. In the following years, Portman starred in the romantic comedy No Strings Attached and portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie , which earned her a third Academy Award nomination. Portman has also directed the short film Eve and the biographical drama A Tale of Love and Darkness , in which she also starred. In , she co-founded the production company MountainA, under which she produced and starred in the film May December and the miniseries Lady in the Lake Portman and her family first lived in Washington, D.
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. Six months after Ruthless! 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. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one.
It was definitely interesting to think about — why men write the female characters they do. Just like the way they write the male character. How much is wish-fulfilment fantasy, and why. After filming The Professional , Portman went back to school and during the summer break of , 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. 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.
