Film
Natalie Portman
Actress, Academy Award for Best Actress 2011
Born 1981
Photo: Colleen Sturtevant · CC BY 4.0
«I'd rather be smart than a movie star.»
Natalie Portman is an Israeli-American actress who played Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequels and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Black Swan. She is one of the few Hollywood stars with a genuine scientific record: her name is on two published research papers, the second written while she was at Harvard.
Key achievements
- Academy Award for Best Actress, Black Swan, 2011
- Co-authored two published neuroscience papers as a student
Universities
Cambridge, Massachusetts
AB in psychology, 1999–2003, filming the Star Wars prequels during the vacations.
Facts
- She entered Harvard in 1999, the year The Phantom Menace was released, and shot Attack of the Clones during the summer break of 2000.
- Under her real name, Natalie Hershlag, she co-authored a 2002 paper in NeuroImage on infant memory based on experiments in a Harvard psychology laboratory.
- As a schoolgirl she reached the semi-finals of the Intel Science Talent Search with a project on producing hydrogen from sugar using enzymes.
- Giving the Harvard Class Day speech in 2015, she admitted she had felt like an impostor as a student and had chosen deliberately hard courses to prove she was not just an actress.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.