Natalie Portman, the actress who preferred to be intelligent before movie star
In 1996, a whole generation of male viewers grew sideburns. And all because ** Natalie Portman ** liked Timothy Hutton's in Beautiful Girls.
It was her second movie and the whole world couldn't stop watching it. Twenty-three years later, the actress is a rarity: she has an Oscar, a college degree, a happy family and the certainty that she will be a star for the rest of her life.
Her career is full of risky films that marked our entire generation, and yet some perceive her as a soft actress. Like Hollywood sliced bread. She has not experienced a single scandal, she has never given a single controversial statement and her wedding photos are only in her personal album.
Natalie Portman may seem like a boring star. But she really has broken down walls for the women who come after her, without bragging about it. She talks little, and she listens a lot. And she has shown that revolution can sometimes be made with a smile.
These are the risks that Portman, and no other actress, has taken in her lifetime. You have to take them into account before dismissing it as boring.
In Leon, the Professional and Beautiful Girls, Portman played two teenagers that any adult could talk to. What's more, any adult would die (at first, literally) to talk to her.
She was 13 years old and she already dominated the screen transmitting the inner world of her characters: without ceasing to be a girl, the actress perfectly understood what she was doing.
And that's precisely why she stopped doing it. "It was like a fantasy object for men, with an idealized purity combined with the fertility of youth all rolled into one," recalls Portman, "I started getting fan letters that terrified me, so I stopped reading them and refused to read them again."
play s-xy roles. The actress had to learn too quickly to protect her privacy, a treasure that many believed they had the right to raid: "one of the things that most impacted me when I was 17 or 18 years old was that they asked me if I was a virgin, believing they had the right to Do it, remember when Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson proclaimed their virginity? I thought it was a joke."
The smartest in the class
Since she decided not to attend the world premiere of The Phantom Menace because it coincided with her final exams at her high school, Natalie Portman has not wavered when it comes to prioritising her education. "I don't care if college ruins my career, I'd rather be smart than a movie star,"
she clarified before temporarily stepping back. The actress shot the two Star Wars sequels during her summer vacation. In 2004 she graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology and has since published two scientific papers:
Simple Method for Demonstrating Enzymatic Hydrogen Production from Sugar and Frontal Lobe Activation During Object Permanence: Infrared Spectroscopy Data. Jessica Alba would get dizzy just reading the titles.
The vast majority of stars dropped out of school to pursue her dream. In a maelstrom that is consuming younger idols, there is no time to lose, and nobody wants to land in Hollywood at 23.
This trend magnifies the legend of those who have succeeded, but it also fills Los Angeles with uneducated waiters who did not make it. succeed. And when some stars take to Twitter, they make it clear that they didn't even finish high school.
Portman is one of the few with higher education, and has used her knowledge of psychology to explore characters: when the script for Goya's Ghosts stated "she's out of jail and she's crazy", the actress researched for months to understand how the isolation trauma.
She dared with the most taboo profession for actresses
Hollywood prefers to victimize female characters. When an actress plays a prostitute (Pretty Woman, Monster), the script will make sure it's clear that it's not her fault. However, strippers are swampy territory, because in the eyes of Hollywood that profession is not justifiable.
Striptease sank Demi Moore's career when she was at the top and Showgirls dug a hole of unprecedented depth to bury Elizabeth Berkley. Natalie Portman exposed herself to this role in Closer, becoming the neatest stripper in film history, and exploiting a s-x uality that, now, was completely under her control.
The actress is aware of her physique: "I have the body of a boy", she admits, "sometimes they tell me 'okay, let's go for this scene.
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