After making her onscreen debut at 11, Natalie Portman quickly learned to separate herself from her public image.
The Oscar winner recently opened up about being subjected to “a long Lolita phase” when she was “really sexualized” as a child actor, making her debut performance in Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional.
“I think there’s a public understanding of me that’s different from who I am,” she told Jenna Ortega for Interview. “I’ve talked about it a little before—about how, as a kid, I was really sexualized, which I think happens to a lot of young girls who are onscreen. I felt very scared by it. Obviously sexuality is a huge part of being a kid, but I wanted it to be inside of me, not directed towards me. And I felt like my way of protecting myself was to be like, ‘I’m so serious. I’m so studious. I’m smart, and that’s not the kind of girl you attack.’”
Portman continued, “I was like, if I create this image of myself, I’ll be left alone. It shouldn’t be a thing, but it worked. But I think that’s the disconnect between me being stupid and silly in real life, and people thinking that I’m some really serious bookish person. I’m not a particularly private person in real life—I’ll tell you anything—but in public, it was so clear early on that if you tell people how private you are, your privacy gets respected a lot more. I set up a little bit of a barrier to be like, ‘I’m not going to do photo shoots with my kids.’”
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As a teenager, Portman also starred in such films as Beautiful Girls (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996), Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), Anywhere But Here (1999) and Where the Heart Is (2000). The actress took a step back from acting from 1999 to 2003 as she attended Harvard University.
Following Portman’s breakout role in The Professional, she turned down the titular role in director Adrian Lyne’s 1997 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which ultimately starred Dominique Swain.
“I met with the director but I immediately told him there’s no way I’m gonna do this movie,” Portman told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. “Kubrick’s film of the book is great because nothing is really shown, but this one will be explicit. He told me they’d use body doubles but I said people will still think it’s me, so no thank you.”
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