Natalie Portman (born June 9, 1981, Jerusalem) is an Israeli American actress known for the aristocratic poise and nuance with which she evinced the struggles of complex precocious women. In 2011, she won an Academy Award for her performance in Black Swan (2010).

Early life and first films

Natalie Hershlag was born in Jerusalem; her mother was American and her father, who later became a fertility doctor, was Israeli. In 1984 the family moved to the United States, eventually settling in Syosset, Long Island, New York. After a brief stint in modeling, Hershlag turned to acting, securing her first film role in Léon (1994; The Professional). She starred opposite French actor Jean Reno as an adolescent girl training to be an assassin after her parents have been murdered. Hershlag assumed her maternal grandmother’s last name at this time in order to protect herself from unwanted attention as a result of the role, which had sexual overtones. She then appeared in Michael Mann’s crime thriller Heat (1995) as a troubled teenager.

Beautiful Girls, Closer, and Star Wars movies

Portman worked steadily, accepting supporting roles in the relationship drama Beautiful Girls (1996), Woody Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and Tim Burton’s alien-invasion comedy Mars Attacks! (1996) before appearing as the elaborately costumed Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999). Portman reprised the role in the film’s two sequels (2002, 2005). The trilogy, though spurned by critics and excoriated by many aficionados of the earlier films, was nonetheless highly lucrative and established Portman as a recognizable face.

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During that time Portman also starred as the resentful daughter to Susan Sarandon’s flamboyant single mother in Anywhere but Here (1999) and as a homeless and pregnant teen who gives birth in a Wal-Mart store in Where the Heart Is (2000). In addition to acting, Portman attended Harvard University, graduating in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. In 2004 she won acclaim for the humanity she brought to both the romantic comedy Garden State and the Mike Nichols relationship drama Closer. The latter role earned her a Golden Globe for best supporting actress and an Academy Award nomination in the same category.

Black Swan and Thor series

Portman again demonstrated the facility with which she alternated between genres as a shaven-headed revolutionary in the dystopian fantasy V for Vendetta (2005), a brassy gambler in Wong Kar-Wai’s moody romance My Blueberry Nights (2007), and the doomed queen Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008). She played a grieving military spouse in Brothers (2009) and both directed and appeared in segments of New York, I Love You (2009), a compilation of short films. Her role as the disturbed ballerina Nina Sayers in the thriller Black Swan (2010) won her an Academy Award for best actress. During the filming of that movie, she met Benjamin Millepied, a dancer and choreographer, and the couple married in 2012 (divorced 2024).

Later roles for Portman included a dowdy supermarket cashier in Hesher (2010) and a scientist in the action fantasies Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). She also took on lighter fare, appearing opposite Ashton Kutcher in the romantic comedy No Strings Attached (2011) and portraying a warrior princess in the bawdy period comedy Your Highness (2011). Portman then appeared as an unfaithful wife in Terrence Malick’s Hollywood parable Knight of Cups (2015) and as a hard-bitten pioneer in the vengeance tale Jane Got a Gun (2016).

Later work

Portman earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Jackie (2016), about Jacqueline Kennedy in the days after her husband’s assassination. She next portrayed a waitress seduced by a music producer in Malick’s Song to Song (2017), a romantic drama set against the Austin, Texas, music scene, and then led a largely female cast in Annihilation (2018), a sci-fi thriller in which she played a biologist who goes on a dangerous secret mission.

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Portman then garnered critical acclaim for her performance as a pop music diva staging her comeback in Vox Lux (2018), but her next movies, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018) and Lucy in the Sky (2019), were not well received. In 2020 she narrated the family documentary Dolphin Reef. Portman then starred in Todd Haynes’s May December (2023), playing an actress researching her upcoming role of a teacher (played by Julianne Moore) who has an affair with a student.