Natalie Portman on acting inspiration: “You can’t possibly measure up to Audrey Hepburn”
When a 17-year-old Natalie Portman landed the role of Padmé Amidala in George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, a stack of old movies were shoved into her arms to watch for inspiration.
Lucas wanted the character, the young queen of the planet Naboo, to speak with a vocal tone and accent that was maddeningly specific. He imagined her voice sounding unusually deep for a woman, and with a mid-Atlantic accent that would be difficult to trace to one particular place. As any fan of Old Hollywood leading ladies will have already guessed, Lucas was hearing the voices of a select group of stars in his head while envisioning Amidala’s regal tone.
“George worked with me a lot on changing my voice and my movement and the way I carried myself,” Portman revealed to CNN in 1999. “We worked on this accent that goes to older generations of actresses who used an unidentifiable accent. ‘Is it American or is it British?’ I watched Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn.”
While all three of these legendary stars informed Portman’s performance, there’s only one that she would subsequently be compared to throughout her career. From almost as soon as she came of age in movies like Where the Heart Is, Cold Mountain, and Garden State, the beautiful, pixie-like Portman was likened to the equally slight and ethereal Hepburn, whose iconic Breakfast at Tiffany’s charm – and stunning wardrobe – is forever burned into the brains of several generations of cinephile.
As Portman came into her own, the Hepburn chatter only got louder. Rather than shy away from it, she had a bit of fun with the comparison, kitting herself out in Hepburn’s legendary Givenchy black column dress, pearls and that beehive hairdo from Breakfast at Tiffany’s for a Harper’s Bazaar cover in 2006. Pulling on the very same frock Hepburn had made world-famous was a bit of a “Cinderella slipper” moment – not least because Portman had fretted she’d never squeeze into Hepburn’s famously diddy frame. When it turned out the dress fit her a treat, well, that just poured petrol on the fire.
Having said this, when Portman was asked about evoking the spirit of Holly Golightly in such a one-to-one way, she was quick to stress that, while she “did feel very elegant suddenly”, she pushed back against the notion that she compared in any way to Hepburn. “I mean, you can’t possibly measure up to Audrey Hepburn,” she stated incredulously. “But the elegance that she exuded was transmitted to the dress, you know, the feeling, the emotion of it.”
Asked almost the same question two years later, Portman’s answer was very similar. She told Time magazine that, of course, Hepburn was an actor she admired and watched a lot of growing up, especially when getting into the royal headspace to play Amidala. This time, though, she claimed that comparisons between them were “a compliment”, but she’d come to believe that likening Hepburn to anyone else was “an insult.” That’s high praise.
At the core of the matter, Portman believed that if she and Hepburn’s names were to be mentioned in the same breath, she’d rather it be because people were likening their good works outside of acting, as opposed to something as superficial as their looks. Hepburn quit Hollywood in 1967 to spend more time with her family, and in her later life, devoted much more time to humanitarian work with UNICEF in places like Africa, Turkey, and Central America than she did to acting. Portman has followed suit, spending long periods outside the daily grind of Hollywood championing animal rights and anti-poverty campaigns.
“I just saw a compilation of all her visits to Africa, and I was crying,” Portman revealed in 2023. “To be able to leave the glamour behind, and all the allure of movies, and be real and help people is an admirable thing to do.”
