Natalie Portman: Serious beauty
LOS ANGELES -- Natalie Portman is all grown up, almost.
Having skipped the awkward teen stage entirely, at least onscreen, Portman plays a stripper with a heart of tarnish in ''Closer," the Mike Nichols movie about gorgeous people doing god-awful things in the name of love. But even wrapped around a pole, she has plenty of girl in her, with only a hint of the woman-to-be in her heart-shaped face.
In person, Portman still gets the giggles, as anyone who saw her on a recent ''Inside the Actors Studio" knows. But the Harvard University graduate also takes herself, her work, and the world she lives in seriously.
In the last year, Portman stumped for John Kerry on television and the campaign trail. She toured Uganda and Guatemala to raise awareness and funds for the Washington-based Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), which provides small loans to impoverished women who want to start businesses. And she asked Nichols to cut her nude scenes from ''Closer," deciding she wasn't ready at 23 to bare her breasts on the big screen. Her director, both friend and father figure, complied.
Portman must know her decision dismayed the male fans who have followed her since she teased Timothy Hutton in ''Beautiful Girls" in 1996. But Queen Amidala of ''Star Wars" fame had no qualms about doing a lap dance for costar Clive Owen or showing lots of leg for her art. Her sole concern: that her body wasn't believable, since she isn't what would be considered overly endowed. Visiting strip clubs for the first time eased her mind; she realized strippers ''have all different body types, skinnier girls and bigger girls, and all shapes and sizes."
''Going to strip clubs was really helpful," said Portman, who on a recent morning happened to be wearing impossibly high heels and a sweater cut down to here, there, everywhere. ''The women were amazing. I talked to some of them for a long time."
Those conversations were revelatory for a young woman whose upbringing was so sheltered that she'd never done her own laundry before moving into a Cambridge dormitory, never mind cooking or cleaning or using an ATM. The only child of an Israeli doctor and an Ohio artist, born in Jerusalem but raised on the East Coast, Portman says she'd never even walked down the street alone as a child, even if she was almost as precocious in real life as she was in the movies.
In the decade since a modeling agent discovered her in a New York pizza parlor, Portman has played the wise but still naive child/woman more than once. What she was never cast as was a teen in a teen movie -- a shame, because she says she adored John Hughes movies and once dreamed of starring in ''The Babysitters Club," based on some of her favorite books from childhood. (''I've never really worked with people my age, a group of young people hanging out together, which I always thought would be a fun experience," she said.) But for better or worse, her debut in ''The Professional" and her follow-up in ''Heat" with Al Pacino set her on a career path that established her as a serious actor, even as a child.
''She brings great beauty, high intelligence, and an enormous gift for acting to this movie," said Nichols, who had been looking to work with Portman again ever since he directed her in ''The Seagull" in Central Park three years ago, alongside Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Christopher Walken. ''She is four or five different women in this. She has such variety in her because of her intelligence, which she's had since she was very young.
''With very beautiful people, we often overlook their acting gift," Nichols continued. ''And when someone is as beautiful as Natalie or Julia [Roberts, another co-star in ''Closer"], you think that's what they bring, perhaps all they bring. But what they bring is being actresses first and then the way their bodies and faces are shaped."
Portman doesn't deny that her face and her shape have helped her career; she's refreshingly candid about the benefits of beauty. Now she's out to play more mature parts, and not necessarily ones calling for an attractive adult. She's had a small part as a war widow in ''Cold Mountain" and a more substantial turn in last summer's sleeper hit ''Garden State," which also gave her a rare chance to get a laugh.
But it's ''Closer," pronounced as if someone were saying ''Come closer," that has pleased her most. She calls it ''really funny and brutal and tough." She adds, ''I'm enjoying the reaction, watching people's reactions to me in this."
What she won't do for them is reveal the back story she built for Alice, a stripper who isn't who she seems to be. That is for the audience to decide. ''I think the best thing about art is that everyone comes to it with their own thing and takes something else away," Portman said. ''It's not for me to tell them this is what happened."
Portman, as it happens, doesn't enjoy telling much about herself, either. She answers questions politely but prefers her privacy. She doesn't talk about boyfriends or breakups. Gael Garcia Bernal, the sultry star of ''The Motorcycle Diaries" and Portman's last beau, returns the favor. In a recent interview he said he would find it ''impossible to comment on anyone who is close to me. Please understand."
Romantic outcomes aside, Portman says she has surrounded herself with loyalists, people who would never betray her to the tabloids or the paparazzi she calls ''dangerous" and ''creepy." She hates discovering that what she thought was a private moment has become a public one via long-lens photography. The psychology major says she was especially grateful to realize no one would make a big deal of her at Harvard, since the self-described nerd never questioned that she would aim for an Ivy League degree.
''First of all, I'm not like a celebrity celebrity; I don't get recognized when I'm walking down the street," Portman said. ''At school I'm sure they knew who I was because word spreads on a small campus. At the same time, the kids at Harvard are so accomplished in their own ways. . . . You talk to people and you discover that they spent a year working with AIDS patients in Africa, or there's a kid I knew who . . . would cut all his classes to go to the lab, where he was working on a cure for cancer. There's a kid in my class who published a novel before he started school that's a bestseller. So I was no big deal."
She did act during college, shooting ''Garden State" between exams her senior year. Her deal with ''Star Wars" director George Lucas, however, was summer breaks only to play Queen Amidala in the three most recent films, which she says was just fine with him.
Even now she's no acting machine, taking her time between movies and preferring to live a relatively quiet life on Long Island and to visit family in Israel until something as demanding as ''Closer" comes along. Then there's her work with FINCA, something she's not shy about. The statistics and stories pour out of her. She says she's proud to put a spotlight on the women the organization helps. That way the light is only indirectly on her, the way she prefers it when she's not filling a movie screen.
Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com.
