Death scares, creepy mentors, and freaky fan mail. It's all part of being Natalie Portman,
professional space princess, black swan, and thunder god.
Natalie Portman is incredibly proud of her Jewish roots, yet her family has a
tragic history due to their ethnic background. According to the actor, several of her family
members were placed in concentration camps for their Jewish ancestry during The Holocaust.
Sadly, not all of them survived. She told Harper's Bazaar in 2019,
"My great-grandparents were killed in the camps,
and my grandfather's younger brother was shot in Poland during the war."
According to the actor, she wants to commemorate her Jewish heritage and expresses the importance
of raising her children as Jewish as well. Her husband Benjamin Millepied,
her husband since 2012, had even converted to Judaism for Portman. To this day,
she continues to raise awareness about antisemitism and what people can do to prevent
it so that the harrowing experiences of her ancestors are not repeated.
Natalie Portman got her start in Hollywood at quite a young age. According to Vogue,
she was discovered when she was just nine years old while at a pizza parlor. It wasn't
long before she was cast in her first film role, Leon: The Professional, only a few years later.
"Is life always this hard, or is it just when you're a kid?"
She was only 12 years old at the time,
and her innocence was stripped away from her quickly following the film's release.
At the 2018 Women's March, she said,
"I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me.
A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I
would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews."
Portman went on to explain that at the start of her career, she felt objectified and exposed to
the public to the point where she had to hide any traces of womanhood or sexuality. Portman
wouldn't accept any film roles that involved mere kissing scenes, because she didn't want the public
to regard her in a sexualized light. And in an attempt to shield herself from sexual harassment
or objectification, she admits she developed what she called a "prudish" persona. She said,
"I felt the need to cover my body and to inhibit my expression and my work,
in order to send my own message to the world that I'm someone worthy of safety and respect."
As we mentioned earlier, Natalie Portman was only 12 years old when she starred in Leon:
The Professional. Although most might assume that becoming a movie star would make her the
most popular kid in school, that didn't turn out to be true for Portman. According to the actress,
she blocked out a lot of seventh grade because of the bullying she experienced
for becoming a young starlet. In a 1999 interview with Jane Magazine, she said,
"In seventh grade, I cried every single day when I came back from shooting The Professional.
My friends were not my friends. They were saying, 'She thinks she's so hot now,' things like that,
and it was the most painful thing I've ever gone through. I have barely any memories of that year,
except that I would just cry all the time."
"I was like, 'Oh God, I should just keep my head down all the time."
But despite how awful the torment she experienced at school was,
it ultimately ended up doing some good for the celeb. When she was on The Drew
Barrymore Show in 2020, Portman told the host that her experiences made her a better person.
In fact, she says that being bullied helped her develop a better understanding of empathy.
Back when she was only a teenager, Natalie Portman had an unpleasant experience with Moby,
who, at the time, was 33. In his 2019 memoir titled Then It Fell Apart,
the musician recounted his fling with the young star,
whom he claimed in his book was 20 years old. But Portman says she was barely 18 at the time.
She told Harper's Bazaar,
"I was surprised to hear that he characterized the very short time
that I knew him as 'dating' because my recollection is a much older man
being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school."
She continued, saying that she was a fan of his music, and had attended his concert when
she was a teen. After the show, he told her he wanted to be friends. She told the publication,
"We only hung out a handful of times before I realized that this was an
older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate."
But Moby has a totally different recollection of things.
He made a response to Portman's comments in an Instagram post,
where he insists they did, in fact, date. He accused the celeb of lying, saying,
"So what should I do? What do you do when people believe lies and accusations and not actual
photographs and evidence? I want to take the high road, but I honestly don't know what to do."
Natalie Portman has always been vocal about how much of an importance she places on education.
According to the New York Post, she once reportedly said that cracking open the books
is far more important to her than any form of stardom she might have, saying,
"I'd rather be smart than a movie star."
"I was like the biggest, uh, biggest nerd at school."
In 2003, she attended Harvard University. But despite placing such a heavy value on education,
her time in college was no easy feat. Of course, no one would exactly consider attending
Harvard a walk in the park, but for Portman, her struggles didn't have to do with the curriculum.
As she revealed in her 2015 Harvard Commencement Speech, she was struggling with impostor syndrome
while at school and felt as though she didn't deserve to be there. She said in the speech,
"I felt like there had been some mistake. And that every time I opened my mouth,
I would have to prove that I wasn't just a dumb actress."
Portman continues, saying that she felt as though she just got
in because of her celebrity status as opposed to her genuine intellect.
Furthermore, the star dealt with mental health problems while she was in college.
In Portman's speech, she revealed that she was on a particular birth control at the time,
which affected her moods and caused her to be bedridden most mornings.
According to Natalie Portman, she had a very hard time getting over a breakup
when she was in her mid-20s. She told New York Magazine in 2014,
"When I was 25, I had my heart broken. The rupture of my adolescence, the big heartbreak."
She goes on to explain that she was at her mentor Mike Nichols' house, and he had to send her to
the doctor because she was so distraught at the time. She said of the experience,
"I was at his apartment on the floor, and he picked me up and gave me a pep talk and
sent me to a doctor and straightened me out — literally peeled me off the floor."
Portman has always been adamant about keeping her personal life under the radar because she
values her privacy. This is especially the case in regards to something as intimate
as her romantic life. Because of this, it is uncertain who she is referring to
when it comes to the initiator of her breakup. But regardless of who it was,
we can all understand how grueling it is to go through your first big heartbreak. At least she
is now happily married to Benjamin Millepied, who she met on the set of Black Swan back in 2009.
"We had like a whole— he was teaching me how to dance."
Because Natalie Portman has been a big-time celebrity in Hollywood since childhood,
she has had a lot of help with managing her stardom through older mentors. But sadly,
the actor says that most of her mentors had, at some point, been creepy to her,
and tried to take advantage of their relationship. Fortunately, she had one mentor throughout the sea
of alleged creeps who made her feel totally comfortable. That mentor was the late Mike
Nichols, who directed her in the 2004 film Closer. She praised Nichols in a book about the director,
titled Mike Nichols: A Life. Portman was quoted saying the director had been "the
only older man who mentored me without there ever being a creepy element in it."
Portman also claimed that Nichols went out of his way to make sure
she was comfortable during a scene in Closer in which she plays a stripper, saying,
"He wants to see my bare ass [even] less than my father would."
Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her starring role in the 2010 film,
Black Swan. In the movie, she plays a perfectionist ballerina who struggles
with severe mental health issues as well as an eating disorder. But immersing herself into
such a complex role took a grueling toll on her own well-being. In fact, according to Portman,
she thought she was going to lose her life in the filming process. She told Entertainment Weekly,
"There were some nights that I thought I literally was going to die. It was the first
time I understood how you could get so wrapped up in a role that it could sort of take you down."
Due to the multiple injuries she faced during the making of the film,
Portman eventually needed a medic. Vogue reports that Portman allegedly gave up her
trailer while filming the movie so she could afford a medic on the film's tight budget.
"He picked me, Mommy."
Natalie Portman has always been very vocal about women's rights issues,
particularly in regards to the Me Too movement. And in an interview with Porter Magazine,
Portman admitted that she had experienced hundreds of encounters where she felt
taken advantage of by powerful men in the industry. One example she gave is when a
producer tried to manipulate her into bed with him. She told the magazine,
"It was just the two of us, and only one bed was made up. Nothing happened. I was not assaulted.
I did make a point of saying, 'This does not make me feel comfortable,' and that was respected. But
that was super not okay, you know? That was really unacceptable and manipulative. I was scared."
Although she finds it disheartening that she and so many women have experienced such unfortunate
incidents of harassment, she is hopeful that now things will begin to change. She said,
"It's also kind of exciting that so many people are having these awakenings,
and asking how we can change and affect larger changes."
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault,
help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact
RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).