Natalie Portman's Shaved Head

Portman once said that she'd "rather be smart than a movie star" and put her money where her mouth was by completing a degree in psychology at Harvard and having two co-authored research papers published in scientific journals.

While filming Anywhere But Here, Susan Sarandon remarked: "I felt at times that I was working with an equal. She has a natural grace that doesn't make her seem as if she's of her generattion."

The black swan and the white: to find the boundary between reality and fantasy

Paranoia and incipient madness

A crescendo of madness

Nina’s psychological state is evidently part of the artifice of “Black Swan,” but her body, subject to unimaginable (and sometimes unreal) mutations and mutilations, is the film’s ground zero of authenticity.

The white swan and the black represent, above all, the Apollonian and Dionysian poles of art, one restrained and rational, the other unruly, passionate and dangerous.
The forced integration of the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses leads to the disintegration of her personality, a literal splitting into two Ninas that takes place in full view of the camera and also entirely, it seems, within the character’s mind.

she seems, with her mother and with Thomas, more like a terrified child than an accomplished professional with the skills of an athlete. She is, to some extent, the creature of these two dominating figures, with very little personality of her own and almost no ability to articulate her own desires or feelings other than by trembling, perpetually, on the verge of tears.

In keeping with the logic of “Swan Lake” her liberation — her realization of a self freed from the constraints of other people — takes the form of self-destruction

Natalie Portman: Spreading Her Wings

The only way to be perfect, is to allow chaos and madness into your life. -Darren Aronofsky

“The biggest challenge for all actors,” says Portman, “is that you see yourself on a screen outside of your body and have to reenter your body to look at the world through your own eyes instead of at yourself. . . .

Jorie Graham notes that at Harvard Natalie went under her real name, Hershlag, and “the class soon forgot what she was and got to know who she was. She was determined not to let her life run on fame, and not to lose perspective on what life’s journey is for. . . . She was wise enough not to trust the virtual over the actual.”

“When people get older and they’re not good on the inside, it starts to show.

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