Early career

Portman started dancing lessons at the age of four and she performed in local troupes. At the age of ten, a Revlon agent asked her to become a child model, but she turned down the offer, to focus on acting. In a magazine interview, Portman said that she was "...different from the other kids. I was more ambitious, I knew what I liked and what I wanted, and I worked very hard. I was a very serious kid." Portman spent her school holidays attending theater camps. When she was ten, she auditioned for Ruthless!, a play about a girl who is prepared to commit murder to get the lead in a school play, and she was chosen as the understudy for Laura Bell Bundy. In 1994, she auditioned for the role of a child who befriends a middle-aged hitman in Luc Besson's film Léon (aka The Professional). Soon after getting the part, she took her grandmother's maiden name "Portman" as her stage name, in the interest of privacy; in the Director's Cut of the film on DVD she is credited as Natalie Hershlag. Léon opened on November 18, 1994, and marked her feature film debut at age 13. That same year she appeared in the short film Developing, which aired on television.