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'I'd rather be smart than a movie star'

She's a Harvard-educated, eco-minded, non leather-wearing vegetarian. She's also an Oscar-nominated actor who's taken time out from her glittering Hollywood career to campaign for women's rights and edit a maths magazine.

Published: Wed 28 Nov 2007, 11:26 AM

Last updated: Wed 12 Apr 2023, 9:37 AM

Craig McLean tries to sum up the enigma that is Natalie Portman

THE OSCAR-nominated galactic queen who has been famous for more than half of her short life walks into a quiet Turkish cafe near her home in New York's East Village. Natalie Portman arrives on her own, sans entourage. The maitre d' greets her warmly but unfussily. "Nice to see you again..."

She listens patiently, hands clasped in a little fist, peach- perfect face upturned, beauty spots on each cheek, as the waiter reads through a list of today's specials, all of which contain meat or fish. She doesn't interrupt to tell him that she's vegetarian. Eventually he finishes and she says that she'll have the shepherd salad with a side of tzatziki. Tap water will be fine.

She's not a vegan, though she has been trying to phase out eggs. "But I don't think I could do it. It's really hard for travelling, especially if you want to maintain your protein levels."

She refuses to wear leather, but will wear wool. "Although I don't think I have a lot of wool clothes. And I sort of made a no-buying-anything-new rule. I just have a lot of stuff," she says with a tiny pout. "And I figured: look, if I need something, if my running shoes have holes in them and I don't have running shoes any more, then I'll get new ones. But you know, I have 40 T-shirts, I have 20 pairs of jeans — you get so forced into believing (that you need all this stuff). Maybe it's a New York thing."

It's also surely a her-job thing. People must send Portman lovely clothes for red-carpet events and the like.

"Most of the time I give them back. Because it's not like you wear them ever again. Also, a lot of them are samples and you have to give them back. It's very Cinderella."

Even the Zac Posen stuff? (The New York designer sees Portman as his muse.)

"Yeah, but again, I don't really wear them again — except a lot of my friends started getting married this year. So all of a sudden," she smiles, "I actually do wear fancy dresses."

Undressing Natalie

But dress sense isn't the thing that preoccupies most people when they think of Portman. It's undressing.

If you go down to the multiplex today, to see director Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, you're sure of a big surprise. Not from the film — three bickering American brothers (Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson) travel across India by train — which is Merchant Ivory by way of Jackass. No, the remarkable thing is Hotel Chevalier, Anderson's 10-minute short that appears before the main feature. It's remarkable because it's so much better than the two-hour film thatllows. And because in it Natalie Portman disrobes and acts out a sex scene.

"I think it's beautiful and I think it's tastefully done and I love the short," says Portman. "And it still wasn't like full nudity."

Well, it was and it wasn't. Hotel Chevalier is about a young couple, played by Portman and Schwartzman, reuniting for a (possibly final) tryst. It's a perfect little two-hander, Schwartzman strange, fidgety and sad, Portman enigmatic, elegant and sad. It's all rendered just so: Peter Sarstedt's 'Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)' is the soundtrack. Cigarettes are smoked brilliantly. And when you see Portman naked and leaning in profile on a dresser, she's posed deliberately, artfully, bony elbows protecting her modesty. Rodin's 'Thinker' with a xylophone of ribs and a gamine haircut. But she's definitely starkers.

And yet, and yet... Natalie Portman doesn't do nudity. That's what she said, that's what everyone said. The actress was a paragon of principle, a hugely talented brainbox who happened to be both bombshell and bewitcher, who rewrote the rule book for young Hollywood hot shots.

"It confuses people to think that someone so completely beautiful could be a first-rate actor, too," says veteran director Mike Nichols, to whom Portman is very close. "It's hard to grasp, but it's happened. It's happened a few times before, with Garbo and Louise Brooks."

Portman was shocked by the response to her first movie, 1994's Leon, in which she played a 12-year-old girl having a tender but uncomfortable-to-watch relationship with a hitman. The media response and the dodgy letters sent to adolescent Portman didn't sour her towards acting per se, "but towards acting in stuff that was sexually provocative when I was young".

Retreating into the 'real' life

Before and after Leon, Portman, an only child, and her super- supportive, super-protective parents (dad a fertility doctor, mum a housewife) tried to do things right.

She'd wriggled free from the Hollywood tractor beam even before she felt its pull — while she continued with her schooling in a well-to-do area of Long Island, on screen she hid her real identity (Natalie Hershlag) behind Portman, her grandmother's maiden name.

She took another jailbait-ish role in the wonderful Beautiful Girls, but as she advanced into her teens refused more sexually provocative roles in Romeo & Juliet, The Ice Storm and Lolita. She agreed to be in Star Wars Episodes I to III, but only if she could do the films in summer holidays.

Portman retreated even further into 'real life' by taking a psychology degree at Harvard, the gravity (in every sense) slowing her shooting-star trajectory. "I don't care if going to Harvard ruins my career," she said at the time. "I'd rather be smart than a movie star."

She was, then, a principled young actress, smarter than the average bare-all starlet. So, in Closer, 2004's sexually charged chamber piece in which four beautiful people (Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen) fall in and out of love and lust, she asked Mike Nichols, the director, to remove scenes in which her character — a pink-haired stripper — gets her kit off.

In her first real adult role, her instincts were bang on: her performance was stunning enough without disrobing, and she won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar.

Then, in this year's Goya's Ghosts, an arthouse film made in Spain with director Milos Forman, she insisted on a body-double being used for scenes where her character is naked. "That wasn't by choice in Goya's Ghosts, by the way," she interjects. "But that's sort of a boring conversation."

Experimental mode

She doesn't think she has any rational explanation as to why she agreed to go nude for Anderson, other than "sometimes I just feel like changing rules a bit. I get into modes where I feel like I wanna experiment with my acting."

Thus the first film she did after completing the overblown Star Wars trilogy was the $2.5m Garden State, a scruffy, lovely, cheapo indie that was the directorial debut of Scrubs star Zach Braff.

She'll play a shaven-headed terrorist in V for Vendetta, the controversial Wachowski Brothers-produced comic-book adaptation.

She'll take time off to make a short with German director Tom Twyker (Run Lola Run, Perfume).

Another example: "I'll go do a big-budget movie that I thought I'd never do." She doesn't elaborate here, but I'm guessing Mars Attacks!, in which she played the president's daughter.

Anyway, "I get impulses to do stuff and they're not always explicable. And they often turn into my favourite experiences."

Of which, she says, Hotel Chevalier is emphatically one. But now a cloud is passing over Portman's sunny features.

"The thing is — it's proven to me yet again, which is a bummer — and maybe I've brought it on myself by talking about nudity so much — it's still the thing that people talk about more than the short. And that's the thing that makes me think maybe I shouldn't have done it. It's not that I regret the actual thing. But it really depresses me that what I think is a wonderful film, that I'm really happy with — and Wes put a lot of time and energy into planning shots and writing the script, it's very minimal, very exact — and then at the end literally half of any article or review about it has been about the nudity.

"I'm really not prudish about doing nudity," she continues. "I think it's beautiful in films, and sex is such a big part of life, and nudity is obviously our natural state. That's not my issue. My issue is that I feel it takes something away from what you're doing. And also that it can be used afterwards for different purposes. Misappropriated."

Nudie clips that end up on YouTube?

"Yeah. My picture ended up on porn sites," she says, face aghast. "So that's the dilemma more than... The artistic decision of it is a no-brainer to me. But it's not the way it used to be; it doesn't show at a film festival, you know?"

Working from the shadows

Portman likes to investigate, to be specific, to focus. This autumn she's fronting a new high-school maths campaign, and has just guest-edited an issue of Scholastic Math: "(Maths) made me excited about life, to consider the limitlessness of the mind and what we can do with it."

She's visited Rwanda to make a documentary for the Animal Planet channel, highlighting the plight of gorillas. And rather than 'just' be the face of a charity visiting this or that beleaguered country, she works with the Foundation for International Community Assistance (Finca), which offers micro-financial investment to women in developing countries. It's a very under-the-radar — and unshowy — charitable initiative.

"Well, yeah, because I wanna do something meaningful. They ask you to do 4,000 charity things a year and all of them are worthy. But I don't think you can really make an impact unless you do (just) one thing and really devote yourself. And it's been important to me."

Portman was born in Israel (her family moved to the US when she was three) and in 2004 spent six months doing Middle Eastern studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She became involved with Finca after reading that Queen Rania of Jordan was a supporter.

"I contacted her because I was interested in doing some sort of Israeli/Palestinian initiative with women, and she's the most high- profile Palestinian woman in the world. And also someone I really admire. She's just super-eloquent and smart and compassionate and doing great things. So I hoped to do something with her, and she directed me towards micro-finance.

"It's amazing," she continues, her unblinking eyes shining eagerly. "It's less of a charity than sort of an expansion of opportunity. It's opening up banking services to the poor."

"There's this book I love called The Future of Life by EO Wilson, about the environment. It's basically aimed at business people who just think about infinite possibilities, infinite expansion — but the earth is limited! It's very short term to think we can just accumulate and make as much as we can. If you wanna think longer-term economically, there are better ways.'

Alert, inquisitive, Natalie Portman likes to be stimulated. At Harvard she was tutored by — and became research assistant to — law professor Alan Dershowitz (famous outside academia for his role in the defence of Claus von Bulow).

"She's not one of those Hollywood stars who plays on her stardom to have you listen to her on other issues," he says. "She's worth listening to because of her own inherent intelligence, experience and background."

Ask her why she chose to study psychology and she replies, "I think it's pretty much the same job as being an actor: trying to imagine how other people think, why and how they do the things they do. How things that happen in their life affect them personally and all that stuff."

She talks about 'knowing other minds' - the idea that, initially, children believe everyone shares the same information.

"Then at a certain age the concept of the secret becomes possible. It's understanding subjectivity. It's the basis of all storytelling — everyone who experiences an event has a different take on it and tells it from a different point of view. So yeah, the tale is an amazing thing."

Booked for life

She beams when talking about theatre: at 16 she was Anne Frank on Broadway and was directed by Mike Nichols in The Seagull; she enthuses about Tom Stoppard's Rock'N'Roll, which she saw in London (it has just opened in New York).

And she beams, too, when talking about books: "I really love having a book in my hand. I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma — it's tracing industrialised food production."

And when talking about Norah Jones (Portman and the multimillion- selling jazz-ish singer both star in Wong Kar Wai's upcoming My Blueberry Nights and are now best friends): "Norah is a sweetheart. It's rare that you meet people through work who you're, like: 'Oh my God, I wanna spend every minute with you!'

I sincerely love her. It's hard to describe (why) because 'down-to-earth' usually describes someone who acts more humble than they actually are — because they know that it behoves them to not be an asshole!"

She sits bolt upright in her seat, business-like, hands jammed in the pockets of the coat she doesn't take off, happy to discourse with nuanced savvy on questions of artistry or business or topicality — she's a keen follower of Middle Eastern politics and an avowed Democrat who's yet to decide between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

"I think Hillary is very, very smart. She's maybe the smartest. It would be awesome to have a female president. But I'd also want her to be the best person because I think that's gonna be best for women, too."

Art for human sake

Portman's manners are impeccable. She's smart enough to talk at length without letting her guard down. But she noticeably retreats when the conversation turns personal. There will be no discussion today of her love life, of either (reported) ex- boyfriend Gael Garcia Bernal or current beau, English model turned fashion entrepreneur Nathan Bogle. That side of celebrity she can well do without.

She has no movie mates to speak of — although she does 'socially' know Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire and is excited to be working with them on her next movie, Jim Sheridan's army/family drama Brothers.

And she clicked with Scarlett Johansson while filming the upcoming The Other Boleyn Girl: "It was nice to be with someone who's been through the same experiences, starting out (in movies) young."

Her immediate circle comprises friends from school and university."I must be an asshole when I work because I don't really make friends!" she says, letting out her Tinkerbell laugh. "I'm afraid of getting too caught up in that world. And so it's important to have my separate space."

The essential dumbness of 'that world' — showbiz — causes her some distress.

"I get pissed off that I go to a premiere to talk about my movie, and the first thing they ask me is what dress I'm wearing. And look, I buy into that because I play along — you have to, in a certain way. If you don't dress up then they'll talk about that! It almost becomes less of an issue to play along with it, because then it doesn't become a conversation topic. But that's annoying."

The Oscar-nominated humanitarian Harvard graduate. The actress who makes important and/or great films. The agit/indie chick: her personally compiled alt.rock-heavy playlist is available via iTunes as part of the Big Change: Songs for Finca campaign. The glowing young woman who inspires hot designers to send her fabulous frocks (albeit temporarily) and whose close friend, Stila cosmetics founder Jeanine Lobell (they've been tight since working on a Vanity Fair cover shot when Portman was 17), has named a lip gloss after her: 'Natalie' by Stila is 'a little purple, a little bit darker than my own lip colour', Portman says with a hint of embarrassment. But yes, she wears it.

It's all so perfect and all-boxes-ticked dandy.

Forget psychology, says this psychology graduate: "Overall, to get a real deep, nuanced understanding of human behaviour, art is the best way."

The magic of Natalie Portman

The actress insists her life isn't so fairy tale.

Proof, of sorts, is offered by her new film.

Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium is about a magic toy shop. After the 243-year-old titular owner (Dustin Hoffman) decides to retire, he anoints his young assistant Molly (Portman) as his heir. But the toys and the toy shop don't like this and start rebelling. Molly isn't so sure either.

I can understand how Portman relates to Molly as a woman at the crossroads of girlhood and adulthood (even now she still looks almost childlike). But suffering from crises of confidence - surely that's not Portman?

"Some days I can walk in and feel on top of things and I know what I'm doing and I'm motivated. And there are other days when I have a hard time getting out of bed."

Like Molly, she finds it hard to finish things — she's great at meeting deadlines and film-set call times, but left to her own devices she dithers and frets like the rest of us.

Going over to the dark side didn't help. The response to her performance as Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Portman says, "made my confidence in myself go down, (with) people thinking I sucked after that!"

Her Jedi knight in shining armour was her 66-year-old Closer and Seagull director. "Mike Nichols is sort of my creative father. He rebirthed my belief in myself. And I think other people's belief in me, too. He would lobby other directors for me — he got me the part in Cold Mountain. They didn't want to hire me, and he wrote a letter to (director) Anthony Minghella for me. You spend two minutes with him and you're a better person for it."

Having been sent the script for Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium on the Thursday, she knew immediately it was a goodie. She had signed on by the Monday. Indeed, her joy practically dollops out of the screen, with the camera lingering long and lovingly on her little-girl-lost-then-found features.

"It's this really imaginative, special, amazing world that wasn't some sort of pat kids' movie. It had a great sense of goodness and magic, but in a very sincere way. It wasn't treacly."

This veteran of the CGI-heavy The Phantom Menace et al — where the actors often had to 'act' against no one — was also relieved that "there are barely any green screen shots, so the effects are really real. And a lot of the humour is absurdist. I was, like: 'Wow, I would like to see this, but I could also take my friends' kids to it.' There's no sex or violence in it, but otherwise it could be an adult movie."

And in the end, fake-free Natalie Portman, who always wants to be true to the art — nudity if required, porn sites be damned — found a film she could relate to.

"It had a character with a real conflict in the middle, and that was very true and appropriate to my age, but in this incredible world that I thought kids would love. Because I think half the stuff that is interesting for us to do as actors is so boring to watch"