How Natalie Portman Achieved a Net Worth of $60 Million
Natalie Portman is an award-winning Israeli-American actress, producer, writer, and director. Having begun her career as a child actress, she is now one of the most successful and best-paid actresses in the film industry. Her professional success has also made her very wealthy, and she now has a personal net worth of $60 million. Here is how this talented actress became so wealthy. Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem on June 9, 1981. When she was three, she moved to the United States with her parents for her father’s career as a gynecologist and fertility specialist. The family lived in several locations in the United States during Portman’s childhood. As a child, she studied modern dance and ballet at the American Theater Dance Workshop in New York, and this is how she got her first experiences as a performer.
Prior to becoming a child actress, Portman was asked to model for Revlon. However, she declined the offer as she wanted to become an actress. She started her career as a child stage actress, before landing her first film role in 1993. This was playing an orphan child in ‘Leon: The Professional’. This led to her getting further film roles, including parts in ‘Mars Attack!’, ‘Everyone Says I Love You’, and ‘Heat’. However, it was her performance in ‘Beautiful Girls’ that attracted significant attention to Portman for the first time for both good and bad reasons. While her performance received great critical acclaim, it also caused debate about sexualizing youngsters in films. This later affected Portman’s future role choices.
After being cast as Padme Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy and filming had begun, she was offered a role in ‘Anywhere but Here’, playing Susan Sarandon’s daughter. She initially declined the role because it included a sex scene. However, Sarandon and the film’s director demanded that the script was rewritten to exclude the sex scene, and Portman accepted the role. The film was released in 1999 and Portman was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance. In the same year, she played Queen Amidala in ‘Star Wars: Episode I- The Phantom Menace’. This was a critically and commercially successful film that grossed $431 million at the worldwide box office. At this point, Natalie Portman had achieved worldwide fame.
Following the turn of the millennium, Portman continued to appear in many successful films for which she received great critical acclaim, and this meant that she could command high fees for her film appearances. She received an Oscar nomination for her performance in the 2004 fil ‘Closer’ and reprised her role as Queen Amidala for the second and third films in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
In 2010, Portman portrayed a young ballerina in ‘Black Swan’, which was directed by Darren Aronofsky. To prepare for the role, Portman had to work hard and even underwent daily dance training for six months in preparation. The talented actress won a Golden Globe, an Academy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Despite this phenomenal success, the film was tarnished because of claims by Sarah Lane, one of Portman’s dancing doubles, that Portman had performed very little in the film. In fact, Lane said that only five percent of the dancing scenes were Portman. Aronofsky defended Portman by saying she had performed at least 80 percent of the dancing.
More recent films that have contributed to Portman’s personal net worth of $60 million include ‘No Strings Attached’, ‘Your Highness’, ‘Thor’, ‘Thor: The Dark World’, ‘Jane Got a Gun’, and ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’, which she also co-wrote and it was her directorial debut. Most recently, Portman played the title role in ‘Jackie’ and as a former soldier in ‘Annihilation’. IN 2018, she played a pop star in ‘Vox Lux’.
Further to her acting, producing, and directorial work, Portman has also earned money for her appearances in advertising campaigns. These have included a deal she signed in 2012 with Dior. One of the adverts was surrounded in controversy because a competitor of Dior complained that the advertisement exaggerated the results of wearing Dior mascara. This led to the advert being banned in the United Kingdom.
In her personal life, Portman is married to Benjamin Millepied, a French choreographer and ballet dancer. The couple lives in Los Angeles with their son, Aleph, and daughter, Amalia.