Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman is an actor, born 1981.
Natalie Portman was cast in Leon: The Professional as a child and gave a performance most adults could not, which set the pattern of being taken more seriously than her material. Heat and Beautiful Girls followed while she was still at school. Then the Star Wars prequels made her one of the most recognisable people alive and gave her almost nothing to play: three films of formal dialogue delivered inside elaborate collars.
Her real subject is control and its failure. Black Swan is the clearest case, a performance about a body disciplined past the point of usefulness, and it won her the Academy Award, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award. Jackie is the better film about the same instinct, a widow managing her own image in real time and drafting a legacy while the blood is still on the suit. Closer, a decade earlier, is built on a woman deciding precisely how much of herself to hand over and to whom.
What she has done with the resulting freedom is choose difficulty. Annihilation, Vox Lux, May December, the two drifting plotless films she made in the middle of the 2010s: these are not career moves, they are pictures more interested in mood than story, and she keeps signing up for them. The Marvel work is the exception and has never found much use for her, Thor: Love and Thunder aside. She has also directed, including her segment of New York, I Love You, and produced, and there is a case that the acting is now the least ambitious thing she does.
Movies (56)
- Avengers: Endgame (2019)
- Léon: The Professional (1994)
- Heat (1995)
- Closer (2004)
- Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
- Thor (2011)
- Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
- Thor: The Dark World (2013)
- Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
- No Strings Attached (2011)
- Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
- V for Vendetta (2006)
- Black Swan (2010)
- Annihilation (2018)
- Fountain of Youth (2025)
- May December (2023)
- The Twits (2025)
- Mars Attacks! (1996)
- Brothers (2009)
- Cold Mountain (2003)
- Zoolander (2001)
- New York, I Love You (2008)
- New York, I Love You (2008)
- The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
- Jackie (2016)
- Where the Heart Is (2000)
- Hotel Chevalier (2007)
- The Gallerist (2026)
- Garden State (2004)
- My Blueberry Nights (2007)
TV (3)
Where to start with Natalie Portman
Black Swan is the obvious entry and it earns its reputation, provided you know you are signing up for something genuinely unpleasant. If that sounds like too much, Léon: The Professional is the other famous one and remains extraordinary as a child performance.
The film to seek out is Jackie, which does more in ninety minutes than most biographical pictures manage in three hours and contains her most technically difficult work. Closer is the sharp, cruel, talky pick. Annihilation is the strangest and the one most likely to keep bothering you, science fiction with no interest in explaining itself. Garden State has aged badly and is still useful for understanding a certain decade. Of the blockbusters, only V for Vendetta gives her a real part.
The performances that won the awards
The serious end of the filmography. Black Swan is the Oscar win and the most physically punishing thing she has done. Closer got her a nomination and is all evasion and surface. Jackie is close-up work for almost two hours, and May December is recent proof she still takes risks.
The blockbuster franchises
Two enormous franchises, taken on fifteen years apart. The Star Wars prequels gave her very little to work with and she has been candid about that; the Marvel films eventually did better by her, giving Jane Foster an actual arc by the time of Love and Thunder.
The strange films with unusual directors
Portman has always taken work from directors who do not make conventional films. Annihilation is the best of these, science fiction that refuses to explain itself. The Terrence Malick films are close to plotless, and Hotel Chevalier is a Wes Anderson short worth thirteen minutes of anyone's time.
The child and teenage roles
She was working from the age of twelve, and the early performances hold up unusually well. Leon: The Professional is the startling one, Beautiful Girls gives her the best scenes in the film, and Everyone Says I Love You has her singing for Woody Allen at fifteen.