Screen Queen Leads Quiet Campus Life

As she strolls down the uneven, May-moist bricks that pave most Cambridge sidewalks, Natalie Portman ’03 has something to make her the envy of many undergraduates: a dog.

Charlie—the petite and well-kept mutt that accompanies the psychology concentrator and film actor on jaunts through the Square and its environs—is an unusual companion at a college where most students are forbidden to keep pets.

But perched alertly on Portman’s lap, Charlie hardly seems lonely. He aims his short snout at a passing spaniel and twitches his nose in the easy spring breeze. Like his owner, he appears confident in the shade of Harvard’s halls.

But both will be leaving Cambridge in less than a month. After seven semesters at the College, Portman is taking her degree beneath crimson banners.

In spite of an impressive career to date, Portman looks toward a largely uncharted future. She says she intends to take on a series of acting projects for the first few years after graduation—beginning with a trip to Sydney this summer to work on the final installment of George Lucas’ Star Wars series—but her post-college years are otherwise as undefined as most of her classmates’.

This prospect pleases her.

“I’m definitely going to be acting for the next few years, and then I think I’m just going to take it as it comes and see what I feel like,” she says. “I don’t have any further thoughts or plans. I have definite dreams about acting work I want to do and definite dreams about further academic work that I’d be interested in.”

One might not expect a movie actor with more than 10 films to her credit to look toward a postgraduate academic future. But Portman has managed to pursue her academic work passionately while sustaining a successful career.

She has devoted enough attention and interest to her classes to develop friendships with some of her teachers at Harvard, she says.

“I’ve been really fortunate to have a few personal relationships with professors,” she says. “I thinks that’s really the most rewarding thing.”

Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn—among those whom Portman identified as a friend and mentor—says Portman consistently approached her work with diligence and precocity. Her critique of a paper that he and some colleagues wrote on neuroimagery as possible lie detection, Kosslyn says, has impelled them to reassess their methods for future studies.

“She did an absolutely superb job criticizing it,” he says. “In fact, her insights were markedly better than those of the expert reviewers who accepted the paper for publication.”

Kosslyn recalls also that he was able to share with Portman a penchant for French film and an acute sense of humor.

“She is unusually warm and has what I would call an energetic sense of humor,” he says. “She’s very quick and is fun to talk to. She’s witty and clever, sometimes almost wickedly clever.”

Imagining a wicked jibe from Portman, a small, soft-spoken student in thong sandals and bright-pink toenail polish, is difficult.

Preparing to step through the University’s gates for the last time as an undergraduate, she has nothing but praise for the teachers and peers whom she has encountered and gratitude for the relationships that she has established with them.

It’s a ‘Wonderful’ Life

When Portman discusses the Harvard professors who influenced her most—a list that includes such illustrious names as Alan Dershowitz, Jorie Graham and Michael Sandel—one adjective appears in each description: wonderful.

She invokes this term again in describing her classmates—peers, she says, who have mitigated the aura of awkwardness that her acting work ordinarily casts around her.

“In every previous experience with perfect strangers who are aware of my celebrity, I’ve either had people reacting in embarrassingly positive ways or...they make assumptions about you or just stay away from you for whatever reason,” she says. “But I’ve felt everyone has been really warm and just treated me like a regular person on campus, which has really helped my experience here be wonderful.”

Largely as a result of her peers—and the accommodating Harvard University Police Department—Portman’s acting career and life at Harvard have hardly interfered with each other, she says.

“I feel that I’ve been really, really lucky to have those experiences—acting and being here,” she says. “At the beginning of college I was talking to people who were actors who had gone to college, and I heard awful stories about people getting 200 visitors a year knocking on their dorm room, or having awful stalker issues. But I’ve not been bothered once, and that’s also thanks to the police here, who have been really wonderful.”

Her public status has not been entirely unnoticeable within the College, though. Shortly after her arrival in Cambridge, a deluge of e-mails sent to every Harvard undergraduate named Natalie—“Portman” is a pseudonym—incited the formation of the so-called “Harvard Natalies,” a group of eight students who exchanged some of the more amusing misdirected e-mails they received.

Citing what she describes as “this false sort of fame that I have,” Portman has shied from the public limelight during her time at the College, instead contributing quietly to the Harvard community.

She has worked as a research assistant in Kosslyn’s lab, working on a study of differences in visual mental imagery by testing about 30 subjects on visual imagery tasks and performing statistical analysis on the results. She also assisted a study of frontal lobe activation in infants jointly undertaken by Harvard Medical School students and graduate students at Harvard’s Laboratory of Infant Study.

In addition to fulfilling her concentration requirements in psychology, Portman says, she was able to enroll in a number of electives, such as courses in French and American literature and a poetry workshop. She did this despite taking the College’s Advanced Standing option, using her AP credits from high school to graduate in seven semesters.

Portman took last fall off to film an adaptation of Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain, which will be released this December.

At some point in the future, she says, she hopes to study Middle Eastern history and literature, a field that she has scarcely begun to explore at Harvard. She took an introductory Israeli literature class during her first year in Cambridge.

Portman, who was born in Jerusalem, revealed her interest in Middle Eastern issues to the Harvard community and the world at large in April 2002 when she authored a letter to The Crimson in response to an op-ed by a law student denouncing “Israel’s racist colonial occupation.”

Portman’s letter emphasized the common historical origins and racial similarities of warring Israelis and Palestinians and condemned the notion that either group could be vindicated to the detriment of the other.

The letter received more than 38,000 hits on The Crimson’s website and elicited more than 130 letters to the editor in response. Portman says her concern for the political situation in the Middle East compelled her to write.

“I love Israel and wish, as many do, for peace and dignity for all in the region,” she says. “It angers me when events are inaccurately depicted for political purposes.”

Though not as vocal as some campus personalities, Portman has undertaken some quiet activism throughout her college career.

She has volunteered hours as a teacher for CityStep, a program that aims to empower middle-school students in Cambridge public schools through dance and improvisation.

During her sophomore and junior years, she was also active in Harvard’s Concert Commission, an Undergraduate Council-sponsored effort to bring popular live music to the University.

The Commission experienced a series of setbacks, beginning last year, due to misunderstandings between its organizers and College administrators, and it eventually became “too much” for Portman, she explains.

“It got to be such bureaucracy,” she says. “I didn’t feel like being a businesswoman or anything. I just wanted to have shows at school.”

Yard to Yearbook

Portman lived in Grays West during her first year at Harvard, moving to a Lowell House suite as a sophomore. By her junior year, she says, she felt she needed more personal space than the House system would allow.

“I really needed to have my own bedroom, and I don’t think that would have been possible,” she says as Charlie wanders toward the opposite end of the bench where she sits. “I loved living in the House. It was just really difficult to be 21 and not be able to, you know, sleep in a room on my own.”

Portman spent the year living alone in an apartment in the Square. Since returning to Cambridge this past semester, she has been living near the Yard with her “best, best friend”—a fellow senior, not just Charlie.

Now, as she prepares to leave the College, not to return in the fall, she says she is grateful for the friends whom she’s made within—and without—Harvard’s gates through what she calls “a surprisingly nice social life.”

“I have great friends whom I’ll be friends with for a really long time,” she says. “That’s one of the best things about being here. And of course there’s always time to meet more people. I’m sure Harvard will have us coming back for many years to come and mingle”—she chuckles—“as they try to get money out of us.”

Charlie squirms in Portman’s lap as she reflects on her graduation and the plain of years beyond. Her largely unmapped future, she says, remains open to any changes in interests and priorities that time may bring.

“I’m just following my instinct as I go along. I’ve already been working for 10 years. In 10 more years I might be ready for something new,” she says. Charlie blinks.

“I hope I’m happy and I hope I have a family by that point,” she adds. “Those are my goals.”

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.