Oscar winner Natalie Portman’s ancestry would make a movie of its own. Born Natalie Hershlag in Jerusalem, she has dual US and Israeli citizenship. She has said that she loves the United States, but Jerusalem is where she feels at home.

His maternal ancestors were Jewish immigrants to the US from Austria and Russia and his paternal ancestors were Jews who moved to Israel from Poland and Romania.

His great-grandparents on his father’s side died in Auschwitz and his Romanian great-grandmother was a spy for British intelligence during World War II.

His parents met at a Jewish student center at Ohio State University, where his mother sold tickets. They corresponded after he returned to Israel and were married when his mother visited a few years later.

Portman was born in Jerusalem on June 9, 1981, but was 3 years old when the family moved to the United States of America, where her father trained to be a doctor.

After living in Washington DC they moved to Connecticut and finally settled in Long Island, New York in 1960. He attended Jewish schools where he learned to speak Hebrew and English. She has loved languages ​​from an early age and has studied French, Japanese, German, and Arabic.

Portman began taking dance lessons at the age of 4 and at the age of 10 was asked by a Revlon agent to become a child model. She had already decided that she wanted to become an actress and she turned down her offer to concentrate on acting.

During her school vacations she attended drama camps and at the age of 10 auditioned for the off-Broadway show “Ruthless!” a musical about a girl who was willing to commit murder to get the lead in a school play.

Portman and Britney Spears were chosen to replace star Laura Bell Bundy and in 1994 she auditioned for the role of a girl who befriends a middle-aged hit man in the 1994 film Leon (also known as The Professional). Luc Besson and got the role.

To protect her family’s identity, she took her grandmother’s maiden name, Portman, as her stage name. The film was released on November 18, 1994 when she was 13 years old and was followed by a short film “Developing” which was shown on television.

These two films launched his film career and between 1995 and 1999 he appeared in several films. After turning down the lead role in “Anywhere But Here” because it would involve a sex scene, she decided to accept the role of Ann August after director Wayne Wang and actress Susan Sarandon demanded that the script be rewritten.

The film was released in late 1999, and she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role.

After playing the lead role of a teenage mother in “Where is the Heart”, she moved to Harvard Road University to pursue a BA in Psychology. Aside from the Star Wars prequels, she wouldn’t take roles for four years until she got the title from her.

In July 2001, she played Nina in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the Public Theater in New York City, directed by Mike Nichols. Also in the cast were Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

In 2010, she played a veteran dancer in the Darren Aronofsky film “Black Swan.” Film critic Kurt Loder wrote, “Portman gives one of the most compelling performances of hers on film.”

To prepare for the role, she trained five to eight hours a day in ballet for six months. All the hard work paid off and she won the Golden Globe and the Oscar for Best Leading Actress.

On the set of “Black Swan” she met ballet dancer Benjamin Millepied who was the choreographer for the film and they announced their engagement on December 27, 2010. They are expecting their first child in the summer of 2011.

She has been criticized by US Republican politician Mike Huckabee for choosing to have a baby out of wedlock saying she is exalting single motherhood.