Preparing to step through the University’s gates for the last time as an undergraduate, she has nothing but praise for the teachers and peers whom she has encountered and gratitude for the relationships that she has established with them.

It’s a ‘Wonderful’ Life

When Portman discusses the Harvard professors who influenced her most—a list that includes such illustrious names as Alan Dershowitz, Jorie Graham and Michael Sandel—one adjective appears in each description: wonderful.

She invokes this term again in describing her classmates—peers, she says, who have mitigated the aura of awkwardness that her acting work ordinarily casts around her.

“In every previous experience with perfect strangers who are aware of my celebrity, I’ve either had people reacting in embarrassingly positive ways or...they make assumptions about you or just stay away from you for whatever reason,” she says. “But I’ve felt everyone has been really warm and just treated me like a regular person on campus, which has really helped my experience here be wonderful.”

Largely as a result of her peers—and the accommodating Harvard University Police Department—Portman’s acting career and life at Harvard have hardly interfered with each other, she says.

“I feel that I’ve been really, really lucky to have those experiences—acting and being here,” she says. “At the beginning of college I was talking to people who were actors who had gone to college, and I heard awful stories about people getting 200 visitors a year knocking on their dorm room, or having awful stalker issues. But I’ve not been bothered once, and that’s also thanks to the police here, who have been really wonderful.”

Her public status has not been entirely unnoticeable within the College, though. Shortly after her arrival in Cambridge, a deluge of e-mails sent to every Harvard undergraduate named Natalie—“Portman” is a pseudonym—incited the formation of the so-called “Harvard Natalies,” a group of eight students who exchanged some of the more amusing misdirected e-mails they received.

Citing what she describes as “this false sort of fame that I have,” Portman has shied from the public limelight during her time at the College, instead contributing quietly to the Harvard community.

She has worked as a research assistant in Kosslyn’s lab, working on a study of differences in visual mental imagery by testing about 30 subjects on visual imagery tasks and performing statistical analysis on the results. She also assisted a study of frontal lobe activation in infants jointly undertaken by Harvard Medical School students and graduate students at Harvard’s Laboratory of Infant Study.

In addition to fulfilling her concentration requirements in psychology, Portman says, she was able to enroll in a number of electives, such as courses in French and American literature and a poetry workshop. She did this despite taking the College’s Advanced Standing option, using her AP credits from high school to graduate in seven semesters.

Portman took last fall off to film an adaptation of Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain, which will be released this December.

At some point in the future, she says, she hopes to study Middle Eastern history and literature, a field that she has scarcely begun to explore at Harvard. She took an introductory Israeli literature class during her first year in Cambridge.

Portman, who was born in Jerusalem, revealed her interest in Middle Eastern issues to the Harvard community and the world at large in April 2002 when she authored a letter to The Crimson in response to an op-ed by a law student denouncing “Israel’s racist colonial occupation.”

Portman’s letter emphasized the common historical origins and racial similarities of warring Israelis and Palestinians and condemned the notion that either group could be vindicated to the detriment of the other.