As provocative orphan and pouting pole dancer, Natalie Portman was a wow ? but will she seduce in a lead role?




In the closing scene of the recent film Closer, a girl strides towards the camera through a throng of commuters on New York?s Times Square. Slavering males turn to gawp at this miraculous vision, pink hair aflame, a private smile rippling faintly across her porcelain-doll face. This, the shot says in sleazy slow motion, is how a man?s world looks at beautiful young girls.


Film actresses are in the profession of being looked at, and none has been looked at in that way from a younger age than the one on the Manhattan sidewalk in Closer. Natalie Portman is now twice the age of Matilda, the 12-year-old orphan who melted the heart of a pitiless hit man in Luc Besson?s Léon. Far more than any of her contemporaries who started early ? Christina Ricci, Claire Danes, Scarlett Johansson ? she never had a period of grace when her screen persona was not complicated by sexuality. A concierge in Léon asks about Mathilda?s relationship with the father figure she?s rooming with. ?He?s my lover,? she confides darkly. A year later, Ted Demme made an underrated movie about a high-school reunion, Beautiful Girls. Though the cast also included Mira Sorvino and Uma Thurman, most men left the cinema thinking disturbing thoughts about the beautiful 13-year-old girl with the brown-owl eyes who, over the picket fence, confesses her love for Timothy Hutton. No child actress ever opened her innings with a more precocious display.


Since then, Portman has been through three chapters of Star Wars and three years of Harvard. Now, for the first time, she stars in a big-budget adventure of her own. V for Vendetta, adapted from an early-1980s anti-Thatcherite graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, is set in a dystopian England where a Mosleyite despot governs a cowed populace with an iron fist. The script is by the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed the Matrix films. In a cast consisting largely of British and Irish character actors, she is recognisably the lead (unless you count Hugo Weaving, who, as the lone resistance fighter V, acts throughout behind a joke-shop Guy Fawkes mask).


To get her accent up to snuff, she was given Barbara Berkery, the dialectologist who sculpted Gwyneth Paltrow?s impeccably English glottal stops.


Normally, the blandishments offered up by stars lauding their latest vehicle are just so much blah. But read between these lines. ?It was just an exciting thing for me to see a movie on this scale,? says Portman, ?a big studio movie that was about something really interesting and had ideas in it, and strong character relationships ? and a great story and complicated characters, too.?


Nobody is ever going to get Queen Padmé Naberrie Amidala to say in as many words that the Star Wars trilogy had none of the above. Yet, clearly, she knows. She can?t possibly not know, armed with a psychology degree that, she says, ?raises the bar for projects I want to work on. It has to be something that?s going to be as interesting as school was for me?. Nowadays, when Portman is preparing for a part such as her enchanting epileptic in Garden State, or the artist?s muse in Milos Forman?s forthcoming Goya?s Ghosts, Harvard offers a unique resource. ?I call a professor from school and say, ?This is what the character went through. What kind of symptomology would they display?? And they?ll write me an e-mail back: ?This is a video, and this is an article you might want to read.?? She even had her own reading list for the Wachowskis and her director, James McTeigue ? David Mitchell?s novel Cloud Atlas ? to get them all thinking about justifiable violence. George Lucas was lucky to get to Portman when the bar was lower.


SPOILER ALERT...


The professor must have had a field day with V for Vendetta. Portman plays Evey, the orphaned daughter of dissidents, who is rescued from a police mugging by a masked avenger bent on toppling the regime. She goes on the run, fights the system, has her head shaved in prison. (Which Portman rather enjoyed: ?I had to really concentrate hard on being in the character.?) In the spectacular climax, she even succeeds where Guy Fawkes fluffed it. In short, Portman finally gets to play the adult protagonist. Yet the script also casts a backward glance at the vapour trail of smut that attached itself to Léon. V sets a honeytrap for a paedophile archbishop by sending him Evey in pigtails and a pink baby-doll outfit ? and, before your eyes, Portman morphs right back into that 12-year-old minx.


?That echo was not intentional,? she says. ?It was part of the novel. But I think every actor holds within them a series of echoes of prior work they?ve done. Also, the fact that I don?t really look much older than I did 12 years ago probably can be taken advantage of.?


...END SPOILER ALERT


She says this, and much else, with a light touch, being neither guarded nor determinedly serious. She is on the diminutive side ? ?Five three,? she says. ?I think it?s exaggerated because I?m physically small, too? ? even in the steep heels worn for a day of smiling sweetly for the world?s film hacks in the Beverly Hills Hotel. ?I actually am starting to feel I should start a revolution against heels, even though that wouldn?t be a dramatic revolution. Everyone around me says, ?You have to wear heels.? It?s based on some silly concept that longer legs are more beautiful.?


Portman ?can still look like a kid?, in her words, but what got her noticed was knowing how to impersonate an old head on young shoulders. ?Being an only child, I spent so much time around adults, because my parents always took me with them, so I knew how to talk to grown-ups and pretend to be grown-up. But I wasn?t. I had a strong awareness of how to flirt and how to be shocking, as little girls do.?


She was born in Jerusalem, where her Israeli father was a fertility doctor. Her parents brought her to America, the land of her mother, at three. Growing up on Long Island, she watched all the other kids from dance class go off to acting auditions in New York and, ?after a lot of begging and screaming?, she wore down her mother?s resistance.

The one she ended up in was for Besson, the director of Subway and Nikita. Thus, though her debut was shot in New York, it had that French sensibility that celebrates female intelligence as well as beauty. Portman?s early experience of acting was much closer in spirit to Emmanuelle Béart?s than, say, Drew Barrymore?s.


?It was kind of amazing,? says Portman. ?Especially as, at that point, I probably would have done a toothpaste commercial. I haven?t been as lucky with things after that. It?s really been the film, so far, that people still come up to me about ? even though every movie I?ve done since then has made more money.?


Her parents did their damnedest to keep her feet on the ground through roles in Heat, Mars Attacks!, Everyone Says I Love You and a stage debut on Broadway, aged 16, as Anne Frank. Her life took on a duality not dissimilar to that of Alice (whose secret name is Anna) in Closer. Portman assumed her grandmother?s maiden name and carried on at school as Natalie Hershlag. ?It was a practical decision, because we couldn?t get my name out of the phone book. I guess it is a form of inventing yourself, being able to say, ?This is who I am.? But I went through school feeling just like any other kid.? Only when she left did yearbooks with her face in turn up on eBay. ?I felt sort of violated, just because classmates and their families were making money off me, none of whom needed to make money.?


Would she do childhood stardom again? ?I don?t know if I?d recommend it to other people. I can handle all of the ups and downs because I have this other world I can reside in, which weighs me down. I don?t float away or get caught up in stuff that doesn?t matter. I haven?t had negative Hollywood experiences.? It may be worth mentioning that, while she weeps beautifully for the camera, she claims: ?I never cry in real life.?


Her other world includes a charity she fronts that supplies small loans to women in developing countries; studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for several months; and going out to bat for John Kerry. Although Portman has grown up off screen, on screen it has been harder. ?After I?d done all the Star Wars movies, a lot of people were not thinking of giving me the dramatic challenges I was ready for.? When she took a punt on Garden State, written and directed by Zach Braff, the young star of Scrubs, it was because, ?to be honest, I wasn?t getting a lot of parts. I mean no offence at all to Zach, but I wanted to work so badly?.


Then came Closer, which she accepted partly because there wasn?t the faintest whiff of the child-woman in Alice the lap dancer and partly because of the reassuring presence of Mike Nichols, who directed her in a stage production of The Seagull in 2001. Closer was the film that finally made it legitimate (not to mention legal) for all those fans of Beautiful Girls to see Portman as a beautiful woman: to be the object of lust in that closing shot. Did she think her character was objectified?


?I think you?re objectified whether you want to be or not ? as a public female. The magazine rankings of women, like they?re cars or something ? if I could extricate myself from those, I would in a second. I guess some people would say, ?Oh, she should be honoured. Maybe she?s disgruntled. Maybe she wants to be No 1 and not No 25.? Not only that, I would be happy to do nudity in a film that was appropriate. But because it?ll end up on a porn site, that?s what keeps me from doing it. If a character goes through something that a woman goes through, then I?ll play it.?


In V for Vendetta, there is no love story. Indeed, her relationship with the ultraviolent male lead has a freaky symmetry with that of Mathilda and Léon. ?I didn?t think about it while doing it, but when I watched it I got these really strong echoes. Sometimes you think they might be lovers, sometimes you think they might be father-daughter, sometimes you think they?re mentor-pupil.? Perhaps the mentors and father figures who make films are not quite ready to fall for Portman as a woman after all. Sooner or later, though, she?s going to make it happen. ?I don?t know anything other than being in my skin,? she says. ?But the ideas and thoughts I want to convey on film are older. You want to look it, too. You don?t always want to look like a kid.?