Natalie Portman (born Natalie Hershlag;^[1][2] Hebrew: נטלי הרשלג‎; June 9, 1981)^[3] is an actress with dual American and Israeli citizenship. Her first role was as an orphan taken in by a hitman in the 1994 action film Léon: The Professional, but mainstream success came when she was cast as Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (released in 1999, 2002 and 2005).^[4] In 1999, she enrolled at Harvard University to study psychology while still working as an actress. She completed her bachelor's degree in 2003.

Portman was born in Jerusalem, Israel.^[9][10][11] She is the only child of Shelley (née Stevens), an American homemaker who works as Portman's agent, and Avner Hershlag, an Israeli citizen who is a fertility specialist and gynecologist.^[12][13][14] Portman's maternal ancestors were Jewish immigrants to the United States (from Austria and Russia); her mother's family had changed their surname from "Edelstein" to "Stevens".^[15] Her paternal grandparents were Jews from Poland and Romania. Natalie's paternal grandfather, Zvi Yehuda Hershlag, was born in Poland, in 1914, and moved to then-Mandatory Palestine, where he was an economics professor, in 1938;^[16] Zvi's parents died at Auschwitz. Natalie's Romanian-born great-grandmother was a spy for British Intelligence during World War II.

Portman started dancing lessons at age four^[4] and performed in local troupes. At the age of ten, a Revlon agent asked her to become a child model,^[4][48] but she turned down the offer to focus on acting. In a magazine interview, Portman said that she was "different from the other kids. I was more ambitious. I knew what I liked and what I wanted, and I worked very hard. I was a very serious kid."^[49]

On school holidays, Portman attended theater camps. When she was ten, Portman auditioned for the 1992 Off-Broadway show Ruthless!, a musical about a girl who is prepared to commit murder to get the lead in a school play. Portman and future pop star Britney Spears were chosen as the understudies for star Laura Bell Bundy.^[40] In 1993, she auditioned for the role of a child who befriends a middle-aged hitman in Luc Besson's film, Léon: The Professional. Soon after getting the part, she took her paternal grandmother's maiden name, "Portman", as her stage name in the interest of privacy and to protect her family's identity.^[50][51] Léon: The Professional opened on November 18, 1994, marking her feature film debut. That same year she appeared in the short film Developing, which aired on television.