Natalie Portman

Six months after Ruthless! ended, Portman auditioned for and secured a leading role in Luc Besson's action drama Léon: The Professional (1994).[21] To protect her privacy, she adopted her paternal grandmother's maiden name, Portman, as her stage name.[24][25] 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 nudity and the killings committed by Portman's character.[26] Portman herself said that after those scenes were removed, she found nothing objectionable about the content.[27] 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.[19] 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.[28][29]

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.[31] She also enrolled at the Stagedoor Manor performing arts camp, where she played Anne Shirley in a staging of Anne of Green Gables.[32] 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.[33][34] 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).[27] Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Portman, a budding knockout, is scene-stealingly good even in an overly showy role."[35] She subsequently went back to Stagedoor Manor to appear in a production of the musical Cabaret.[36] Also in 1996, Portman had brief roles in Woody Allen's musical Everyone Says I Love You and Tim Burton's comic science fiction film Mars Attacks!.[37]

Portman was cast opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), but she dropped out during rehearsals when studio executives found her too young for the role.[19] Luhrmann said "Natalie was amazing in the footage, but it was too much of a burden for her at that age".[38] She was also offered Adrian Lyne's Lolita, based on the novel of the same name, but she turned down the part due to its excessive sexual content.[19][27] She later bemoaned that her parts in The Professional and Beautiful Girls prompted a series of offers to play a sexualized youngster, adding that it "dictated a lot of my choices afterwards 'cos it scared me ... it made me reluctant to do sexy stuff".[30] Portman instead signed on to star as Anne Frank in a Broadway revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, which was staged at the Music Box Theatre from December 1997 to May 1998. 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.[39][40] Reviewing the production for Variety, Greg Evans disliked her portrayal, which he thought had "little of the charm, budding genius or even brittle intelligence that the diary itself reveals".[41] Conversely, Ben Brantley found an "ineffable grace in her awkwardness".[42] The experience of performing the play was emotionally draining for her, as she attended high school during the day and performed at night; she wrote personal essays in Time and Seventeen magazines about her experience.[43]

Portman's costume from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts

Portman began filming the part of Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy in 1997, which marked her first big-budget production. The first film of the series, Episode I – The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, when she was in her senior year of high school.[44] Portman was unfamiliar with the franchise when she was cast, and watched the original Star Wars trilogy before filming began.[45] She worked closely with the director George Lucas on her character's accent and mannerisms, and watched the films of Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, and Katharine Hepburn to draw inspiration from their voice and stature.[46] Filming in arduous locations in Algeria proved challenging for Portman.[47][21] She did not attend the film's premiere so she could study for her high school finals.[48] Critics disliked the film but with earnings of $924 million worldwide it was the second highest-grossing film of all time to that point, and it established Portman as a global star.[49][50]

Portman graduated from Syosset High School in 1999.[51][52][53] Her high school paper, "A Simple Method to Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar", co-authored with scientists Ian Hurley and Jonathan Woodward, was entered in the Intel Science Talent Search.[54] Following production on The Phantom Menace, Portman initially turned down a lead role in the coming-of-age film Anywhere but Here (1999) after learning it would involve a sex scene, but the director Wayne Wang and actress Susan Sarandon (who played Portman's mother in the film) demanded a rewrite of the script. She was shown a new draft, and decided to accept the part.[16][55] Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon called Portman's performance "astonishing" and added that "unlike any number of actresses her age, she's neither too maudlin nor too plucky".[56] She received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination for it.[57]

Portman's sole screen appearance in 2000 was in Where the Heart Is, a romantic drama filmed in Texas, in which she played a pregnant teenager.[58] After finishing work on the film, she began attending Harvard University to pursue her bachelor's degree in psychology, and significantly reduced her acting roles over the next few years.[16] She studied advanced Hebrew literature and neurobiology,[59] and she served as Alan Dershowitz's research assistant.[20][60] In the summer of 2001, she returned to Broadway (at the Delacorte Theater) to perform Chekhov's drama The Seagull, which was directed by Mike Nichols and co-starred Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.[61] Linda Winer of Newsday wrote that the "major surprises come from Portman, whose Nina transforms with astonishing lyricism from the girl with ambition to Chekhov's most difficult symbol of destruction".[62] Also in 2001, Portman was among several celebrities who made cameo appearances in the comedy Zoolander.[63] The following year she reprised her role of Amidala in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, which she had filmed in Sydney and London during her summer break of 2000.[64] She was excited by the opportunity to play a confident young woman who did not depend on the male lead.[65] When asked about balancing her career and education, she said, "I don't care if [college] ruins my career. I'd rather be smart than a movie star."[66][67] In 2002, she contributed to a study on memory called "Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy".[68][69] Portman graduated from Harvard in 2003 and her sole screen appearance that year was in the brief part of a young mother in the war film Cold Mountain.[16][70][71]

Portman on the set of Free Zone in 2005

Portman began 2004 by featuring in the romantic comedy Garden State, which was written and directed by its star Zach Braff. She was the first actor to sign on to the film after finding a connection with her part: a spirited young girl suffering from epilepsy.[17][72] Her role in it was described by Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club. as a prime example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character type – a stereotypical female role designed to spiritually help a male protagonist.[73] Portman later said she found it upsetting to have contributed to the trope.[74] She followed it by playing a mysterious stripper in Closer, a romantic drama directed by Mike Nichols based on the play of the same name, and co-starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Clive Owen. Portman agreed to her first sexually explicit adult role after turning down such parts in the past, saying it reflected her own maturity as a person.[17][75] She had also performed her first nude scenes for the film, but they were deleted from the final cut when she insisted that they were inessential to the story.[75] Closer grossed over $115 million worldwide against a $27 million budget, and the critic Peter Travers took note of Portman's "blazing, breakthrough performance", writing that she "digs so deep into the bruised core of her character that they seem to wear the same skin."[76][77] She won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and received an Academy Award nomination in the same category.[78][79]

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, the final installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, was Portman's first film release of 2005. It earned over $848 million to rank as the second-highest-grossing film of the year.[80] She next played a Jewish-American girl in Free Zone, a drama from Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. To prepare, she studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and read memoirs of Yitzhak Rabin, which she said allowed her to explore both the role and her own heritage.[75][23] Controversy arose when she filmed a kissing scene at the Western Wall, where gender segregation is enforced, and she later issued an apology.[81] Critics disliked the film for its heavy-handed approach to the conflicts in the Middle East.[82] Portman's final film role in 2005 was that of Evey Hammond in the political thriller V for Vendetta, based on the comics of the same name, about an alternative future where a neo-fascist regime has subjugated the United Kingdom. She was drawn to the provocative nature of the script, and worked with a dialect coach to speak in an English accent. In a scene in which her character is tortured, her head was shaved on camera; she considered it an opportunity to rid herself of vanity.[83] Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle deemed it Portman's strongest performance to that point, and remarked that she "keeps you focused on her words and actions instead of her bald head."[84] She was awarded the Saturn Award for Best Actress.[85]

Portman began 2006 by hosting an episode of the television sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live.[86] One of her sketches, a song named "Natalie's Rap", was released later in 2009 on Incredibad, an album by the Lonely Island.[87] In the anthology film Paris, je t'aime, consisting of eighteen short films, she had a role in the segment named "Faubourg Saint-Denis" from director Tom Tykwer.[88] Later that year, she starred in Miloš Forman's Goya's Ghosts, about the painter Francisco Goya. Forman cast her in the film after finding a resemblance between her and Goya's portrait The Milkmaid of Bordeaux.[89] She insisted on using a body double for her nude scenes after discovering on set that she had to perform them when they were not originally in the script.[90] It received predominantly negative reviews, but Roger Ebert was appreciative of Portman for playing her dual role "with fearless conviction".[91][92]

Portman at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where she served as a jury member

Portman began 2007 by replacing Jodie Foster in Wong Kar-wai's romantic drama My Blueberry Nights, which was his first English-language film. For her role as a gambler, she trained with a poker coach.[93] Richard Corliss of Time magazine believed that "for once she's not playing a waif or a child princess but a mature, full-bodied woman" and commended her "vibrancy, grittiness and ache, all performed with a virtuosa's easy assurance".[94] Her next appearance was in Hotel Chevalier, a short film from Wes Anderson, which served as a prologue to his feature The Darjeeling Limited (in which Portman had a cameo).[95] In the short, she and Jason Schwartzman play former lovers who reunite in a Paris hotel room. For the first time, Portman performed an extended nude scene; she was later disappointed at the undue focus on it and she subsequently swore off appearing nude again.[90][96] Keen to work in different genres, Portman accepted a role in the children's film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, playing an employee of a magical toy store.[97] She also appeared in Paul McCartney's music video "Dance Tonight" from his album Memory Almost Full, directed by Michel Gondry.[98]

Scarlett Johansson and Portman portrayed rival sisters Mary and Anne Boleyn, respectively, in the period film The Other Boleyn Girl (2008). She was excited by the opportunity to work opposite another actress her age, bemoaning that such casting was rare in film.[99] Derek Elley of Variety was critical of Portman's English accent and wrote that she "doesn't quite bring the necessary heft to make Anne a truly dominant power player".[100] The film had modest box-office earnings.[101] She served as a jury member of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and also launched her own production company, named handsomecharlie films, after her late dog.[93][102] Portman's directorial debut, the short film Eve, opened the short-film screenings at the 65th Venice International Film Festival.[103] It is about a young woman who goes to her grandmother's romantic date, and Portman drew inspiration for the older character (played by Lauren Bacall) from her own grandmother.[104]

A poorly received adaptation of Ayelet Waldman's novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, entitled The Other Woman, marked Portman's first film role of 2009.[105] She appeared in a faux perfume commercial called Greed, directed by Roman Polanski, and in the anthology film New York, I Love You, she directed a segment and also starred in a different segment directed by Mira Nair.[106][107] Portman next took on a role opposite Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal in the drama film Brothers, a remake of the 2004 Danish film of the same name. Her role was that of a war widow, for which she spoke with military wives to prepare. The film was shot during the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike, and Portman found it challenging to shoot certain scenes without a written script.[108] Claudia Puig of USA Today found her to be "subdued and reactive in a part that doesn't call for her to do much else".[109]

After producing and co-starring alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the black comedy Hesher (2010),[110] Portman played a ballerina overwhelmed with the prospect of performing Swan Lake in Darren Aronofsky's psychological horror film Black Swan. She was trained by the professional ballerina Mary Helen Bowers, and in preparation, she trained for five to eight hours daily for six months and lost 20 pounds (9 kg).[111][112][113] Her performance was acclaimed;[114] writing for Empire, Dan Jolin found her to be "simultaneously at her most vulnerable and her most predatory, at once frostily brittle and raunchily malleable [...] before peaking at the film's denouement with a raw, alluring showstopper of a performance."[115] Black Swan emerged as a sleeper hit, grossing over $329 million worldwide against a $13 million budget, and earned Portman several prizes including the Academy Award for Best Actress.[116][117][118] Following her Oscar win, controversy arose over who performed the bulk of the on-screen dancing in the film.[119] Sarah Lane, one of Portman's dancing doubles in the film, claimed that the actress performed only about five percent of the full-body shots, adding that she was asked by the film's producers not to speak publicly about it during awards season.[120] Aronofsky defended Portman by insisting that she had performed 80 percent of the on-screen dancing.[120]

Portman at the 83rd Academy Awards in 2011, where she won the Academy Award for Best Actress

Portman next served as an executive producer for No Strings Attached (2011), a romantic comedy in which she starred with Ashton Kutcher as a young couple in a casual sex relationship. She described the experience of making it as a "palate cleanser" from the intensity of Black Swan.[121] It received unfavorable reviews but was a commercial success.[122][123] She next agreed to the film Your Highness for the opportunity of playing an athletic and foul-mouthed character, which she believed was rare for actresses.[124] Critics were dismissive of the film's reliance on scatological humor and it proved to be a box-office bomb.[125][126] In her final film release of 2011, Portman took on the part of Jane Foster, a scientist and love-interest of the titular character (played by Chris Hemsworth) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film Thor. She liked the idea of Kenneth Branagh directing a big-budget film that emphasized character; she signed on to it before receiving a script, and helped develop her part by reading the biography of scientists such as Rosalind Franklin.[127][128][129] Richard Kuipers of Variety commended Portman's "sterling work in a thinly written role" for adding dimension to the film's romantic subplot.[130] Thor earned $449.3 million worldwide to emerge as the 15th highest-grossing film of 2011.[131]

In 2012, Portman topped Forbes' listing of the most bankable stars in Hollywood.[132] Her sole screen appearance that year was in Paul McCartney's music video "My Valentine", alongside Johnny Depp.[133] The following year, she reprised the role of Jane Foster in Thor: The Dark World, which earned over $644 million worldwide to emerge as the 10th highest-grossing film of 2013.[134] Forbes featured her in their Celebrity 100 listing of 2014, and estimated her income from the previous year to be $13 million.[135]

In 2015, Portman appeared alongside an ensemble cast, including Christian Bale, in Terrence Malick's experimental drama film Knight of Cups, which marked her first project after giving birth. She shot for it within a week of returning to work and she did not receive a traditional script or dialogues, improvising most of her scenes with Bale.[136][137] She said that shooting with Malick influenced her own directorial venture, A Tale of Love and Darkness which was released in the same year.[136] Based on Israeli author Amos Oz's autobiographical novel of the same name which is set in Jerusalem during the last years of the British Mandate of Palestine, the Hebrew-language film starred Portman who also produced and co-wrote it.[138][139] She had wanted to adapt the book since she first read it a decade ago, but postponed it until she was old enough to play the leading role of a mother herself. She collaborated closely with Amos, showing him drafts of her script as she adapted the book.[140][141] A. O. Scott of The New York Times found it to be a "conscientious adaptation of a difficult book" and was appreciative of Portman's potential as a filmmaker.[142] She next produced and starred in the western film Jane Got a Gun about a young mother seeking vengeance. Initially scheduled to be directed by Lynne Ramsay, the production was plagued with numerous difficulties. Ramsay did not turn up on set for the first day of filming and was eventually replaced with Gavin O'Connor. Michael Fassbender, Jude Law, and Bradley Cooper were all cast as the male lead, before Ewan McGregor played the part.[143] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian reviewed that Portman's "stately performance" was not enough to save the "laborious and solemn western", and it grossed less than $4 million against its $25 million budget.[144][145]

Portman attending the premiere of Planetarium at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival

Portman portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in the Pablo Larraín-directed biopic Jackie (2016), about Kennedy's life immediately after the 1963 assassination of her husband. She was initially intimidated to take on the part of a well-known public figure,[146] and eventually researched Kennedy extensively by watching videos of her, reading books, and listening to audiotapes of her interviews.[147][148] She also worked with a dialect coach to adopt Kennedy's unique speaking style.[149] David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter termed it an "incandescent performance" and added that "her Jackie is both inscrutable and naked, broken but unquestionably resilient, a mess and yet fiercely dignified".[150] She won the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.[151][152] She also served as producer for the comedy horror film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, directed by Burr Steers, and starred in Rebecca Zlotowski's French-Belgian drama Planetarium.[153][154] The 2017 experimental romance Song to Song marked Portman's second collaboration with Terrence Malick, which like their previous film polarized critics.[155][156]

In 2018, Portman starred in the science fiction film Annihilation, based on Jeff VanderMeer's novel. She played a biologist and former soldier who studies a mysterious quarantined zone of mutating organisms.[157][158] She was pleased to headline a rare female-led science fiction film, and she moved her family near Pinewood Studios during filming. For the action sequences, she underwent movement training with the dancer Bobbi Jene Smith.[159] Benjamin Lee of The Guardian took note of Portman's "strong, fiercely compelling presence" and commended her for playing the part without unnecessary sentimentality.[160] It only received a limited theatrical release and was distributed on Netflix internationally.[161] Her next appearance was in Xavier Dolan's first English-language film, the ensemble drama The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (2018), which was termed a "shocking misfire" by Eric Kohn of IndieWire.[162] She then starred as a troubled pop singer in Vox Lux, sharing the part with Raffey Cassidy. She was drawn to the idea of showcasing the negative effects of fame, and in preparation, she watched documentaries on musicians and listened to the music of Sia, who wrote her songs in the film. For the climactic dance routines, she trained with her husband, Benjamin Millepied, who choreographed the sequence.[163] It received mixed reviews from critics, but Portman's performance earned unanimous praise.[164] Comparing it to her performances in Black Swan and Jackie, Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph wrote that "this role has a similar audacity and extravagance that few actresses would dare attempt, let alone be allowed to get away with".[165]

Unused footage from Thor: The Dark World and a new voice-over were used for Portman's brief appearance in the 2019 superhero film Avengers: Endgame.[166] She then portrayed a psychologically troubled astronaut (based on Lisa Nowak) in the drama Lucy in the Sky, directed by Noah Hawley.[167] She replaced the film's producer Reese Witherspoon, who backed out due to a scheduling conflict. The film was poorly received, though Portman's performance was praised.[168] The following year, she narrated the Disney+ nature documentary Dolphin Reef and voiced Jane Foster in the animated series What If...?.[169][170] In 2022, Portman reprised her role as Foster in the sequel Thor: Love and Thunder, in which her character becomes Mighty Thor.[171][172] She agreed to return to the franchise after meeting with director Taika Waititi, who offered to portray her character in an "adventurous and fun and funny" way.[173][174] In preparation, Portman took the Mjolnir prop home to practice using it for her stunts.[175] Nick Allen at RogerEbert.com opined, "In both her human and her heroic state, Portman’s performance conveys why it's great to see Jane again."[176] Portman received a nomination for the Critics' Choice Super Award for Best Actress in a Superhero Movie.[177] In a 2022 readers' poll by Empire magazine, Portman was voted one of the 50 greatest actors of all time.[178]

Portman (left) at a press conference for May December at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival

Portman and her producing partner, Sophie Mas, founded the production company MountainA in 2021, and signed a first-look television deal with Apple TV+.[179] The company's first project was May December, a drama from filmmaker Todd Haynes, starring Portman and Julianne Moore, which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.[180][181] Portman played an actress researching to play a woman (played by Moore) married to a much-younger man. She was pleased to work with Haynes, whose work she admired, and to play a morally ambiguous character.[182] Geoffrey Macnab of The Independent believed that the film had been "galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore".[183] The company next produced the HBO documentary series Angel City, about the inaugural season of Angel City FC, which was co-founded by Portman.[180]

MountainA's third project will be Lady in the Lake, an Apple TV+ miniseries adaptation of Laura Lippman's novel of the same name, starring Portman as a 1960s housewife turned investigative journalist.[184]