Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman is an Israeli-born American actress and filmmaker. She gained international recognition for starring as Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. In 2004, Portman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has since portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the biopic Jackie.

About Natalie Portman in brief

Summary Natalie PortmanNatalie Portman is an Israeli-born American actress and filmmaker. She gained international recognition for starring as Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. In 2004, Portman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a Golden Globe Award for playing a mysterious stripper in the romantic drama Closer. She has since portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the biopic Jackie, earning her third Academy Award nomination, and a biologist in the science fiction film Annihilation. Portman’s directorial ventures include the short film Eve and the biographical drama A Tale of Love and Darkness. She is vocal about the politics of America and Israel, and is an advocate for animal rights and environmental causes. She was born in Jerusalem, to Jewish parents, and was given the Hebrew name Neta-Lee. She learned to speak Hebrew while living on Long Island and 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. Her parents were reluctant to let her do the part of Mathilda in Léon: The Professional due to the explicit sexual and violent nature of the film, but agreed after the nudity and killings were removed. Her mother was displeased with some of the sexual twists and turns in the finished film, which were not part of the script of the movie. She played Mathilda, an orphan child who befriends a middle-aged hitman in the action drama film No Strings Attached.

She also played Anne Boleyn in The Other BoleyN Girl and a troubled ballerina in the psychological horror film Black Swan, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress. She went on to star as Jane Foster in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero films Thor and Thor: The Dark World. She adopted her paternal grandmother’s maiden name, PortMan, as her stage name to protect her privacy. She has professed an interest in foreign languages since childhood and has studied French, Japanese, German, and Arabic. Her mother, Shelley Portman, is an American homemaker who works as her agent, and Avner Hershlag, an Israeli gynecologist, is her paternal grandfather. She lives in New York City with her husband and three children. She and her family first lived in Washington, D. C., but relocated to Connecticut in 1988 and then moved to Long Island, in 1990. She said that she was more ambitious. I knew what I liked and what I wanted, and I worked very hard. I was a very serious kid. She turned down the offer to become a child model when she was 10 years old, but used the opportunity to get an acting agent. She auditioned for the 1992 off-Broadway musical Ruthless! about a girl who is prepared to commit murder to get the lead in a school play. Six months after Ruthless!, Portman auditioned and secured a leading role in Luc Besson’s action drama Léons: the Professional.