Here, there and everywhere

She's young, bright and already a star. But Natalie Portman of Anywhere But Here will be anywhere but on a movie set in the next few years, finds MARK KENNEDY.


Natalie Portman is going to hate herself in the morning. Hate herself because there are dirty jeans and unread books piling up in her dormitory. Hate herself because she is hundreds of miles away in New York, curled up on a sofa answering questions.

"It's so overwhelming. I have to go home after this and just cry over how much work I have," says the 18-year-old, first-year university student, her eyes rolling heavenward.

"I'm having the most amazing, amazing, amazing time. But it's really hard balancing everything, taking care of yourself, setting your own limits, scheduling for yourself," she says.

"And, on top of that, you have to balance doing, like, your housework, too, which was never a part of the equation! All of a sudden, you have to do laundry and clean your sheets and vacuum and wash the toilets."

That's an image: Natalie Portman, the star of the smash hit, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, and one of Hollywood's most sought-after young actresses, getting busy with a bathroom scrubber.

And why not? After all that, too, is Portman, a teenager who rises to announce she needs "a potty break" or who pre-emptively apologises for her "stinky feet" on shedding her Guccis.

"I'm just trying to be true to who I am and not let anyone define me except for myself," she says. "I'm not trying to have a magazine call me the 'It Girl.'"

Perhaps Lit Girl would be better. Portman may have ruled a planet in Star Wars but now she just wants to be one more stressed-out student lugging books across the quad.

"I've been so lucky to have these opportunities, but we have a way of making movie stars not mortal. We have a way of making them images rather than people, and they're human beings," she says.

"They're extraordinary at what they do, but so is my father who is a doctor, and no one ever freaked out about meeting him. No one would ever shake shaking his hand, but people meet me and they'll shake and they'll cry and that's weird and that's wrong."

Keeping Portman sane are her new college pals: the youngest speaker at the Million Man March; a cellist who has worked with Yo-Yo Ma; the poet-slash-artist down the hall; her room-mate, a star tennis player.

"You should hear these kids," she says. "I mean, these people are just all so fantastic in their own right that, you know, nothing I do is that impressive to them that they'd be overly interested in me."

Portman is as cagey as she is self-deprecating. She's an on-the-record vegetarian, a straight-A student, a teetotaller and an adamant non-smoker. Drugs? Don't even think about it.

"I don't like it when people just assume they can smoke around me or do drugs around me," she says. "I think probably people view me as a goody-goody, which isn't necessarily true. I mean, I'm a human being. I'm not an angel."

There are areas, though, that Portman feels uncomfortable discussing. She shies away from referring to her hometown on New York's Long Island and the gossipy details of her life at Harvard University aren't easily forthcoming. She's even registered under a different name at school.

"There's a great mystery to Natalie," says director Wayne Wang. "We're very close on one level, but also there's a great mystery about her. I think it's a certain kind of control that she has, a certain maturity."

Portman just laughs it off. The secrecy, she says, gives her insulation, while the pseudonym - borrowed from her maternal grandmother - offers a degree of anonymity when she's not acting.

"I'm not trying to hide," Portman insists. "I'm not trying to have a split life here. In no way am I trying to be two different people. I'm not Superman - I'm the same person. I don't act differently when I'm in my different worlds."

Her worlds intertwined last year while making Anywhere But Here in which Portman stars as a teenager, mature beyond her years, whose mother (Susan Sarandon) is flighty and needy.

Yearning for adulthood and freedom, Portman's character goes through a painful coming-of-age while also coming to terms with her mother and finally escaping, to college.

In other words, life imitated art.

"It was interesting because it was like experiencing something exactly the same way that I knew I was going to experience a year later," she says.

"Moving out is a big deal, it's a huge change in your life, so thinking about it a little earlier was helpful."

Portman is a delicate beauty with eyebrows that skate horizontally across her face and almond-shaped eyes that hint at her Israeli heritage. Two tiny moles stand sentry above either cheek.

Her striking looks led to her big break. Like an updated version of the Lana Turner-found-in-a-drugstore fable, Portman was discovered while munching pizza at a Long Island eatery.

- REUTERS

Who: Natalie Portman

What: Anywhere But Here

Where and when: Now showing, cinemas nationwide