Natalie Portman’s favourite books
Over the years, Natalie Portman has graced our screens with a variety of impressive performances, such as the reoccurring role of Padmé Amidala in several Star Wars movies and the obsessive ballerina Nina Sayers in Black Swan.
Proving herself to be an incredibly versatile actor, Portman’s career has spanned genres from science-fiction to romantic comedy. Portman made her screen debut in Luc Besson’s 1994 movie Leon: The Professional as a young girl who trains under the supervision of the titular hitman to seek revenge on her family’s killers. At just 12 years old, Portman was touted as one of Hollywood’s next big stars, although the actor only picked up a handful of roles until 1999’s The Phantom Menace, which subsequently thrust her into the mainstream.
Since then, Portman has starred in a number of celebrated works, winning multiple awards, including an Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe for her performance in Black Swan. However, while balancing her acting work, Portman has found the time to engage in other endeavours, such as studying for a psychology degree at Harvard University during the late 1990s.
With that, it goes without saying that Portman is also an avid reader, citing a wide variety of titles as some of her favourites. One of her go-to’s is Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases, released in 2007. She explained that the novel “captures the comic absurdity of the bureaucracy of a dictatorship. What’s most interesting to me is, as one character makes clear, the truth-tellers in life are so often written off as crazy”.
Portman is also a fan of Robert Hass’ poetry collection, Sun Under Wood, citing ‘Dragonflies Mating’ as one of her favourites. The actor described his writing as “very American, spare, clean. And manly. There’s a ruggedness to his poems”.
She also noted David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as the “present I gave everyone I knew for three years”, calling the short stories “meditations on violence, specifically the necessity of violence”.
Elsewhere, Portman selected What Is The What by Dave Eggers as an essential read. She said: “I read about Sudan every day, and I didn’t understand what was going on there until this book”.
Finally, to round things off, Portman picked out A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, which she adapted for the big screen as her feature film debut in 2015. The actor described the book as “about the birth of a language” before adding: “It’s so interesting to think about what comes before the process of naming something—how you struggle when you don’t have the words to say what you feel”.
Natalie Portman’s favourite books:
- The Ministry of Special Cases – Nathan Englander
- Sun Under Wood – Robert Hass
- Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
- What Is The What – Dave Eggers
- A Tale of Love and Darkness – Amos Oz
