Many Factors Pushing Food Crisis

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

The new hunger has triggered riots from Haiti to Egypt to Ethiopia, threatening political stability; it has conjured up a raft of protectionist policies, threatening globalization. And yet the response to this crisis from governments the world over has been lackadaisical or worse.

Start with the lunatic story of rice stockpiles in Japan. A new paper from the Center for Global Development describes how Japan’s government imports rice in order to comply with its global trade commitments but withholds most of that rice from consumers lest they decide they prefer it to the local sort. Japanese traditionalists view the consumption of sticky, short-grained rice as a patriotic duty. So rather than letting Mrs. Watanabe corrupt her children’s dietary habits, Japan stores much of its imported rice until it has become unfit for human consumption, whereupon it is sold to feed livestock.

From the perspective of Japan, stockpiling rice is a costly exercise in chauvinism, but Japan can afford that. From the world’s perspective, the stockpiling is more serious. More than 3 billion people depend on rice as their daily staple, and half of them are very poor. Japan could save many of them from hunger if it released its stocks.

The scandal is not just Japanese, however. In order for Japan to sell its rice outside its borders, it needs permission from the countries that supplied it — the United States, Thailand and Vietnam. A bit of U.S. leadership could deliver that permission easily, but the Bush administration is apparently worried about a backlash from American rice growers who see no downside in high prices, thank you very much. Not for the first time in Washington do the fat welfare queens of the farm lobby trample on the poorest people in the world.

Speaking of welfare queens, Congress passed a farm bill last week with thunderous bipartisan support. The bill includes reasonable subsidies for low-income Americans hit by high food prices, but it also sprays money at farmers who already earn more than the average taxpayer and contains shockingly little for the world’s poor. Congress is considering a separate bill that would boost international food aid more substantially. But that measure has been met with shameful indifference by lawmakers and consequently has stalled.

Congress won’t even act on a common-sense proposal from the Bush administration that food aid be reformed. If the United States bought some of the food that it donates from other countries, it could get aid to the needy faster and more cheaply. But that would upset American farmers and shipping interests, as a new Council on Foreign Relations paper emphasizes. The president’s proposal has few takers on the Hill.

The Europeans, for their part, have their own way of entrenching hunger. Just as Japan is wedded to its rice culture, Europe is irrationally hostile to genetically modified food. Study after study has found no danger in seeds that have been manipulated to grow better, withstand insects or survive in arid soil. But the Europeans still feel squeamish, and their hang-up deters Africans from taking advantage of crop science lest their exports be barred from European markets. Again, a peccadillo that to Europeans is affordable starves people in the poor world.

Finally, poor countries themselves have made things worse. Panicked at the prospect of food riots, countries with crop surpluses have forbidden exports in an attempt to bottle up supply and keep prices down. More than 40 countries have imposed some kind of export restraint, with the result that countries suffering food deficits have seen prices hit the roof. This nationalized hoarding is frustrating international relief efforts. The World Food Program has sought to buy food from countries with surpluses, such as Pakistan, to ship to desperate neighbors such as Afghanistan. But Pakistan drags its feet about selling.

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Food wars and the challenge for peace-makers

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Everyday concerns of the population rarely reach the negotiating table, in part because the economic and social problems in conflict-ridden societies are extremely complex, involve many actors and can only be resolved in the long term.

So what happens when people are driven to kill one another for food? It’s a critical question to ask as the world faces a sudden and unexpected food price crisis that is threatening to plunge millions back into poverty.

The sharp spike in food prices this year has already generated violence. Food riots in parts of Africa and the Caribbean have created social and political instability. In rice-growing countries like India, Vietnam and Thailand, hoarding has begun with export bans already in place, creating inter-state friction.

Burma’s rice-growing capacity has been devastated by Cyclone Nargis, which will add to price pressures in the coming months.

This is largely a crisis born of inflation and other market factors rather than fundamental shortages. Prices for the benchmark Thai variety of rice, a food staple across much of Asia, have increased threefold in a year, reports the Asian Development Bank. Meat prices have risen by 60% in Bangladesh in the year ending in March, and by 45% in Cambodia and 30% in the Philippines.

With this sharp increase in the price of basic staples, people are already hoarding, stealing and fighting over scarce supplies. The World Food Programme calls it a “silent tsunami.”

The threat of conflict is real, both within societies where the numbers impoverished by higher grain prices is already high, and also between states as the trend towards commercial liberalisation and conglomeration is suddenly reversed and replaced by subsidies, price-fixing cartels and export curbs.

In Indonesia, retired general recently warned: “If students demonstrate it’s not a worry, but if hungry people take to the streets, now that’s dangerous.”

Hunger causes conflict when people feel they have nothing to lose and are willing to kill their neighbours over scarce resources. The peasant wars of the late 20th century in Central and South America and the wars that sprung from famine in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan, are grim reminders of man’s most basic instinct, which is to fight to survive.

The trouble is that in terms of resolving conflict, we have come to rely less on material remedies and more on political artifice. Many of the internal conflicts that have been peacefully resolved in recent years only superficially addressed the material seeds of conflict. Peace agreements have been elite affairs where leaders of armed groups and governments reached an understanding on how to share power within a common state.

This approach is a sensible first step toward conflict resolution: by convincing the people inciting violence to lay down their arms, it becomes possible to start designing a wider range of policies addressing socio-economic issues.

However, typically, the socio-economic changes and the economic reconstruction and development the public was expecting trickled down slowly, if at all. Aceh remains one of the poorest parts of Indonesia, as does Mindanao in the southern Philippines - two areas of Southeast Asia where peace has been negotiated.

When hunger drives people into conflict, we might presume that peace-making will simply be a question of providing food. We would be mistaken. In fact, the experience of humanitarian aid agencies in the 1970s and ’80s in Africa was that food aid tends to fuel conflict, as the combatants seek to harness the supply of nutrition to the goals of war.

Experts tell us that farmers will eventually adjust the supply of food to cope with higher demand so that prices stabilise. More encouragingly, there are signs that decades of improving cooperation between states is stimulating a collective urge to resolve the crisis. The sharing of technology is key, says Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general. He believes that farmers in Africa could double food output in five to 10 years if rich countries partner them in a “Green Revolution” for a long-term solution to the continent’s food crisis.

But realistically, trade agreements and technological advances are slow-moving transformations.

In the meantime, officials in India warn that the food price crisis could plunge millions of people into poverty in a country that is already battling an internal Marxist insurgency that draws support from impoverished and landless peasants.

In Bangladesh, where the soaring cost price of staples has forced the marginally poor to give up meat and rice, there is a significantly increased risk of conflict in an already fractured polity.

The immediate challenge, therefore, is to prevent and resolve conflict arising from the food crisis. This places a significant burden on the international community to swiftly respond to outbreaks of violence.

But if people driven to war by hunger are less inclined to compromise, this makes the task of peace-making rather more challenging.

For one thing, conflict fuelled by hunger will be more widespread, exerting strain on international agencies involved in peace-keeping and humanitarian work. Food security is already fragile in many African countries and a protracted conflict tends to drift across borders, as we have seen in Sudan and Congo.

Peace-makers need to be more aware of, and recognise, the socio-economic roots of conflict. They should incorporate in peace agreements remedies for the population’s grievances and to enlist the international community’s support behind their implementation.

Such remedies should include pledges by leaders to address in a meaningful manner contentious issues such as land distribution, job creation, and racial and ethnic discrimination leading to socio-economic inequality.

The ethnic and religious wars of the last half of the 20th century have perhaps lulled us into a false sense of security.

We have grown accustomed to resolving conflict by forging political accommodation and compromise in situations where protagonists had much to lose materially if they kept on fighting.

But in a world where environmental and market pressures can treble the price of staple commodities in a matter of a few months, it is harder to find the grounds for compromise.

This calls for more effective negotiating skills, both domestically and internationally, bilaterally as well as multilaterally, to resolve these crises.

Markets must be kept open to assist with the flow of goods to crisis situations, and in affected countries solutions must be found that address both elite and popular grievances.

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Help for hoarder is available from many different sources

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Hoarding is known by several other names — Pack Rat Syndrome, collecting, etc. — but it is considered to be a form of OCD, which is highly treatable once you convince the person to get treatment. Sufferers are usually aware they have a problem, but ashamed to let anyone know.

This problem crosses all social and economic boundaries. People with it are often highly intelligent, otherwise normal people. They just need help, and it is available. Many areas have support groups to help. — JUDY JONES, MURIETTA, CALIF.

DEAR JUDY: Thank you for writing. Yes, as with many other problems, help is available — if those who need it will only reach out. People with OCD can be helped through therapy, drugs, experts and organizations.

One such organization is the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation. It is best accessed through its Web site, www.ocfoundation.org. Its phone number is (617) 973-5801. It offers referrals to local groups across the United States. Read on:

DEAR ABBY: “Troubled in Colorado” should call her county social services office. Most states have a senior adult services office that could help the woman in that letter take care of her needs. Hoarding is often a sign of self-neglect, and that’s something these officers often deal with. They can refer her to providers who can help her clean her place.

If she has a mental health issue, the senior services worker would also help her find counseling or a doctor to deal with her challenge in discarding things. — C.R. MAHONEY, AGENCY ON AGING, CLEVELAND

DEAR READERS: FYI, your local Area Agency on Aging can be reached at (800) 677-1116 or at www.eldercare.gov, and has expertise in handling such matters.

DEAR ABBY: I’m responding to “Troubled in Colorado,” who was trying to decide what to do about the poor living conditions she found in her sick co-worker’s house. I work in a hospital, and what I have seen under similar circumstances is that EMS will report living conditions like the one she described to the receiving ER, which will likely get a case manager involved, along with treating the patient’s medical problems. The woman sounds like she has significant OCD that needs to be addressed. — R.G. IN CRANSTON, R.I.

DEAR ABBY: As a professional organizer for more than 10 years, I have seen it all. “Meg,” the woman in that letter, is a hoarder, which can be caused by depression. Any professional organizer should be able to help her get organized. But she also needs professional help to get to the bottom of her depression. The condition of her house is a symptom of her problem, and any professional organizer who deals with hoarders can help her. — LESLIE J., NEW BRITAIN, CONN.

DEAR ABBY: My sisters found me in similar circumstances. The dirty living quarters, not reaching out for help — these are all too common among people with major depressive disorder. The past year has been difficult, but with the help of my family, my therapist and the right medication, I’m doing well. You were right, Abby, when you said “Troubled” needs to let the hospital know, so “Meg” can get the help she needs. — DOING BETTER IN MILWAUKEE

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This girl won’t lose her head

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Natalie Portman is hardly your out-of-control young diva who
dominates the tabloids with her antics.
If anything, the 26-year-old Israeli-born American actress, who
has a degree in psychology from Harvard and grew up in front of the
cameras, is a little too serious.
So, today, in an attempt to break down a little of her guard, I
ask about her shoes. Her own line of vegan shoes, that is.
Wearing a brilliant yellow top and scarf and beige slacks, she
raises her foot to reveal the ballet flats she is wearing.
“Most of the shoes [in the range] are heels because it’s very
hard to find vegan evening shoes,” she says. “So I was, like, let’s
just make all my favourite shoes that I always wish I had, but with
no animal materials in them.”
Portman readily admits that she enjoys fashion. And fashion
likes her - she is the muse of New York designer Zac Posen and a
long-time friend of Isaac Mizrahi.
“I really love beautiful things and I actually don’t take issue
with borrowing things for premieres. I don’t see it as me buying
into consumerism because I really don’t shop at all. I’m obviously
lucky to be in a position where people give me things.”
She is, however, not into hoarding and views stockpiling
possessions as one of the world’s ills.
“It’s absurd: I have 400 pairs of shoes. I can’t keep them all,
so every six months I take half my stuff and I give it away,” she
says.
“One person who lives in the Ugandan village I visited in August
[as part of her work for the Foundation for International Community
Assistance] can be saved by having one pair of shoes. They walk
barefoot everywhere and they’ve got ringworm which makes them more
susceptible to malaria and that’s how they die.”
Weren’t we just talking about fashion? Portman has a way of
turning things around - even when it comes to her latest movie,
The Other Boleyn Girl. She plays Anne Boleyn, the ambitious
young woman who became the second wife of King Henry VIII (played
by Eric Bana) after initially vying with her little-known younger
sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), for his affection.
“By all accounts, it was very much a relationship of the mind,”
she says. “Henry was an incredibly scholarly man. He was a great
musician and a great writer and Anne was really his intellectual
match. There were constant reports of them chatting away in the
corner of the room. The fact that he changed the religion of the
country was clearly so that she could marry him. The philosophical
and religious discussions they were having led to that
decision.”
Is a man’s intelligence a high priority for her?
“I think the ideal is to have it all. You can have the
intellectual companionship, but you also want the humour, the
emotional side, the sexual side. But it’s hard to ask one person to
be everything. It’s near impossible. I read an article in The
[New York] Times saying that your partner now has to be
everything and that it’s ruining relationships.”
King Henry certainly didn’t believe his partner had to be all
things to him, she says. “There was a definite division between his
mind and his body; I think between Anne and Mary.”
In the film, King Henry’s court is painted as a sexual circus
and there are clear parallels with Hollywood. At the Berlin
International Film Festival, where our interview takes place, Bana
hilariously refers to Henry as “the Hugh Hefner of the 16th century
with a castle as his Playboy mansion.”
Portman is not a circus creature in any way. She surrounds
herself with like-minded types, among them Jake Gyllenhaal and Gael
Garcia Bernal, her only famous boyfriend on public record. The
couple reportedly split when the Mexican heart-throb chose to take
his parents rather than Portman to Cannes in 2004. Portman made it
to the festival the following year - to promote Star Wars:
Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith. She also brought with her a
new boyfriend, Liron Levo, her co-star in the Israeli film Free
Zone.
The Levo relationship is now a thing of the past and Portman is
dating former model and billionaire designer Nathan Bogle. And he
suits her fine. It’s tough being with another famous actor, she
says.
“You’re double as interesting to the press and if you break up
then you have to see their face all over the place, which is hard.
And you have to hear about [their] new relationships and that’s not
fun either.”
Mostly, Portman will not discuss her private life. “It’s not
that I don’t party, it’s just that I’m not going to party where I
know the paparazzi hang out. LA’s harder, but in New York it’s not
bad. They’re on one block and if you don’t go there, it’s
fine.”
Portman has just completed her first film with Gyllenhaal, a
remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish film Brothers. “I’ve been
friends with Jake a really long time, so that was really exciting,”
she says. She has considered Lukas Haas “one of her best friends”
since they appeared together in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I
Love You in 1996 and after appearing with Norah Jones in My
Blueberry Nights (not yet released here) Portman counts the
singer as another close friend.
Working on The Other Boleyn Girl revealed the
similarities between Portman and Johansson. This is partly due to
their Jewish heritage, she says. “We both move our hands around a
lot,” she says.
“I don’t have any friend I can relate to in the same way as
Scarlett. I’m 26, I’ve been making movies for 15 years and I’m more
experienced than everyone I work with. It’s a weird situation that
we’ve both found ourselves in.”
Johansson, in fact, received her break in 1997 when Portman
dropped out of Robert Redford’s film The Horse Whisperer to
appear in The Diary Of Anne Frank on Broadway. Portman now
has the more substantial role in The Other Boleyn Girl and
while Johansson recalls struggling to breathe in the tight period
frocks, Portman didn’t mind. “I get so excited to have any sort of
cleavage. There are no complaints on my end,” she says.
It is not lost on her that in the film she plays the mother of
one of her favourite actresses, Cate Blanchett, given that the
Australian star has made Elizabeth I her own.
“Well, that’s right, I have an Australian daughter,” she
quips.
Portman has even come to appreciate the Down Under sense of
humour, thanks to her work with Australians. She bonded with Rose
Byrne on Star Wars, with Hugo Weaving in V For
Vendetta. “And Eeerric,” she interjects with mock distain, when
referring to her latest co-star, “he takes the piss out of
everything.”
Portman has compered the legendary live comedy program
Saturday Night Live and has a lively comedic repartee when
she gets going. Bana became the victim of this wit at their Berlin
press conference.
“He was saying how we were all cycling together so I just made a
stupid joke about how he could never find a tampon when he needed
one.” For once, the talkative Australian was lost for words.
So why don’t we see her in comedies? “I’m really picky about
comedy stuff. I find many dramatic scripts that I believe in but,
somehow, with comedy, it takes a lot to make me laugh. I think you
have to be even truer in comedy to make it work.”
Portman is an only child. Her Israeli doctor father and American
artist mother moved with her to the US when Portman was three. It
was only two years ago that Portman moved out of the family home
and into the East Village.
She has always aimed to keep her distance from prying eyes, ever
since she was discovered in a pizza parlour as a child and cast in
The Professional. “It was after dance class one day and
someone approached me,” she recalls. She changed her name from
Hershlag to her grandmother’s maiden name. “I have a different name
on my credit card, my driver’s license and my passport, so it gives
me a real level of privacy,” she says.
Portman considers herself American rather Israeli and, while not
a practising Jew, she says she is “culturally Jewish” and plans to
raise her children in the Jewish faith.
She returned to Jerusalem in 2004 for a semester at university
and was able to avoid the media completely and live a normal life.
She has always cultivated a life away from the cameras, even as she
was growing up on movie sets.
“I don’t think I missed childhood, I just had a different
childhood. I had a really interesting one where I got to travel,
meet people and learn all kinds of things. I got to live in France
when I was 12 for The Professional, I learned to ice-skate
when I was 13 for Beautiful Girls and I was lucky enough to
have a stable household where my parents were protective and
focused on my schooling and kept me away from the nonsense of it
[show biz].”
She decided early that negative portrayals of women were not her
style. She turned down Adrian Lyne’s 1997 remake of Lolita
because it was “too sleazy”. Her savvy, sexy 12-year-old orphan
from The Professional has attracted far more attention than
her Star Wars princess. She was the only actor to know the
story of the three Star Wars prequels in advance - or she
wouldn’t commit.
In recent years she has been broadening her range. Dancing
around a pole as a stripper in Closer certainly showed her
in a new light and even if the nude scene was cut from the film
Portman asserted herself as a fully-fledged adult star for the
first time. She even received an Oscar nomination. She shaved her
head for the politically motivated V For Vendetta and gained
attention with her sympathetic turn in Garden State. She
again did a kind of striptease for a raunchy love scene with Jason
Schwartzman in Wes Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier.
She is keen to direct and is planning to adapt Israeli writer Amos
Oz’s autobiography, A Tale Of Love And Darkness, for the
screen. That is some time off, she says.
Portman also takes a stand on political and humanitarian issues.
She campaigned for John Kerry in the last presidential election and
is a supporter of Hillary Clinton in this one. She is a strong
supporter of FINCA, an organisation that gives small loans to women
to start their own business in developing countries.
“I have been brought up in a politically aware way,” she says.
“My dad was always talking politics in the house. I think it’s
natural when you come from Israel to be engaged in politics; you
are obsessed with politics. You’re always, like, how can we make
the world better?” One imagines that with Portman, unlike so many
others in Hollywood, that will never change.
The Other Boleyn Girl opens this Thursday.
Source: The Sun-Herald

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This girl won’t lose her head

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Natalie Portman is hardly your out-of-control young diva who
dominates the tabloids with her antics.
If anything, the 26-year-old Israeli-born American actress, who
has a degree in psychology from Harvard and grew up in front of the
cameras, is a little too serious.
So, today, in an attempt to break down a little of her guard, I
ask about her shoes. Her own line of vegan shoes, that is.
Wearing a brilliant yellow top and scarf and beige slacks, she
raises her foot to reveal the ballet flats she is wearing.
“Most of the shoes [in the range] are heels because it’s very
hard to find vegan evening shoes,” she says. “So I was, like, let’s
just make all my favourite shoes that I always wish I had, but with
no animal materials in them.”
Portman readily admits that she enjoys fashion. And fashion
likes her - she is the muse of New York designer Zac Posen and a
long-time friend of Isaac Mizrahi.
“I really love beautiful things and I actually don’t take issue
with borrowing things for premieres. I don’t see it as me buying
into consumerism because I really don’t shop at all. I’m obviously
lucky to be in a position where people give me things.”
She is, however, not into hoarding and views stockpiling
possessions as one of the world’s ills.
“It’s absurd: I have 400 pairs of shoes. I can’t keep them all,
so every six months I take half my stuff and I give it away,” she
says.
“One person who lives in the Ugandan village I visited in August
[as part of her work for the Foundation for International Community
Assistance] can be saved by having one pair of shoes. They walk
barefoot everywhere and they’ve got ringworm which makes them more
susceptible to malaria and that’s how they die.”
Weren’t we just talking about fashion? Portman has a way of
turning things around - even when it comes to her latest movie,
The Other Boleyn Girl. She plays Anne Boleyn, the ambitious
young woman who became the second wife of King Henry VIII (played
by Eric Bana) after initially vying with her little-known younger
sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), for his affection.
“By all accounts, it was very much a relationship of the mind,”
she says. “Henry was an incredibly scholarly man. He was a great
musician and a great writer and Anne was really his intellectual
match. There were constant reports of them chatting away in the
corner of the room. The fact that he changed the religion of the
country was clearly so that she could marry him. The philosophical
and religious discussions they were having led to that
decision.”
Is a man’s intelligence a high priority for her?
“I think the ideal is to have it all. You can have the
intellectual companionship, but you also want the humour, the
emotional side, the sexual side. But it’s hard to ask one person to
be everything. It’s near impossible. I read an article in The
[New York] Times saying that your partner now has to be
everything and that it’s ruining relationships.”
King Henry certainly didn’t believe his partner had to be all
things to him, she says. “There was a definite division between his
mind and his body; I think between Anne and Mary.”
In the film, King Henry’s court is painted as a sexual circus
and there are clear parallels with Hollywood. At the Berlin
International Film Festival, where our interview takes place, Bana
hilariously refers to Henry as “the Hugh Hefner of the 16th century
with a castle as his Playboy mansion.”
Portman is not a circus creature in any way. She surrounds
herself with like-minded types, among them Jake Gyllenhaal and Gael
Garcia Bernal, her only famous boyfriend on public record. The
couple reportedly split when the Mexican heart-throb chose to take
his parents rather than Portman to Cannes in 2004. Portman made it
to the festival the following year - to promote Star Wars:
Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith. She also brought with her a
new boyfriend, Liron Levo, her co-star in the Israeli film Free
Zone.
The Levo relationship is now a thing of the past and Portman is
dating former model and billionaire designer Nathan Bogle. And he
suits her fine. It’s tough being with another famous actor, she
says.
“You’re double as interesting to the press and if you break up
then you have to see their face all over the place, which is hard.
And you have to hear about [their] new relationships and that’s not
fun either.”
Mostly, Portman will not discuss her private life. “It’s not
that I don’t party, it’s just that I’m not going to party where I
know the paparazzi hang out. LA’s harder, but in New York it’s not
bad. They’re on one block and if you don’t go there, it’s
fine.”
Portman has just completed her first film with Gyllenhaal, a
remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish film Brothers. “I’ve been
friends with Jake a really long time, so that was really exciting,”
she says. She has considered Lukas Haas “one of her best friends”
since they appeared together in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I
Love You in 1996 and after appearing with Norah Jones in My
Blueberry Nights (not yet released here) Portman counts the
singer as another close friend.
Working on The Other Boleyn Girl revealed the
similarities between Portman and Johansson. This is partly due to
their Jewish heritage, she says. “We both move our hands around a
lot,” she says.
“I don’t have any friend I can relate to in the same way as
Scarlett. I’m 26, I’ve been making movies for 15 years and I’m more
experienced than everyone I work with. It’s a weird situation that
we’ve both found ourselves in.”
Johansson, in fact, received her break in 1997 when Portman
dropped out of Robert Redford’s film The Horse Whisperer to
appear in The Diary Of Anne Frank on Broadway. Portman now
has the more substantial role in The Other Boleyn Girl and
while Johansson recalls struggling to breathe in the tight period
frocks, Portman didn’t mind. “I get so excited to have any sort of
cleavage. There are no complaints on my end,” she says.
It is not lost on her that in the film she plays the mother of
one of her favourite actresses, Cate Blanchett, given that the
Australian star has made Elizabeth I her own.
“Well, that’s right, I have an Australian daughter,” she
quips.
Portman has even come to appreciate the Down Under sense of
humour, thanks to her work with Australians. She bonded with Rose
Byrne on Star Wars, with Hugo Weaving in V For
Vendetta. “And Eeerric,” she interjects with mock distain, when
referring to her latest co-star, “he takes the piss out of
everything.”
Portman has compered the legendary live comedy program
Saturday Night Live and has a lively comedic repartee when
she gets going. Bana became the victim of this wit at their Berlin
press conference.
“He was saying how we were all cycling together so I just made a
stupid joke about how he could never find a tampon when he needed
one.” For once, the talkative Australian was lost for words.
So why don’t we see her in comedies? “I’m really picky about
comedy stuff. I find many dramatic scripts that I believe in but,
somehow, with comedy, it takes a lot to make me laugh. I think you
have to be even truer in comedy to make it work.”
Portman is an only child. Her Israeli doctor father and American
artist mother moved with her to the US when Portman was three. It
was only two years ago that Portman moved out of the family home
and into the East Village.
She has always aimed to keep her distance from prying eyes, ever
since she was discovered in a pizza parlour as a child and cast in
The Professional. “It was after dance class one day and
someone approached me,” she recalls. She changed her name from
Hershlag to her grandmother’s maiden name. “I have a different name
on my credit card, my driver’s license and my passport, so it gives
me a real level of privacy,” she says.
Portman considers herself American rather Israeli and, while not
a practising Jew, she says she is “culturally Jewish” and plans to
raise her children in the Jewish faith.
She returned to Jerusalem in 2004 for a semester at university
and was able to avoid the media completely and live a normal life.
She has always cultivated a life away from the cameras, even as she
was growing up on movie sets.
“I don’t think I missed childhood, I just had a different
childhood. I had a really interesting one where I got to travel,
meet people and learn all kinds of things. I got to live in France
when I was 12 for The Professional, I learned to ice-skate
when I was 13 for Beautiful Girls and I was lucky enough to
have a stable household where my parents were protective and
focused on my schooling and kept me away from the nonsense of it
[show biz].”
She decided early that negative portrayals of women were not her
style. She turned down Adrian Lyne’s 1997 remake of Lolita
because it was “too sleazy”. Her savvy, sexy 12-year-old orphan
from The Professional has attracted far more attention than
her Star Wars princess. She was the only actor to know the
story of the three Star Wars prequels in advance - or she
wouldn’t commit.
In recent years she has been broadening her range. Dancing
around a pole as a stripper in Closer certainly showed her
in a new light and even if the nude scene was cut from the film
Portman asserted herself as a fully-fledged adult star for the
first time. She even received an Oscar nomination. She shaved her
head for the politically motivated V For Vendetta and gained
attention with her sympathetic turn in Garden State. She
again did a kind of striptease for a raunchy love scene with Jason
Schwartzman in Wes Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier.
She is keen to direct and is planning to adapt Israeli writer Amos
Oz’s autobiography, A Tale Of Love And Darkness, for the
screen. That is some time off, she says.
Portman also takes a stand on political and humanitarian issues.
She campaigned for John Kerry in the last presidential election and
is a supporter of Hillary Clinton in this one. She is a strong
supporter of FINCA, an organisation that gives small loans to women
to start their own business in developing countries.
“I have been brought up in a politically aware way,” she says.
“My dad was always talking politics in the house. I think it’s
natural when you come from Israel to be engaged in politics; you
are obsessed with politics. You’re always, like, how can we make
the world better?” One imagines that with Portman, unlike so many
others in Hollywood, that will never change.
The Other Boleyn Girl opens this Thursday.
Source: The Sun-Herald

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Related posts

Posted in Find Cate School | No Comments »

This girl won’t lose her head

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Natalie Portman is hardly your out-of-control young diva who
dominates the tabloids with her antics.
If anything, the 26-year-old Israeli-born American actress, who
has a degree in psychology from Harvard and grew up in front of the
cameras, is a little too serious.
So, today, in an attempt to break down a little of her guard, I
ask about her shoes. Her own line of vegan shoes, that is.
Wearing a brilliant yellow top and scarf and beige slacks, she
raises her foot to reveal the ballet flats she is wearing.
“Most of the shoes [in the range] are heels because it’s very
hard to find vegan evening shoes,” she says. “So I was, like, let’s
just make all my favourite shoes that I always wish I had, but with
no animal materials in them.”
Portman readily admits that she enjoys fashion. And fashion
likes her - she is the muse of New York designer Zac Posen and a
long-time friend of Isaac Mizrahi.
“I really love beautiful things and I actually don’t take issue
with borrowing things for premieres. I don’t see it as me buying
into consumerism because I really don’t shop at all. I’m obviously
lucky to be in a position where people give me things.”
She is, however, not into hoarding and views stockpiling
possessions as one of the world’s ills.
“It’s absurd: I have 400 pairs of shoes. I can’t keep them all,
so every six months I take half my stuff and I give it away,” she
says.
“One person who lives in the Ugandan village I visited in August
[as part of her work for the Foundation for International Community
Assistance] can be saved by having one pair of shoes. They walk
barefoot everywhere and they’ve got ringworm which makes them more
susceptible to malaria and that’s how they die.”
Weren’t we just talking about fashion? Portman has a way of
turning things around - even when it comes to her latest movie,
The Other Boleyn Girl. She plays Anne Boleyn, the ambitious
young woman who became the second wife of King Henry VIII (played
by Eric Bana) after initially vying with her little-known younger
sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), for his affection.
“By all accounts, it was very much a relationship of the mind,”
she says. “Henry was an incredibly scholarly man. He was a great
musician and a great writer and Anne was really his intellectual
match. There were constant reports of them chatting away in the
corner of the room. The fact that he changed the religion of the
country was clearly so that she could marry him. The philosophical
and religious discussions they were having led to that
decision.”
Is a man’s intelligence a high priority for her?
“I think the ideal is to have it all. You can have the
intellectual companionship, but you also want the humour, the
emotional side, the sexual side. But it’s hard to ask one person to
be everything. It’s near impossible. I read an article in The
[New York] Times saying that your partner now has to be
everything and that it’s ruining relationships.”
King Henry certainly didn’t believe his partner had to be all
things to him, she says. “There was a definite division between his
mind and his body; I think between Anne and Mary.”
In the film, King Henry’s court is painted as a sexual circus
and there are clear parallels with Hollywood. At the Berlin
International Film Festival, where our interview takes place, Bana
hilariously refers to Henry as “the Hugh Hefner of the 16th century
with a castle as his Playboy mansion.”
Portman is not a circus creature in any way. She surrounds
herself with like-minded types, among them Jake Gyllenhaal and Gael
Garcia Bernal, her only famous boyfriend on public record. The
couple reportedly split when the Mexican heart-throb chose to take
his parents rather than Portman to Cannes in 2004. Portman made it
to the festival the following year - to promote Star Wars:
Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith. She also brought with her a
new boyfriend, Liron Levo, her co-star in the Israeli film Free
Zone.
The Levo relationship is now a thing of the past and Portman is
dating former model and billionaire designer Nathan Bogle. And he
suits her fine. It’s tough being with another famous actor, she
says.
“You’re double as interesting to the press and if you break up
then you have to see their face all over the place, which is hard.
And you have to hear about [their] new relationships and that’s not
fun either.”
Mostly, Portman will not discuss her private life. “It’s not
that I don’t party, it’s just that I’m not going to party where I
know the paparazzi hang out. LA’s harder, but in New York it’s not
bad. They’re on one block and if you don’t go there, it’s
fine.”
Portman has just completed her first film with Gyllenhaal, a
remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish film Brothers. “I’ve been
friends with Jake a really long time, so that was really exciting,”
she says. She has considered Lukas Haas “one of her best friends”
since they appeared together in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I
Love You in 1996 and after appearing with Norah Jones in My
Blueberry Nights (not yet released here) Portman counts the
singer as another close friend.
Working on The Other Boleyn Girl revealed the
similarities between Portman and Johansson. This is partly due to
their Jewish heritage, she says. “We both move our hands around a
lot,” she says.
“I don’t have any friend I can relate to in the same way as
Scarlett. I’m 26, I’ve been making movies for 15 years and I’m more
experienced than everyone I work with. It’s a weird situation that
we’ve both found ourselves in.”
Johansson, in fact, received her break in 1997 when Portman
dropped out of Robert Redford’s film The Horse Whisperer to
appear in The Diary Of Anne Frank on Broadway. Portman now
has the more substantial role in The Other Boleyn Girl and
while Johansson recalls struggling to breathe in the tight period
frocks, Portman didn’t mind. “I get so excited to have any sort of
cleavage. There are no complaints on my end,” she says.
It is not lost on her that in the film she plays the mother of
one of her favourite actresses, Cate Blanchett, given that the
Australian star has made Elizabeth I her own.
“Well, that’s right, I have an Australian daughter,” she
quips.
Portman has even come to appreciate the Down Under sense of
humour, thanks to her work with Australians. She bonded with Rose
Byrne on Star Wars, with Hugo Weaving in V For
Vendetta. “And Eeerric,” she interjects with mock distain, when
referring to her latest co-star, “he takes the piss out of
everything.”
Portman has compered the legendary live comedy program
Saturday Night Live and has a lively comedic repartee when
she gets going. Bana became the victim of this wit at their Berlin
press conference.
“He was saying how we were all cycling together so I just made a
stupid joke about how he could never find a tampon when he needed
one.” For once, the talkative Australian was lost for words.
So why don’t we see her in comedies? “I’m really picky about
comedy stuff. I find many dramatic scripts that I believe in but,
somehow, with comedy, it takes a lot to make me laugh. I think you
have to be even truer in comedy to make it work.”
Portman is an only child. Her Israeli doctor father and American
artist mother moved with her to the US when Portman was three. It
was only two years ago that Portman moved out of the family home
and into the East Village.
She has always aimed to keep her distance from prying eyes, ever
since she was discovered in a pizza parlour as a child and cast in
The Professional. “It was after dance class one day and
someone approached me,” she recalls. She changed her name from
Hershlag to her grandmother’s maiden name. “I have a different name
on my credit card, my driver’s license and my passport, so it gives
me a real level of privacy,” she says.
Portman considers herself American rather Israeli and, while not
a practising Jew, she says she is “culturally Jewish” and plans to
raise her children in the Jewish faith.
She returned to Jerusalem in 2004 for a semester at university
and was able to avoid the media completely and live a normal life.
She has always cultivated a life away from the cameras, even as she
was growing up on movie sets.
“I don’t think I missed childhood, I just had a different
childhood. I had a really interesting one where I got to travel,
meet people and learn all kinds of things. I got to live in France
when I was 12 for The Professional, I learned to ice-skate
when I was 13 for Beautiful Girls and I was lucky enough to
have a stable household where my parents were protective and
focused on my schooling and kept me away from the nonsense of it
[show biz].”
She decided early that negative portrayals of women were not her
style. She turned down Adrian Lyne’s 1997 remake of Lolita
because it was “too sleazy”. Her savvy, sexy 12-year-old orphan
from The Professional has attracted far more attention than
her Star Wars princess. She was the only actor to know the
story of the three Star Wars prequels in advance - or she
wouldn’t commit.
In recent years she has been broadening her range. Dancing
around a pole as a stripper in Closer certainly showed her
in a new light and even if the nude scene was cut from the film
Portman asserted herself as a fully-fledged adult star for the
first time. She even received an Oscar nomination. She shaved her
head for the politically motivated V For Vendetta and gained
attention with her sympathetic turn in Garden State. She
again did a kind of striptease for a raunchy love scene with Jason
Schwartzman in Wes Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier.
She is keen to direct and is planning to adapt Israeli writer Amos
Oz’s autobiography, A Tale Of Love And Darkness, for the
screen. That is some time off, she says.
Portman also takes a stand on political and humanitarian issues.
She campaigned for John Kerry in the last presidential election and
is a supporter of Hillary Clinton in this one. She is a strong
supporter of FINCA, an organisation that gives small loans to women
to start their own business in developing countries.
“I have been brought up in a politically aware way,” she says.
“My dad was always talking politics in the house. I think it’s
natural when you come from Israel to be engaged in politics; you
are obsessed with politics. You’re always, like, how can we make
the world better?” One imagines that with Portman, unlike so many
others in Hollywood, that will never change.
The Other Boleyn Girl opens this Thursday.
Source: The Sun-Herald

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Related posts

Posted in Find Cate School | No Comments »

This girl won’t lose her head

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Natalie Portman is hardly your out-of-control young diva who
dominates the tabloids with her antics.
If anything, the 26-year-old Israeli-born American actress, who
has a degree in psychology from Harvard and grew up in front of the
cameras, is a little too serious.
So, today, in an attempt to break down a little of her guard, I
ask about her shoes. Her own line of vegan shoes, that is.
Wearing a brilliant yellow top and scarf and beige slacks, she
raises her foot to reveal the ballet flats she is wearing.
“Most of the shoes [in the range] are heels because it’s very
hard to find vegan evening shoes,” she says. “So I was, like, let’s
just make all my favourite shoes that I always wish I had, but with
no animal materials in them.”
Portman readily admits that she enjoys fashion. And fashion
likes her - she is the muse of New York designer Zac Posen and a
long-time friend of Isaac Mizrahi.
“I really love beautiful things and I actually don’t take issue
with borrowing things for premieres. I don’t see it as me buying
into consumerism because I really don’t shop at all. I’m obviously
lucky to be in a position where people give me things.”
She is, however, not into hoarding and views stockpiling
possessions as one of the world’s ills.
“It’s absurd: I have 400 pairs of shoes. I can’t keep them all,
so every six months I take half my stuff and I give it away,” she
says.
“One person who lives in the Ugandan village I visited in August
[as part of her work for the Foundation for International Community
Assistance] can be saved by having one pair of shoes. They walk
barefoot everywhere and they’ve got ringworm which makes them more
susceptible to malaria and that’s how they die.”
Weren’t we just talking about fashion? Portman has a way of
turning things around - even when it comes to her latest movie,
The Other Boleyn Girl. She plays Anne Boleyn, the ambitious
young woman who became the second wife of King Henry VIII (played
by Eric Bana) after initially vying with her little-known younger
sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), for his affection.
“By all accounts, it was very much a relationship of the mind,”
she says. “Henry was an incredibly scholarly man. He was a great
musician and a great writer and Anne was really his intellectual
match. There were constant reports of them chatting away in the
corner of the room. The fact that he changed the religion of the
country was clearly so that she could marry him. The philosophical
and religious discussions they were having led to that
decision.”
Is a man’s intelligence a high priority for her?
“I think the ideal is to have it all. You can have the
intellectual companionship, but you also want the humour, the
emotional side, the sexual side. But it’s hard to ask one person to
be everything. It’s near impossible. I read an article in The
[New York] Times saying that your partner now has to be
everything and that it’s ruining relationships.”
King Henry certainly didn’t believe his partner had to be all
things to him, she says. “There was a definite division between his
mind and his body; I think between Anne and Mary.”
In the film, King Henry’s court is painted as a sexual circus
and there are clear parallels with Hollywood. At the Berlin
International Film Festival, where our interview takes place, Bana
hilariously refers to Henry as “the Hugh Hefner of the 16th century
with a castle as his Playboy mansion.”
Portman is not a circus creature in any way. She surrounds
herself with like-minded types, among them Jake Gyllenhaal and Gael
Garcia Bernal, her only famous boyfriend on public record. The
couple reportedly split when the Mexican heart-throb chose to take
his parents rather than Portman to Cannes in 2004. Portman made it
to the festival the following year - to promote Star Wars:
Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith. She also brought with her a
new boyfriend, Liron Levo, her co-star in the Israeli film Free
Zone.
The Levo relationship is now a thing of the past and Portman is
dating former model and billionaire designer Nathan Bogle. And he
suits her fine. It’s tough being with another famous actor, she
says.
“You’re double as interesting to the press and if you break up
then you have to see their face all over the place, which is hard.
And you have to hear about [their] new relationships and that’s not
fun either.”
Mostly, Portman will not discuss her private life. “It’s not
that I don’t party, it’s just that I’m not going to party where I
know the paparazzi hang out. LA’s harder, but in New York it’s not
bad. They’re on one block and if you don’t go there, it’s
fine.”
Portman has just completed her first film with Gyllenhaal, a
remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish film Brothers. “I’ve been
friends with Jake a really long time, so that was really exciting,”
she says. She has considered Lukas Haas “one of her best friends”
since they appeared together in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I
Love You in 1996 and after appearing with Norah Jones in My
Blueberry Nights (not yet released here) Portman counts the
singer as another close friend.
Working on The Other Boleyn Girl revealed the
similarities between Portman and Johansson. This is partly due to
their Jewish heritage, she says. “We both move our hands around a
lot,” she says.
“I don’t have any friend I can relate to in the same way as
Scarlett. I’m 26, I’ve been making movies for 15 years and I’m more
experienced than everyone I work with. It’s a weird situation that
we’ve both found ourselves in.”
Johansson, in fact, received her break in 1997 when Portman
dropped out of Robert Redford’s film The Horse Whisperer to
appear in The Diary Of Anne Frank on Broadway. Portman now
has the more substantial role in The Other Boleyn Girl and
while Johansson recalls struggling to breathe in the tight period
frocks, Portman didn’t mind. “I get so excited to have any sort of
cleavage. There are no complaints on my end,” she says.
It is not lost on her that in the film she plays the mother of
one of her favourite actresses, Cate Blanchett, given that the
Australian star has made Elizabeth I her own.
“Well, that’s right, I have an Australian daughter,” she
quips.
Portman has even come to appreciate the Down Under sense of
humour, thanks to her work with Australians. She bonded with Rose
Byrne on Star Wars, with Hugo Weaving in V For
Vendetta. “And Eeerric,” she interjects with mock distain, when
referring to her latest co-star, “he takes the piss out of
everything.”
Portman has compered the legendary live comedy program
Saturday Night Live and has a lively comedic repartee when
she gets going. Bana became the victim of this wit at their Berlin
press conference.
“He was saying how we were all cycling together so I just made a
stupid joke about how he could never find a tampon when he needed
one.” For once, the talkative Australian was lost for words.
So why don’t we see her in comedies? “I’m really picky about
comedy stuff. I find many dramatic scripts that I believe in but,
somehow, with comedy, it takes a lot to make me laugh. I think you
have to be even truer in comedy to make it work.”
Portman is an only child. Her Israeli doctor father and American
artist mother moved with her to the US when Portman was three. It
was only two years ago that Portman moved out of the family home
and into the East Village.
She has always aimed to keep her distance from prying eyes, ever
since she was discovered in a pizza parlour as a child and cast in
The Professional. “It was after dance class one day and
someone approached me,” she recalls. She changed her name from
Hershlag to her grandmother’s maiden name. “I have a different name
on my credit card, my driver’s license and my passport, so it gives
me a real level of privacy,” she says.
Portman considers herself American rather Israeli and, while not
a practising Jew, she says she is “culturally Jewish” and plans to
raise her children in the Jewish faith.
She returned to Jerusalem in 2004 for a semester at university
and was able to avoid the media completely and live a normal life.
She has always cultivated a life away from the cameras, even as she
was growing up on movie sets.
“I don’t think I missed childhood, I just had a different
childhood. I had a really interesting one where I got to travel,
meet people and learn all kinds of things. I got to live in France
when I was 12 for The Professional, I learned to ice-skate
when I was 13 for Beautiful Girls and I was lucky enough to
have a stable household where my parents were protective and
focused on my schooling and kept me away from the nonsense of it
[show biz].”
She decided early that negative portrayals of women were not her
style. She turned down Adrian Lyne’s 1997 remake of Lolita
because it was “too sleazy”. Her savvy, sexy 12-year-old orphan
from The Professional has attracted far more attention than
her Star Wars princess. She was the only actor to know the
story of the three Star Wars prequels in advance - or she
wouldn’t commit.
In recent years she has been broadening her range. Dancing
around a pole as a stripper in Closer certainly showed her
in a new light and even if the nude scene was cut from the film
Portman asserted herself as a fully-fledged adult star for the
first time. She even received an Oscar nomination. She shaved her
head for the politically motivated V For Vendetta and gained
attention with her sympathetic turn in Garden State. She
again did a kind of striptease for a raunchy love scene with Jason
Schwartzman in Wes Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier.
She is keen to direct and is planning to adapt Israeli writer Amos
Oz’s autobiography, A Tale Of Love And Darkness, for the
screen. That is some time off, she says.
Portman also takes a stand on political and humanitarian issues.
She campaigned for John Kerry in the last presidential election and
is a supporter of Hillary Clinton in this one. She is a strong
supporter of FINCA, an organisation that gives small loans to women
to start their own business in developing countries.
“I have been brought up in a politically aware way,” she says.
“My dad was always talking politics in the house. I think it’s
natural when you come from Israel to be engaged in politics; you
are obsessed with politics. You’re always, like, how can we make
the world better?” One imagines that with Portman, unlike so many
others in Hollywood, that will never change.
The Other Boleyn Girl opens this Thursday.
Source: The Sun-Herald

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Related posts

Posted in Find Cate Blanchette | No Comments »

This girl won’t lose her head

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Natalie Portman is hardly your out-of-control young diva who
dominates the tabloids with her antics.
If anything, the 26-year-old Israeli-born American actress, who
has a degree in psychology from Harvard and grew up in front of the
cameras, is a little too serious.
So, today, in an attempt to break down a little of her guard, I
ask about her shoes. Her own line of vegan shoes, that is.
Wearing a brilliant yellow top and scarf and beige slacks, she
raises her foot to reveal the ballet flats she is wearing.
“Most of the shoes [in the range] are heels because it’s very
hard to find vegan evening shoes,” she says. “So I was, like, let’s
just make all my favourite shoes that I always wish I had, but with
no animal materials in them.”
Portman readily admits that she enjoys fashion. And fashion
likes her - she is the muse of New York designer Zac Posen and a
long-time friend of Isaac Mizrahi.
“I really love beautiful things and I actually don’t take issue
with borrowing things for premieres. I don’t see it as me buying
into consumerism because I really don’t shop at all. I’m obviously
lucky to be in a position where people give me things.”
She is, however, not into hoarding and views stockpiling
possessions as one of the world’s ills.
“It’s absurd: I have 400 pairs of shoes. I can’t keep them all,
so every six months I take half my stuff and I give it away,” she
says.
“One person who lives in the Ugandan village I visited in August
[as part of her work for the Foundation for International Community
Assistance] can be saved by having one pair of shoes. They walk
barefoot everywhere and they’ve got ringworm which makes them more
susceptible to malaria and that’s how they die.”
Weren’t we just talking about fashion? Portman has a way of
turning things around - even when it comes to her latest movie,
The Other Boleyn Girl. She plays Anne Boleyn, the ambitious
young woman who became the second wife of King Henry VIII (played
by Eric Bana) after initially vying with her little-known younger
sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), for his affection.
“By all accounts, it was very much a relationship of the mind,”
she says. “Henry was an incredibly scholarly man. He was a great
musician and a great writer and Anne was really his intellectual
match. There were constant reports of them chatting away in the
corner of the room. The fact that he changed the religion of the
country was clearly so that she could marry him. The philosophical
and religious discussions they were having led to that
decision.”
Is a man’s intelligence a high priority for her?
“I think the ideal is to have it all. You can have the
intellectual companionship, but you also want the humour, the
emotional side, the sexual side. But it’s hard to ask one person to
be everything. It’s near impossible. I read an article in The
[New York] Times saying that your partner now has to be
everything and that it’s ruining relationships.”
King Henry certainly didn’t believe his partner had to be all
things to him, she says. “There was a definite division between his
mind and his body; I think between Anne and Mary.”
In the film, King Henry’s court is painted as a sexual circus
and there are clear parallels with Hollywood. At the Berlin
International Film Festival, where our interview takes place, Bana
hilariously refers to Henry as “the Hugh Hefner of the 16th century
with a castle as his Playboy mansion.”
Portman is not a circus creature in any way. She surrounds
herself with like-minded types, among them Jake Gyllenhaal and Gael
Garcia Bernal, her only famous boyfriend on public record. The
couple reportedly split when the Mexican heart-throb chose to take
his parents rather than Portman to Cannes in 2004. Portman made it
to the festival the following year - to promote Star Wars:
Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith. She also brought with her a
new boyfriend, Liron Levo, her co-star in the Israeli film Free
Zone.
The Levo relationship is now a thing of the past and Portman is
dating former model and billionaire designer Nathan Bogle. And he
suits her fine. It’s tough being with another famous actor, she
says.
“You’re double as interesting to the press and if you break up
then you have to see their face all over the place, which is hard.
And you have to hear about [their] new relationships and that’s not
fun either.”
Mostly, Portman will not discuss her private life. “It’s not
that I don’t party, it’s just that I’m not going to party where I
know the paparazzi hang out. LA’s harder, but in New York it’s not
bad. They’re on one block and if you don’t go there, it’s
fine.”
Portman has just completed her first film with Gyllenhaal, a
remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish film Brothers. “I’ve been
friends with Jake a really long time, so that was really exciting,”
she says. She has considered Lukas Haas “one of her best friends”
since they appeared together in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I
Love You in 1996 and after appearing with Norah Jones in My
Blueberry Nights (not yet released here) Portman counts the
singer as another close friend.
Working on The Other Boleyn Girl revealed the
similarities between Portman and Johansson. This is partly due to
their Jewish heritage, she says. “We both move our hands around a
lot,” she says.
“I don’t have any friend I can relate to in the same way as
Scarlett. I’m 26, I’ve been making movies for 15 years and I’m more
experienced than everyone I work with. It’s a weird situation that
we’ve both found ourselves in.”
Johansson, in fact, received her break in 1997 when Portman
dropped out of Robert Redford’s film The Horse Whisperer to
appear in The Diary Of Anne Frank on Broadway. Portman now
has the more substantial role in The Other Boleyn Girl and
while Johansson recalls struggling to breathe in the tight period
frocks, Portman didn’t mind. “I get so excited to have any sort of
cleavage. There are no complaints on my end,” she says.
It is not lost on her that in the film she plays the mother of
one of her favourite actresses, Cate Blanchett, given that the
Australian star has made Elizabeth I her own.
“Well, that’s right, I have an Australian daughter,” she
quips.
Portman has even come to appreciate the Down Under sense of
humour, thanks to her work with Australians. She bonded with Rose
Byrne on Star Wars, with Hugo Weaving in V For
Vendetta. “And Eeerric,” she interjects with mock distain, when
referring to her latest co-star, “he takes the piss out of
everything.”
Portman has compered the legendary live comedy program
Saturday Night Live and has a lively comedic repartee when
she gets going. Bana became the victim of this wit at their Berlin
press conference.
“He was saying how we were all cycling together so I just made a
stupid joke about how he could never find a tampon when he needed
one.” For once, the talkative Australian was lost for words.
So why don’t we see her in comedies? “I’m really picky about
comedy stuff. I find many dramatic scripts that I believe in but,
somehow, with comedy, it takes a lot to make me laugh. I think you
have to be even truer in comedy to make it work.”
Portman is an only child. Her Israeli doctor father and American
artist mother moved with her to the US when Portman was three. It
was only two years ago that Portman moved out of the family home
and into the East Village.
She has always aimed to keep her distance from prying eyes, ever
since she was discovered in a pizza parlour as a child and cast in
The Professional. “It was after dance class one day and
someone approached me,” she recalls. She changed her name from
Hershlag to her grandmother’s maiden name. “I have a different name
on my credit card, my driver’s license and my passport, so it gives
me a real level of privacy,” she says.
Portman considers herself American rather Israeli and, while not
a practising Jew, she says she is “culturally Jewish” and plans to
raise her children in the Jewish faith.
She returned to Jerusalem in 2004 for a semester at university
and was able to avoid the media completely and live a normal life.
She has always cultivated a life away from the cameras, even as she
was growing up on movie sets.
“I don’t think I missed childhood, I just had a different
childhood. I had a really interesting one where I got to travel,
meet people and learn all kinds of things. I got to live in France
when I was 12 for The Professional, I learned to ice-skate
when I was 13 for Beautiful Girls and I was lucky enough to
have a stable household where my parents were protective and
focused on my schooling and kept me away from the nonsense of it
[show biz].”
She decided early that negative portrayals of women were not her
style. She turned down Adrian Lyne’s 1997 remake of Lolita
because it was “too sleazy”. Her savvy, sexy 12-year-old orphan
from The Professional has attracted far more attention than
her Star Wars princess. She was the only actor to know the
story of the three Star Wars prequels in advance - or she
wouldn’t commit.
In recent years she has been broadening her range. Dancing
around a pole as a stripper in Closer certainly showed her
in a new light and even if the nude scene was cut from the film
Portman asserted herself as a fully-fledged adult star for the
first time. She even received an Oscar nomination. She shaved her
head for the politically motivated V For Vendetta and gained
attention with her sympathetic turn in Garden State. She
again did a kind of striptease for a raunchy love scene with Jason
Schwartzman in Wes Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier.
She is keen to direct and is planning to adapt Israeli writer Amos
Oz’s autobiography, A Tale Of Love And Darkness, for the
screen. That is some time off, she says.
Portman also takes a stand on political and humanitarian issues.
She campaigned for John Kerry in the last presidential election and
is a supporter of Hillary Clinton in this one. She is a strong
supporter of FINCA, an organisation that gives small loans to women
to start their own business in developing countries.
“I have been brought up in a politically aware way,” she says.
“My dad was always talking politics in the house. I think it’s
natural when you come from Israel to be engaged in politics; you
are obsessed with politics. You’re always, like, how can we make
the world better?” One imagines that with Portman, unlike so many
others in Hollywood, that will never change.
The Other Boleyn Girl opens this Thursday.
Source: The Sun-Herald

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This girl won’t lose her head

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Natalie Portman is hardly your out-of-control young diva who
dominates the tabloids with her antics.
If anything, the 26-year-old Israeli-born American actress, who
has a degree in psychology from Harvard and grew up in front of the
cameras, is a little too serious.
So, today, in an attempt to break down a little of her guard, I
ask about her shoes. Her own line of vegan shoes, that is.
Wearing a brilliant yellow top and scarf and beige slacks, she
raises her foot to reveal the ballet flats she is wearing.
“Most of the shoes [in the range] are heels because it’s very
hard to find vegan evening shoes,” she says. “So I was, like, let’s
just make all my favourite shoes that I always wish I had, but with
no animal materials in them.”
Portman readily admits that she enjoys fashion. And fashion
likes her - she is the muse of New York designer Zac Posen and a
long-time friend of Isaac Mizrahi.
“I really love beautiful things and I actually don’t take issue
with borrowing things for premieres. I don’t see it as me buying
into consumerism because I really don’t shop at all. I’m obviously
lucky to be in a position where people give me things.”
She is, however, not into hoarding and views stockpiling
possessions as one of the world’s ills.
“It’s absurd: I have 400 pairs of shoes. I can’t keep them all,
so every six months I take half my stuff and I give it away,” she
says.
“One person who lives in the Ugandan village I visited in August
[as part of her work for the Foundation for International Community
Assistance] can be saved by having one pair of shoes. They walk
barefoot everywhere and they’ve got ringworm which makes them more
susceptible to malaria and that’s how they die.”
Weren’t we just talking about fashion? Portman has a way of
turning things around - even when it comes to her latest movie,
The Other Boleyn Girl. She plays Anne Boleyn, the ambitious
young woman who became the second wife of King Henry VIII (played
by Eric Bana) after initially vying with her little-known younger
sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), for his affection.
“By all accounts, it was very much a relationship of the mind,”
she says. “Henry was an incredibly scholarly man. He was a great
musician and a great writer and Anne was really his intellectual
match. There were constant reports of them chatting away in the
corner of the room. The fact that he changed the religion of the
country was clearly so that she could marry him. The philosophical
and religious discussions they were having led to that
decision.”
Is a man’s intelligence a high priority for her?
“I think the ideal is to have it all. You can have the
intellectual companionship, but you also want the humour, the
emotional side, the sexual side. But it’s hard to ask one person to
be everything. It’s near impossible. I read an article in The
[New York] Times saying that your partner now has to be
everything and that it’s ruining relationships.”
King Henry certainly didn’t believe his partner had to be all
things to him, she says. “There was a definite division between his
mind and his body; I think between Anne and Mary.”
In the film, King Henry’s court is painted as a sexual circus
and there are clear parallels with Hollywood. At the Berlin
International Film Festival, where our interview takes place, Bana
hilariously refers to Henry as “the Hugh Hefner of the 16th century
with a castle as his Playboy mansion.”
Portman is not a circus creature in any way. She surrounds
herself with like-minded types, among them Jake Gyllenhaal and Gael
Garcia Bernal, her only famous boyfriend on public record. The
couple reportedly split when the Mexican heart-throb chose to take
his parents rather than Portman to Cannes in 2004. Portman made it
to the festival the following year - to promote Star Wars:
Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith. She also brought with her a
new boyfriend, Liron Levo, her co-star in the Israeli film Free
Zone.
The Levo relationship is now a thing of the past and Portman is
dating former model and billionaire designer Nathan Bogle. And he
suits her fine. It’s tough being with another famous actor, she
says.
“You’re double as interesting to the press and if you break up
then you have to see their face all over the place, which is hard.
And you have to hear about [their] new relationships and that’s not
fun either.”
Mostly, Portman will not discuss her private life. “It’s not
that I don’t party, it’s just that I’m not going to party where I
know the paparazzi hang out. LA’s harder, but in New York it’s not
bad. They’re on one block and if you don’t go there, it’s
fine.”
Portman has just completed her first film with Gyllenhaal, a
remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish film Brothers. “I’ve been
friends with Jake a really long time, so that was really exciting,”
she says. She has considered Lukas Haas “one of her best friends”
since they appeared together in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I
Love You in 1996 and after appearing with Norah Jones in My
Blueberry Nights (not yet released here) Portman counts the
singer as another close friend.
Working on The Other Boleyn Girl revealed the
similarities between Portman and Johansson. This is partly due to
their Jewish heritage, she says. “We both move our hands around a
lot,” she says.
“I don’t have any friend I can relate to in the same way as
Scarlett. I’m 26, I’ve been making movies for 15 years and I’m more
experienced than everyone I work with. It’s a weird situation that
we’ve both found ourselves in.”
Johansson, in fact, received her break in 1997 when Portman
dropped out of Robert Redford’s film The Horse Whisperer to
appear in The Diary Of Anne Frank on Broadway. Portman now
has the more substantial role in The Other Boleyn Girl and
while Johansson recalls struggling to breathe in the tight period
frocks, Portman didn’t mind. “I get so excited to have any sort of
cleavage. There are no complaints on my end,” she says.
It is not lost on her that in the film she plays the mother of
one of her favourite actresses, Cate Blanchett, given that the
Australian star has made Elizabeth I her own.
“Well, that’s right, I have an Australian daughter,” she
quips.
Portman has even come to appreciate the Down Under sense of
humour, thanks to her work with Australians. She bonded with Rose
Byrne on Star Wars, with Hugo Weaving in V For
Vendetta. “And Eeerric,” she interjects with mock distain, when
referring to her latest co-star, “he takes the piss out of
everything.”
Portman has compered the legendary live comedy program
Saturday Night Live and has a lively comedic repartee when
she gets going. Bana became the victim of this wit at their Berlin
press conference.
“He was saying how we were all cycling together so I just made a
stupid joke about how he could never find a tampon when he needed
one.” For once, the talkative Australian was lost for words.
So why don’t we see her in comedies? “I’m really picky about
comedy stuff. I find many dramatic scripts that I believe in but,
somehow, with comedy, it takes a lot to make me laugh. I think you
have to be even truer in comedy to make it work.”
Portman is an only child. Her Israeli doctor father and American
artist mother moved with her to the US when Portman was three. It
was only two years ago that Portman moved out of the family home
and into the East Village.
She has always aimed to keep her distance from prying eyes, ever
since she was discovered in a pizza parlour as a child and cast in
The Professional. “It was after dance class one day and
someone approached me,” she recalls. She changed her name from
Hershlag to her grandmother’s maiden name. “I have a different name
on my credit card, my driver’s license and my passport, so it gives
me a real level of privacy,” she says.
Portman considers herself American rather Israeli and, while not
a practising Jew, she says she is “culturally Jewish” and plans to
raise her children in the Jewish faith.
She returned to Jerusalem in 2004 for a semester at university
and was able to avoid the media completely and live a normal life.
She has always cultivated a life away from the cameras, even as she
was growing up on movie sets.
“I don’t think I missed childhood, I just had a different
childhood. I had a really interesting one where I got to travel,
meet people and learn all kinds of things. I got to live in France
when I was 12 for The Professional, I learned to ice-skate
when I was 13 for Beautiful Girls and I was lucky enough to
have a stable household where my parents were protective and
focused on my schooling and kept me away from the nonsense of it
[show biz].”
She decided early that negative portrayals of women were not her
style. She turned down Adrian Lyne’s 1997 remake of Lolita
because it was “too sleazy”. Her savvy, sexy 12-year-old orphan
from The Professional has attracted far more attention than
her Star Wars princess. She was the only actor to know the
story of the three Star Wars prequels in advance - or she
wouldn’t commit.
In recent years she has been broadening her range. Dancing
around a pole as a stripper in Closer certainly showed her
in a new light and even if the nude scene was cut from the film
Portman asserted herself as a fully-fledged adult star for the
first time. She even received an Oscar nomination. She shaved her
head for the politically motivated V For Vendetta and gained
attention with her sympathetic turn in Garden State. She
again did a kind of striptease for a raunchy love scene with Jason
Schwartzman in Wes Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier.
She is keen to direct and is planning to adapt Israeli writer Amos
Oz’s autobiography, A Tale Of Love And Darkness, for the
screen. That is some time off, she says.
Portman also takes a stand on political and humanitarian issues.
She campaigned for John Kerry in the last presidential election and
is a su