14 DAY TRIAL // She’s young, talented, rich and extremely popular with all segments of the audience. Even more, despite all this, Natalie Portman still manages to retain a certain down to earth quality, as if someone could easily mistake her for the girl next door if they passed her on the street. The star brings all that, plus her unique style and timeless elegance, in the February 2010 issue of Elle UK magazine.
One thing that her fans have always appreciated in Natalie Portman is her unwillingness to compromise herself for more exposure. Unlike many other stars her age, and even older, she was never in a rush to get somewhere, with that somewhere being vaguely defined as the top of the box office or in critics’ favorite lists. So, ever since she first broke on the scene at the age of 12, Portman has been taking her time: to prove her worth, to prove she’s more than just a pretty face, to learn all she could learn from her profession.
And she did that by avoiding clichés and choosing movies just for the sake of keeping herself occupied. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do comedy, it’s just that I would only get offered girlfriend parts in guy comedies where the woman has to have a job in fashion so that she can have nice clothes, and her goal is always marriage. I’m more interested in finding characters that make me laugh,” the actress says of why she wouldn’t do romcoms, the kind one can find a dime a dozen these days in theaters around the world.
Another genre she always steered clear from is that of Holocaust movies. “I’ve always tried to stay away from playing Jews. I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre. That was the first thing to come my way (‘New York, I Love You’) that really intrigued me,” she says. That, added to her determination to prove she’s more than just a gorgeous woman but a talented actress above everything, are the key ingredients to Natalie’s recipe for success.
Meryl Streep, for instance, is the kind of thespian that deserves praise, she says for the same magazine. Even now when she’s older, Streep continues to be considered a very beautiful woman, but what many young actresses don’t understand is that her beauty lies in her staying power and unbelievable talent. “Whereas you see actresses who marketed themselves on their bodies, and they might be good, but over time they just lose it because that sort of thing doesn’t last,” Portman says of today’s starlets who get a lot of hype on their looks alone, regardless whether they know how to act a part or not.