Goethe wrote that beauty carries with it the magical sense of being blessed by the gods. He would have loved Natalie Portman. At some point in each of her movies, whichever jaded man she’s talking to—Timothy Hutton in Beautiful Girls, or Al Pacino in Heat, or Zach Braff in Garden State—finally allows himself to look at her, and is instantly rendered soft-eyed, dumbfounded, and—at least for a moment—healed.

It happens again in Closer, the raw, wrenching relationship drama that has earned Portman, 23, the Golden Globe for best supporting actress, honors from critics’ organizations nationwide, and, at press time, a possible Oscar nod. She plays Alice, an exotic dancer who peels off her emotional self-protectiveness along with her skivvies. Alice falls in love with Dan (Jude Law), who betrays her with Anna (Julia Roberts), who is married to Larry (Clive Owen), who upon meeting Alice declares, “You have the face of an angel.”

Like an angel’s, Portman’s beauty is complicated by soulfulness, a gentle melancholy at what fools we mortals be. She is attracted to characters who are wounded but not defeated. Let down by love (Everyone Says I Love You, Where the Heart Is) or life (Heat, Garden State), they nevertheless maintain their air of good-heartedness and hope. Except in Cold Mountain, that is, where Portman as a too-young widow and Jude Law as a retreating soldier share the film’s best, most devastating scene.

Portman’s blessings go way beyond her beauty. She has close, loving parents. (The modest shingled house she bought on Long Island is mere blocks from where she grew up, where her father, an Israeli-born fertility doctor, and her mother, a homemaker, still live.) She has excellent taste in material, which has moved her from child roles (her first, startling turn was at age 12 in The Professional) to stage acting (she debuted on Broadway in 1997 as the lead in The Diary of Anne Frank, and appeared in a star-studded The Seagull in Central Park for Closer director Mike Nichols in 2001) to full-fledged film stardom in a decade, without a single raunchy teen comedy or embarrassing misstep. And she has a big brain. Like Jodie Foster, Jennifer Connelly, and other former child actors who insisted on having a life of the mind as well as a career, Portman put her work on hold to attend college; she graduated from Harvard with an honors BA in psychology in 2003.

In a phone conversation from Israel, where she and her parents spent most of December and January, Portman is an adorable paradox: Unfailingly polite, ragingly thoughtful and open-minded, she also speaks in a girlishly high voice sprinkled with “likes” and “sort ofs.” She finishes almost every sentence she utters, no matter how clever, with a self-deprecating giggle. And her favorite word—appropriately—is “amazing.”

At the beginning of the Closer shoot, you gave Julia Roberts a now infamous gift: a necklace with the word “cunt” in delicate script. Where does one purchase such an item?
[laughing] It wasn’t my intention to find that particular necklace. I happened to be in a store on the Lower East Side in New York, and knew it was the perfect gift.

This article was originally published in the March 2005 issue of PREMIERE magazine.

Favorite Natalie Portman performance: Beautiful Girls   0% Closer   67% Cold Mountain   0% Garden State   0% The Professional   33% Other   0% TOTAL ENTRIES: 6