EVERY LITTLE BIT OF GOOD HELP
by Robert Moritz
“Growing up, I felt really weird compared to all my friends,” Natalie Portman said. “I was an only child, and I moved a lot, and English wasn’t my first language. I tried to pick up on all the subtle social cues of how you’re supposed to act and how people want you to be, but it was hard. I just wanted to be like everyone else.”
Natalie Portman is very much not like everyone else. At an age when most recent college grads are typing their first résumé, the 23-year-old actress already has appeared in more than a dozen films, starred on Broadway, gone to Harvard and spent the last year as the Ambassador of Hope with The Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA). Now she is poised to appear in her most significant role to date, alongside Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen in Closer—the tale of four strangers and the complex relationships they forge and betray.
“I play a character who’s completely making herself up and then becoming that person,” she said of the film, opening Friday.
The role tapped into her own personal struggle of self-discovery as she was growing up.
“I loved reading the Baby-sitters Club series,” she said. “They had all types of girls—the really smart one, the really girly girl, the earthy crunchy girl—but it confused me. I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m no one. I’m not a type. I don’t know who I am.’ One of the major shifts I felt coming into adulthood was the understanding that there’s no such thing as types.”
I sat down with Portman for breakfast at The Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago, where she was appearing on Oprah. Afterward, the actress would be heading back to the house she recently purchased near her parents’ home in the upper-middle-class town of Syosset, N.Y. I asked about her childhood.
“I was born in Israel when my dad was in medical school,” she said. Her Israeli father, Avner, a fertility specialist, met her American mother, Shelley, while studying in Ohio. The two fell in love and moved to Israel together. When Natalie was 3, the family relocated to Maryland for her father’s surgery residency, followed by a stay in Connecticut and then Syosset, where Natalie grew up.
A modeling scout for Revlon approached her at a pizza parlor when Natalie was 10. Unlike almost any other girl her age in a similar situation, Natalie said she would rather try acting. She got an agent through the encounter and spent two years learning her craft onstage before landing her first film role in The Professional—the violent tale of a lonely hit man who befriends a desperate young girl. By age 14, she was busy acting in films—beginning with 1995’s Heat, followed by Beautiful Girls, Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You and Mars Attacks!
“My parents were worried about me being in this sort of immoral, bankrupt industry with child actors turning into these big mess-ups,” she said. “They wanted my education to come before acting.”
With their careful guidance, Natalie attended public high school and took parts only during summer breaks. At 16, she made her Broadway debut, starring in The Diary of Anne Frank, the story of the 13-year-old Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam before being sent to her death at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was an acting experience that, she said, changed her.
“Anne Frank’s faith in humanity, even when she was starving and sick, had a huge influence on me,” Natalie recalled. “It convinced me that people need to be constantly reminded of compassion.” The role also connected with her personal family history. Her grandfather moved to Palestine from Poland in the 1930s, expecting his family to join him. His parents, however, were sent to Auschwitz while his 14-year-old brother hid with a Catholic family.
“Finally [the brother] just couldn’t handle it anymore. He ran outside and was shot,” she said. “Being in the play reminded me that history isn’t just the past. It’s alive in us.” This concept is underscored by the fact that while Natalie felt the need to use a stage name to protect her privacy as a minor, she chose to borrow her late grandmother’s surname. (The star’s real name is Natalie Hershlag.)
After the play came her role as Queen Amidala in The Phantom Menace—the first of her three Star Wars prequels, which will culminate in the release of Revenge of the Sith next year. In 1999, Natalie entered Harvard. She majored in psychology and acted occasionally—most notably in Cold Mountain and this year’s indie hit Garden State.
When the Harvard Crimson ran an op-ed article labeling Israel “racist,” Natalie felt compelled to write a public rebuttal. “Israelis and Arabs are historically cousins,” she wrote. “Until we accept the fact that we are constituents of the same family, we will blunder in believing that a loss for one ‘side’ is not a loss for all humankind.”
A year after graduating from college, Natalie Portman appears finally to be discovering who she is. “I imagine looking back at the end of my life and thinking, ‘What would I want to say that I’ve done?’” she said. She described her recent involvement with FINCA, an organization that, in Natalie’s words, “provides small loans to women in Third World countries so they can start their own businesses.” FINCA’s board of directors includes Queen Rania Al-Abdullah, the First Lady of Jordan. “I feel a connection,” Natalie said, “because I absolutely admire her humanitarian work.”
Natalie does more than simply lend her name and face to the cause. She has traveled to Guatemala and Uganda to meet with FINCA clients.
“In Judaism, it’s all about the action, not the intention,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you mean to do the right thing if you do all bad things. You need to learn how to do right things. Doing is what affects people. Meeting face-to-face, you see that these are people with absolutely nothing who, when given a kernel of hope, run with it and turn their lives around.”
Talking about the village women, Natalie’s soft voice suddenly rose as she grew animated. When I mentioned this, she laughed and responded: “That’s because I’m boring. This isn’t. I’ve been given a chance to learn firsthand that it’s the little things that matter. That every little bit of good you do helps, because it can compound and make a huge change in a person’s life. It gives me hope.”