How well do we know our favorite Hollywood celebrities?
Not as well as we think, surely, although the answer to that question really depends on the craftiness of the stars we've chosen to admire.
Actress Natalie Portman, who turned 30 Thursday and is due to deliver her first child any day now, is someone who likes to keep us guessing.
I had the pleasure -- and a pleasure it was, truly -- to interview Portman five times during the '00s while working as a film journalist based in New York City. I got to know the actress a little better with each chat, but at the same time couldn't help coming away feeling that the more I knew, the more there was to this woman to which I would never be privy.
The quintessential actress, that's Natalie Portman.
"I'm always playing some sort of version of myself and I'm always changing, so it's always different," Portman told me in 2007. "That's sort of the goal -- I keep changing and then I keep finding myself in different ways."
This may make it harder for us to get where she's coming from, but it's always the most successful movie stars who keep their private selves from public view, the better to keep their big-screen performances believable. It's become near impossible anymore, for instance, to watch Tom Cruise playing a character without all the time remembering that we're watching Tom Cruise, playing a character.
Portman has always been able to disappear into a role, from the moment she donned Queen Amidala's ridiculous headdresses in 1999's "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace" to her turn as barefoot teenage jailbait in "Where the Heart Is" (2000), a widowed Civil War bride in "Cold Mountain" (2003), an Oscar-nominated stripper in 2004's "Closer," on through her performance as a bald freedom fighter in "V for Vendetta" (2006) and a ballerina with mental issues in last year's "Black Swan," the performance that garnered her an Academy Award.
The actress was only 13 when she shot her first motion picture, 1994's "Heat," a sprawling crime saga starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, not exactly a kiddie flick.
"Look, I'm very happy with how everything worked out for me and I feel very, very lucky," Portman told me in 2007. "I definitely did miss out on a lot of kid things. But everyone has their different path, and I'm not like, 'Oh, I missed my childhood.' "
The actress pointed out that several other female film stars of her generation -- Scarlett Johansson, Reese Witherspoon, Claire Danes, Christina Ricci, Kirsten Dunst, Keira Knightley, Lindsay Lohan -- began acting when they were children as well.
Unlike many of her colleagues, however, Portman made a point of going to, and finishing, college, and not just any school, but Yale University.
The daughter of an Israeli doctor and an artist from Cincinnati, Portman, who was born in Jerusalem and raised in Washington, D.C., and later New York City, the place she calls home, has, in my experience, always been one of the more articulate interviews a film journalist can land. She doesn't take things at face value, particularly the roles she's offered.
"I have been recently getting frustrated," she admitted to me in 2008, "but the number of roles that are strippers or prostitutes, or the opposite, like she's the moral center of the film, she's the pure one, the one who makes the man realize who he should be -- that dichotomy exists so strongly. It's like the virgin-whore thing to the greatest extent."
Portman's concerns haven't stopped her from portraying these very characters, but working in Hollywood is a challenge for any actress today. Portman told me in 2004 that she would never do nudity in a film, only to break that rule for a torture scene in the mediocre 2006 movie "Goya's Ghosts," a decision she later regretted.
It was during that 2004 chat, for the picture "Garden State," that the actress related an anecdote that seemed quite out of character for the prim, proper Yale grad. Shooting on location at a private residence in New Jersey, the cast and crew had only one bathroom available, in the woman's house. When the toilet got backed up, Portman recalled, the woman came running outside, shouting, "Someone made doodie in the bathtub!"
The makers of "Garden State" weren't allowed back to the house after that. I was never able to determine whether "doodie" was Portman's word or the woman's.
I was as surprised as anyone to learn earlier this year that Portman was engaged to her "Black Swan" choreographer Benjamin Millepied, after learning she was pregnant with his child. I had always expected her to make, I don't know, a better match. Heck, I'm still trying to get my mind around the fact that the actress has somehow become 30 years old -- while I was watching, no less.
I wasn't just watching, of course, but was given the opportunity to catch up with Portman face to face after nearly every one of her film shoots of the last decade. Yet when I saw her take the stage at the Kodak Theatre last March to accept the Academy Award for best actress, only to give a perfectly crafted, graceful speech that revealed nothing about what she was feeling at that moment, I realized I didn't know this person at all. What made me think I did?
Well played, Ms. Portman.
source:http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20110613/LIFESTYLE/106130316/Todd-Hill-You-can-t-pin-down-Natalie-Portman?odyssey=nav|head
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