Natalie Portman: The Life Story Behind the Child Star

Natalie Portman was born Natalie Hershlag on 9 June 1981 in Jerusalem, Israel, and she grew up to be one of the most unusual stars in Hollywood: a child actress who became an Oscar winner, a blockbuster queen who went to Harvard, and a director who made a film in Hebrew about her family’s history. Her father, Avner Hershlag, was an Israeli fertility doctor, her mother, Shelley Stevens, was an American artist, and the family moved to the United States when Natalie was three years old, settling on Long Island in New York. She was an only child, she was serious and hard-working at school, and she had no plans to become an actress. She was discovered by accident, at the age of ten, in a pizza parlour, by a modelling scout from Revlon, and the accident became a career that has now lasted more than thirty years. What is remarkable about that career is not only its length but its shape: Portman has been famous since she was twelve, and she has never once behaved like a former child star.

The key to understanding Portman is that she has always treated acting as one part of her life, not the whole of it. She went to Harvard while she was playing a queen in Star Wars, she published psychology research while she was filming blockbusters, and she directed a film in Hebrew while she was one of the biggest stars in the world. She has won an Oscar for playing a ballerina who loses her mind, she has played a Marvel superhero, a First Lady, and a pop star, and she has done it while raising two children, running a production company, and speaking publicly about women’s rights. Her story is not a story of a child who grew up too fast. It is a story of a child who grew up carefully, with parents who protected her, and who became an adult who chose her own path.

Jerusalem, Long Island, and the Pizza Parlour Discovery

Portman’s early life was shaped by two countries. She was born in Jerusalem, where her father was studying medicine, and the family lived in Israel until she was three, when they moved to Washington DC and then to Long Island, where her father set up a medical practice. She grew up in Syosset, a suburb of New York, in a house where Hebrew and English were both spoken, and where education was taken very seriously. She attended a Jewish day school, she was a straight-A student, and she was, by her own account, a serious, bookish child who liked science and dancing. She took ballet from a young age, she performed in school plays, and she had no particular ambition to be famous.

The discovery happened in 1991, when she was ten years old and eating pizza with her family on Long Island. A scout from the cosmetics company Revlon noticed her and offered her modelling work, and her parents, after some discussion, agreed to let her try it, on the condition that school came first. The modelling led to an audition for a film, and the film was Léon: The Professional, directed by the French filmmaker Luc Besson, who was looking for a girl to play Mathilda, a twelve-year-old who is taken in by a hitman after her family is murdered. Portman auditioned, she was chosen from more than two thousand girls, and her parents negotiated carefully: there would be no nudity, the smoking scenes would be limited, and her real name would be protected. She took her grandmother’s maiden name, Portman, as her stage name, to keep her family life private, and she has used it ever since.

Léon was released in 1994, when Portman was thirteen, and her performance was startling. Mathilda is a child who has seen terrible things, who is funny, angry and vulnerable, and who forms a strange, touching bond with the hitman played by Jean Reno. Portman played her without a trace of sentimentality, and critics noticed immediately: here was a child actress who could act, not just look cute. The film was a success, and it made her famous, but it also raised questions that would follow her for years, about the sexualisation of a young girl on screen, and about whether a child should be playing such a role at all. Her parents’ careful negotiations, and her own seriousness, protected her from the worst of it, but the experience taught her early that fame is a bargain, and that the terms of the bargain matter.

The Child Star Who Went Back to School

After Léon, Portman worked steadily, but she and her parents were careful about the roles she took. She appeared in Beautiful Girls in 1996, in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You in the same year, and in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! in 1996, playing the president’s daughter. She turned down the lead role in Adrian Lyne’s Lolita, a decision that showed how seriously her family took the question of what a teenage girl should be playing. She also turned down other offers, and she kept going to school, where she was a normal student, albeit one who disappeared for months at a time to make films. She has said that her school friends kept her grounded, and that her parents’ rule — school first, acting second — saved her from the fate of so many child stars.

In 1997, she took on one of the most demanding roles of her young life: Anne Frank, in the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. She played the part for more than a year, and the experience taught her about discipline, about the responsibility of playing a real person, and about the difference between film acting and stage acting. She was sixteen, she was living in New York, and she was learning her craft in front of a live audience every night, a training that no film set could provide. The production was a critical success, and it confirmed that Portman was not a child who had got lucky once, but a serious actress who was getting better.

The same year, she was cast as Queen Padmé Amidala in George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, a role that would make her famous around the world, and that she would play for the next eight years. She was eighteen when The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, and the film’s success meant that she could never again walk down a street unrecognised. She handled it by doing something that no other Star Wars star had done: she went to university.

Star Wars, Harvard, and the Psychology Degree

Portman enrolled at Harvard University in 1999, the same year The Phantom Menace was released, and she studied psychology, graduating in 2003. She lived in a dormitory, she went to classes, she wrote papers, and she worked as a research assistant in a psychology laboratory, co-authoring papers on memory and on the frontal lobes of the brain. She has said that her Harvard years were the happiest of her life, because she was treated as a student, not as a star, and because she was learning things that had nothing to do with acting. She also turned down roles to stay in school, including a part in the film that became The Ice Storm, because she did not want to miss her classes.

She filmed the Star Wars sequels during her university holidays. Attack of the Clones was released in 2002, and Revenge of the Sith in 2005, and her character, Padmé, went from a queen to a senator to a woman who dies in childbirth, giving birth to Luke and Leia. The films were enormous commercial successes, and they made Portman one of the most recognisable actresses in the world, but they also typecast her, in the eyes of some critics, as a beautiful, regal presence rather than a serious actress. She knew it, and she spent the years after Harvard proving them wrong, one role at a time.

The Harvard years matter because they explain the rest of her career. Portman is an actress who thinks, who reads, who asks questions, and who chooses roles for their ideas, not just their size. She has said that psychology taught her about people, about motivation, about why we do what we do, and that the knowledge has made her a better actress. It also gave her an identity outside acting, a place to go when the films were not working, and a confidence that she did not need Hollywood to survive. That confidence is visible in every choice she has made since.

Closer, V for Vendetta, and the Serious Actress

The first proof that Portman was a serious adult actress came in 2004, with the film Closer, directed by Mike Nichols, in which she played Alice, a young stripper caught in a web of infidelity with Jude Law, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. The role was raw, funny and heartbreaking, and it won her the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and her first Oscar nomination. She was twenty-three, and she had gone from a child star to an actress who could hold her own against the best in the business. The same year she appeared in Garden State, Zach Braff’s independent film, playing a young woman with epilepsy who helps the hero rediscover his life, a performance that became a favourite of a generation of young viewers.

In 2005, she shaved her head for V for Vendetta, the Wachowskis’ adaptation of the graphic novel, playing Evey, a young woman who is transformed by a masked revolutionary. The head-shaving scene was filmed in one take, and it became one of the most famous moments of her career, a physical commitment that showed how seriously she took the work. She followed it with Goya’s Ghosts in 2006, playing a muse of the painter Goya who is imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition, a role that required her to speak Spanish and to play a woman over decades of her life. The films were not all successes, but they were all ambitious, and they showed an actress who was choosing difficult material over easy money.

This period also showed her range. She could play a stripper, a revolutionary, a muse, and a queen, and each performance felt like a different person. She was not trading on her beauty, though she is beautiful, and she was not trading on her fame. She was trading on her work, and the work was getting better every year. The next step would be the role that defined her career, and it would demand more from her than any role she had ever played.

Black Swan and the Oscar

In 2010, Portman starred in Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller about a ballerina, Nina Sayers, who is cast as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake and who slowly loses her mind under the pressure of perfection. The role required a year of ballet training, five hours a day, six days a week, and Portman lost a significant amount of weight for the part, a process that she has since discussed with ambivalence, because it was both necessary for the role and damaging to her health. She trained with the choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who became her husband, and she performed much of the dancing herself, with a body double for the most difficult sequences. The film was a critical and commercial success, and Portman’s performance was universally praised as one of the finest of the year.

She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2011, along with the Golden Globe and the BAFTA, and her acceptance speech was one of the most gracious of the night: she thanked Aronofsky, she thanked Millepied, who was in the audience, and she thanked her parents, who had protected her since she was ten years old. She was twenty-nine, she was pregnant with her first child, and she was at the top of her profession. Black Swan is the film that people think of first when they think of Portman, and it is also the film that shows what she is capable of when she commits completely to a role: she can be terrifying, she can be fragile, and she can carry a film on her own, for two hours, without a safety net.

The film also changed her personal life. She met Millepied during the production, they married in 2012 in a Jewish ceremony in California, and they had two children, a son, Aleph, born in 2011, and a daughter, Amalia, born in 2017. The marriage lasted twelve years, and the couple announced their divorce in 2024, a private event that Portman has not discussed in detail. She has always guarded her family life, and she has continued to do so, raising her children in Los Angeles and in Paris, where Millepied is from, and keeping them out of the public eye.

Thor, Jackie, and the Blockbuster Years

After Black Swan, Portman could have done anything, and she chose to do everything. She played Jane Foster, a scientist and the love interest of Thor, in the Marvel films Thor in 2011, Thor: The Dark World in 2013, and Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022, in which Jane becomes the Mighty Thor herself, wielding the hammer and fighting cancer at the same time. The Marvel films made her a star to a new generation of young viewers, and they also gave her the financial freedom to make the smaller, more personal films she cared about. She has said that she likes the Marvel films, and that she likes playing a scientist, because it is a role that young girls can look up to, and because it is fun.

In 2016, she played Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie, Pablo Larraín’s film about the week after President Kennedy’s assassination, a performance that required her to capture one of the most famous women in American history, in the worst week of her life. She was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress, and the performance was praised for its precision: the voice, the walk, the grief, and the determination to control how history would remember her husband. She followed it with Annihilation in 2018, Alex Garland’s science-fiction film, in which she played a biologist who enters a mysterious zone, and with Vox Lux in the same year, in which she played a pop star who survives a school shooting and becomes famous, a role that required her to sing and to play a woman over decades.

She has continued to work steadily in the years since, appearing in May December in 2023, Todd Haynes’s film about an actress researching a woman with a scandalous past, and in the Apple television series Lady in the Lake in 2024, playing a journalist in 1960s Baltimore. Each role is different, and each one shows a different side of her: the scientist, the First Lady, the pop star, the journalist. She is an actress who refuses to be one thing, and the refusal has kept her interesting for thirty years.

Directing, Producing, and the Work Behind the Camera

Portman’s work behind the camera is as important as her work in front of it. In 2015, she directed her first feature film, A Tale of Love and Darkness, an adaptation of the memoir by the Israeli writer Amos Oz, about his childhood in Jerusalem in the 1940s and his mother’s death. Portman directed the film in Hebrew, she starred in it as Oz’s mother, and she spent years getting it made, because it was a personal project, a film about her own family’s history, and about the country she was born in. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and it was praised for its beauty and its honesty, and it showed that Portman was not just an actress who wanted to direct, but a director with a vision.

She has also produced films through her production company, MountainA, and she has used her position to support women directors and writers, and to tell stories that Hollywood would not otherwise tell. She was one of the founders of Time’s Up, the movement against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, and she spoke at the Women’s March in Los Angeles in 2018, telling the story of her own experiences as a young actress, and of the sexualisation she faced as a teenager. She is also a co-founder of Angel City FC, a women’s football team in Los Angeles, and she has spoken about the importance of investing in women’s sport.

Her activism is not separate from her acting. It is part of the same project: to use her fame for something larger than herself, and to make the industry she works in better for the people who come after her. She has been a vegan since childhood, she speaks about animal rights, and she has been honoured for her humanitarian work. In 2018, she was awarded the Genesis Prize, sometimes called the Jewish Nobel, and she declined to attend the ceremony in Israel, citing her disagreement with the Israeli government’s policies, a decision that was controversial and that she explained carefully, saying that she loved Israel but could not endorse its leadership. It was a brave decision, and it was characteristic: Portman does not do what is easy, she does what she believes is right, and she accepts the consequences.

What Natalie Portman’s Career Means

Portman’s career means that a child star can grow up well, that a blockbuster actress can also be a serious artist, and that a woman in Hollywood can be a mother, a director, a producer and an activist at the same time. She has been famous for more than thirty years, and she has never had a public breakdown, never been arrested, never been the subject of a scandal, and never lost the respect of her peers. That is not luck. It is the result of careful choices, made by her parents when she was a child, and by her when she became an adult, and it is a model for how to survive fame without being destroyed by it.

She is still working, still choosing, and still surprising audiences, and the next chapter of her career is likely to be as varied as the last one. The girl who was discovered in a pizza parlour became a queen, a ballerina, a scientist, a First Lady, and a director, and she did it by going to school, by reading books, and by refusing to let anyone else decide who she was. That is the real story of Natalie Portman, and it is a story that has only just begun.

My Take:

When I think about Natalie Portman, the first image that comes to mind is not a red carpet or an Oscar speech. It is a Harvard dormitory room, with a nineteen-year-old girl who has just played a queen in the biggest film franchise in the world sitting at a desk and writing a psychology paper. That image stays with me because it breaks every rule I thought I knew about child stars. The rule says that fame at twelve destroys you, that you cannot go back to school, that you cannot have a normal life afterwards. Portman broke the rule by refusing to accept it, and by having parents who refused to accept it for her. The pizza parlour discovery could have been the beginning of a tragedy, and instead it became the beginning of a career that has lasted thirty years without a single public collapse. That is not luck. That is a family making careful decisions, year after year, and a young woman learning to make them for herself.

I keep returning to the detail about her parents negotiating the terms of Léon. There would be no nudity, the smoking would be limited, and her real name would stay private. Those sound like small things, but they were the whole story: a child was going to work in an adult industry, and the adults around her were going to set the terms. Most child stars do not get that protection, and most of them pay for it later. Portman got it, and she has spent her adult life extending the same protection to herself, choosing her roles, guarding her children, and refusing interviews that ask the wrong questions. When I read about her turning down Lolita as a teenager, I see a family that understood something many Hollywood parents do not: that saying no is a career move, and that the roles you refuse define you as much as the roles you take.

What impresses me most about her Harvard years is not the degree itself but the stubbornness behind it. She was eighteen, she was in Star Wars, and she could have had any role she wanted. Instead she went to lectures, lived in a dormitory, and worked in a laboratory studying memory. People sometimes treat that as a charming anecdote, but I think it was the most important decision of her career. It gave her an identity that had nothing to do with acting, and it gave her a way of thinking about people that shows in every performance since. When she plays a ballerina losing her mind, or a First Lady holding herself together after an assassination, she is not just feeling the emotion, she is understanding it, and the understanding makes the feeling sharper. Psychology did not make her a better actress by accident. It made her a better actress because she studied how minds work, and then she used that knowledge.

Black Swan is the performance I find hardest to write about, because it is both magnificent and troubling. The year of ballet training, the weight loss, the five hours a day in the studio — it produced one of the great screen performances of the century, and it also cost her something, physically and mentally, that she has been honest about since. I admire the commitment, and I also admire the honesty that came afterwards, when she talked about how difficult the process was, and about how the industry asks women to damage themselves for a role. That honesty matters, because it gives permission to other actresses to say that a role was hard, that the price was high, and that the applause does not erase the cost. Portman won the Oscar, and then she went on to do something even harder: she became a mother, she directed a film, and she kept working without ever trying to repeat Black Swan. She did not chase the same intensity again. She moved on, and that is a kind of wisdom that few Oscar winners possess.

Her directing debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness, is the part of her story I wish more people knew about. It is a film in Hebrew, about a writer’s childhood in Jerusalem, about a mother who dies young, and about a country being born. Portman spent years getting it made, she directed it, she starred in it, and she did it in a language that most of her audience does not speak. That is not a career move. That is a personal project, a film about her own family’s history, made because she needed to make it. I respect that enormously, because it shows what fame is for: not to get bigger roles, but to get the chance to tell the stories that matter to you, even when the market does not want them. The film premiered at Cannes, and it was not a blockbuster, and that does not matter. What matters is that she made it, and that she made it in Hebrew, and that she did not compromise on the language, the story, or the tone.

I think about her Marvel years differently from how most people do. Playing Jane Foster in Thor could have been a paycheck, a few weeks on a green screen, a premiere, and done. Portman treated it as a chance to play a scientist, a woman whose intelligence is the point of the character, and then, in Love and Thunder, to play a woman who becomes a superhero while she is dying of cancer. That last detail is not a comic-book fantasy. It is a real story about illness, about strength, about a body that is failing and a spirit that is not, and Portman played it with a gravity that the film did not entirely deserve. She has said that she likes playing scientists because young girls need to see them, and I believe her, because she has spent her whole career thinking about what young girls see, and about what it does to them. She was a young girl who was sexualised on screen at twelve, and she has spent her adult life making sure that the girls who watch her now see something different.

Jackie is the performance I return to when I want to understand her craft. Jacqueline Kennedy is one of the most imitated women in history, and Portman does not imitate her. She finds the grief underneath the elegance, the calculation underneath the mourning, and the woman underneath the icon. The film is about a week in which a widow has to bury her husband, protect her children, and control how history will remember the whole thing, and Portman plays all three tasks at once, without ever letting one of them win. It is a performance of extraordinary control, and it earned her another Oscar nomination, and it showed that she could play a real person without turning her into a caricature. That is a rare skill, and it is one she learned on Broadway, playing Anne Frank at sixteen, when she first understood that playing a real person is a responsibility, not just a role.

Her activism is the part of her story that makes me think hardest, because it is easy to be cynical about celebrity activism, and Portman makes cynicism difficult. She spoke at the Women’s March in 2018 about her own experiences as a young actress, about being sexualised, about being told to be quiet, and she did it without self-pity, and without naming names for the sake of a headline. She co-founded Time’s Up, she co-founded Angel City FC, and she has used her money and her time to support women’s football and women’s directing. When she declined to attend the Genesis Prize ceremony in 2018, she did it carefully, explaining that she loved Israel but could not endorse its government, and she accepted the criticism that followed. I may not agree with every position she takes, but I respect the way she takes them: she explains herself, she does not hide, and she does not pretend that fame excuses her from having opinions.

What I take from her marriage and divorce is more private, and I want to be careful with it, because she has been careful with it herself. She married Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer of Black Swan, in 2012, they had two children, and they divorced in 2024, after twelve years. She has not given interviews about it, she has not written about it, and she has not used it as material. That restraint is part of who she is, and it is also part of why her career has lasted: she does not turn her private life into content, and she does not ask the audience to care about her pain. She asks the audience to care about her work, and the work is enough. In an era when celebrities share everything, her privacy feels almost radical, and it feels like a choice she made when she was ten years old, in that pizza parlour, when her parents decided that her real name would stay private.

The lesson I would give to a young reader from Portman’s life is simple, and it is not about acting. It is about education. She went to Harvard, she studied psychology, she wrote papers, and she did it while she was famous, while she could have skipped it, while nobody would have blamed her for skipping it. That degree did not make her rich, and it did not make her famous, and it did not win her an Oscar. It made her free. It gave her a life outside acting, a way of thinking, and a confidence that she could survive without Hollywood. Every young person who reads this story should understand that: the most valuable thing Portman did was not winning an Oscar, it was going to class. The Oscar is a statue. The education is a foundation, and foundations last longer than statues.

I also think about the veganism, the animal rights work, and the way she has lived her values since she was a child. She became a vegetarian at eight, after seeing a demonstration of surgery on a chicken, and she has been a vegan for most of her adult life. That is not a diet. That is a moral position, held since childhood, and held publicly, in an industry that does not reward moral positions. She has produced documentaries about factory farming, she has spoken about the environment, and she has done it without preaching, and without making it her brand. It is simply part of who she is, and it fits with everything else: a person who decides what she believes, and then lives by it, whether or not it is convenient.

If there is a warning in her story, it is about the cost of the life she chose. She has worked since she was ten, she has been famous since she was twelve, and she has never had a normal adolescence, a normal university experience, or a normal private life. She has said that she missed things, that she was lonely, that the pressure was enormous, and that she is still learning how to be a person outside her work. That honesty is valuable, because it stops her story from becoming a fairy tale. It was not a fairy tale. It was a childhood spent on film sets, a university degree earned between blockbusters, and a career built on discipline and good decisions, and it worked, but it was hard, and it is still hard. The young reader who wants to be Natalie Portman should know that, and should know that the price was real.

What stays with me, finally, is the image of her at the Oscars in 2011, holding the statue for Black Swan, thanking her parents, and looking, for a moment, like a girl who cannot believe she is there. She had been acting for seventeen years, she had been to Harvard, she had played a queen and a ballerina, and she still looked surprised. That surprise is the most honest thing about her, and it is the reason I keep coming back to her story. She has achieved everything, and she still behaves as if she is lucky to be there, and that gratitude, more than the talent, more than the beauty, more than the intelligence, is what makes her career feel like something worth studying. She did not take fame for granted, she did not take education for granted, and she did not take her audience for granted, and the audience, in return, has not taken her for granted either.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Natalie Portman become famous?

She became known as Mathilda in Leon in 1994 at twelve, then became a global star as Padme Amidala in Star Wars starting in 1999.

Did Natalie Portman win an Oscar?

Yes. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Black Swan in 2011.

Did Natalie Portman go to Harvard?

Yes. She studied psychology at Harvard University and graduated in 2003, while also working as a film star.

Is Natalie Portman from Israel?

Yes. She was born in Jerusalem, Israel, and her family moved to the United States when she was three.

What is Natalie Portman’s best film?

Many critics point to Black Swan from 2010 as her best performance, though Leon from 1994 is also widely praised.

Is Natalie Portman a director?

Yes. She directed A Tale of Love and Darkness in 2015, a film based on a memoir about growing up in Jerusalem.