Natalie Portman famously put a glittering Hollywood career on hold so she could go to Harvard University, remarking that she’d ‘rather be smart than a movie star.’
And the former Star Wars princess has never been shy about reiterating the point to any potential doubters that she’s not just a pretty face – one, indeed, that has been the ‘face’ of Christian Dior for an astonishing 16 years.
She loves people to know that she has an Instagram book club, and few writers have made more of an impression on her than the controversial Canadian-born novelist Rachel Cusk.
Their relationship is now the subject of some debate but it’s certainly true that the pair – who both live in Paris – are friends. Or perhaps, more accurately, were friends.
Portman, 45, raved about Cusk, 59, when she had her as a guest on her book club podcast.
She made Cusk’s novel Second Place one of her picks for ‘Nat’s Book Club’ in 2021 and accorded her the same honor three years later for her 2024 book Parade.
‘Forever in awe of Rachel Cusk and the way she disrupts form and the conventions of storytelling,’ the Israeli-American actress gushed on Instagram before Parade was published.
Well, if one of the conventions of storytelling is to try to mask how fictional characters are based on real people, particularly if you risk dropping a loyal ally under a bus in the writing process, then sad to say that Cusk has spectacularly failed with her latest book.
Natalie Portman loves people to know that she has an Instagram book club, and few writers have made more of an impression on her than Rachel Cusk
Their relationship is now the subject of some debate after Cusk’s new book, Life of M
The friend and ally concerned is none other than Portman on whom, it has been speculated, the central character of Cusk’s new book is based. Life of M is about a film star, identified only as ‘M,’ and the attempts of an unnamed writer-friend (the book’s narrator) to chronicle her life.
And chronicle in a way that is less than flattering by portraying her as a painfully out-of-touch and self-absorbed diva.
The book isn’t out until later this month and yet it has accumulated the level of attention that most writers could only dream of after their tomes had been out for months.
Indeed, such is the intense hype around the slim, 183-page novel that some have even claimed that the two women have hatched this literary furor together just to shift copies of the book.
Despite previous claims that Portman has taken the controversy in her stride, the Daily Mail was this week assured otherwise.
The star who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Black Swan in 2011, and whose other movies include Closer, Jackie and Marvel’s Thor franchise, is reportedly not happy, and friends have been rallying round to point out that she is anything but the person portrayed in Cusk’s book.
Sources insisted to the Daily Mail that the actress and Cusk ‘are not, and have never been, close friends,’ and have seen each other only a few times around Paris, where they both live.
The Portman camp quietly argues that the actress has been the victim of a cynical marketing campaign by publishers to sell the book by kicking up a sexy story about how it has torn apart best.
A Paris-based friend of Portman told the Daily Mail: ‘Natalie is a very private person, that’s why she moved to Paris, so Rachel’s book, Life Of M, has really pissed her off.
‘She thinks it is a real low blow and is horrified about the rumors she was in on the book in some way, which she certainly was not. The celebrity in the book is nothing like her, she is far from a diva, she is a quiet bookworm.
‘Natalie is big on girl power and sisterhood, so this is a gross violation of her code. She believes women’s bonds should be nurtured and not manipulated for commerce.’
The insider went on: ‘Natalie is trying to focus now on her pregnancy – she is due any moment – and be in the present with her boyfriend Tanguy [Destable], who grounds her. She will not address the book and is writing it off as an unfortunate phase of her life.’
Another source also weighed in on Portman’s side, saying: ‘Natalie is such a kind and warm person… The personality of the character bears absolutely no resemblance to her.’
Cusk has not made any official announcement on the ‘is-Portman- or-isn’t-she-M?’ question that has preoccupied book industry dinner parties and literary discussion forums alike.
Some have defended the writer by pointing out details about M that don’t correspond to Portman or arguing that the book’s narrator makes clear that she’s really only speculating about the imaginary actress’s life and that this is a work of fiction.
And yet, a thorough analysis of the book (of which the Daily Mail obtained an advance copy) leaves little doubt that M is based heavily on Portman and – given the personal links between the two women – will inevitably lead many readers to assume that Cusk is revealing what the actress is really like.
Portman raved about Cusk when she had her as a guest on her book club podcast
Despite previous claims that Portman has taken the controversy in her stride, the Daily Mail was this week assured otherwise
A Paris-based friend of Portman told the Daily Mail: ‘Natalie is a very private person, that’s why she moved to Paris, so Rachel’s book, Life Of M, has really pissed her off
Again and again, whenever the book mentions specific details about M, they chime precisely with Portman – even by the second page where the narrator refers to M appearing in a ubiquitous advertising campaign in which she is ‘wreathed in pink flowers.’
Portman has been the face and brand ambassador of the fashion and luxury goods giant Christian Dior since 2010. Some of her most famous adverts for its Miss Dior fragrance – including its Rose N’Roses campaign – have featured her either clutching pink roses and peonies or surrounded by a sea of them.
That’s only the start of Cusk’s trail of rather obvious clues. M and the book’s narrator both live in an unnamed European capital that sounds very much like Paris (both Cusk and Portman now live in Paris) while M’s rise to fame could have been lifted straight out of Portman’s early movie career.
M was a child star, as was Portman. (M was also sexually abused in childhood, although there is no evidence that this also happened to Portman.)
The script for M’s first film included several scenes in which she was seen ‘wanting or inviting sexual interaction with the central male character’ but they were cut after her mother objected.
Portman hit the bigtime when, aged 11 and 12 during filming, she starred in the 1994 Luc Besson thriller, Leon: The Professional, in which she has a sexually ambiguous relationship with an adult hitman played by French star Jean Reno.
And it’s a matter of record that Portman’s mother demanded that more sexually explicit sequences in the script be cut from the movie. Portman also revealed that she was ‘slut-shamed’ and harassed after making the movie – sure enough, so was M, who was called a ‘slut’ by the other children who bullied her at her school.
Portman earned her Oscar in Black Swan for playing an ambitious ballet dancer who wins the lead role in Swan Lake but at the same time develops a deranged jealousy for a rival.
Needless to say, M also starred in just such a move earlier in her career, struggling to overcome the low opinion that her ballet teachers have of her abilities. M is in turn hugely jealous of another actress, the book reveals, who despite not being nearly so beautiful as her is a better actor.
In another passage in the book, M visits a mansion-turned-museum dedicated to a famous but unnamed family – one of whom the actress is about to portray in a film.
Cusk describes this super-wealthy clan as ‘people of legend, all dead now, but still famous for their style and passion and power.’ If that sounds considerably like the Kennedys, it’s worth remembering Portman played First Lady Jackie Kennedy in the 2016 political drama Jackie.
So, if Life Of M is simply regurgitating Natalie Portman’s professional career, why should she be so upset?
The problem, say Cusk’s detractors, is that she’s gone far further than that, and also provided a withering portrait of a pitifully self-absorbed and alienated star who strives to lead a ‘normal’ life but is instead subsumed by her high-wattage fame.
Although M tries to hide it and maintain her beatific smile, ordinary people irritate her when they cough or talk about themselves in front of her.
She is coldly calculating to an obsessive degree, worrying during an interview about how every remark and even facial expression will come across to the attractive man questioning her – until, in a rare moment of weakness, she lets down her guard and confides that after a day filming a sex scene, she cannot contemplate coming home and doing it for real.
M lives in a huge, chillingly impersonal home that is ‘like a big doll’s house, with her as a doll inside of it.’
With an army of underlings at her beck and call, she sails effortlessly through life. Closed restaurants magically open just to accommodate her and everyone is instantly obliging.
Inevitably, M is unable to relate to other people and their mundane problems unless, perhaps, she’s once played such a character on screen and had – to some extent – needed to understand them. In fact, she’s always performing and – most crushingly of all – can’t even be totally sincere when it comes to love.
No wonder twice-married Portman might be more than a little dismayed if people believe all this is true of her.
Portman hit the bigtime when, aged 11 and 12 during filming, she starred in the 1994 Luc Besson thriller, Leon: The Professional
Portman earned her Oscar in Black Swan for playing an ambitious ballet dancer
Some of her most famous adverts for its Miss Dior fragrance have featured pink roses and peonies – a detail in the book
Some have argued that if Portman really is the champion of literature that she claims to be, she will be able to swallow her pride and appreciate her contribution to the latest work by a celebrated novelist.
Otherwise, they say, she may just confirm the view of critics that her bookishness is an affectation to hide a beautiful if painfully bland actress.
Perhaps predicting what has happened now, the book ends with the narrator being confronted by M who complains that it has not made her ‘identifiable’ but seriously misrepresented her and is stuffed with factual errors.
Not everyone agrees that Cusk’s book provides a grossly distorted view of Portman, who has two children with ex-husband Benjamin Millepied and is expecting her third child with her partner, French electronic music producer Tanguy Destable.
‘Natalie is known for having a tough exterior and being a bit difficult to get along with,’ another source told the Daily Mail.
‘She’s particular and a perfectionist and has been in the industry forever.’
The insider insisted that motherhood had softened the star, saying: ‘She knows she sometimes doesn’t have the best reputation, but she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Not everyone’s personality suits everyone in this world.’
The Daily Mail reached out to Portman for comment.
But Cusk doesn’t have the ‘best reputation’ either. Some critics consider her gratuitously cruel in her writing, sacrificing people she knows for the sake of a more compelling story.
And she has been called out before for insufficiently fictionalizing real people – most dramatically in 2009 when the first run of her novel The Last Supper: A Summer In Italy.
An initial print run was pulped because Cusk – who based the story on three months she spent travelling through the country – was threatened with a lawsuit for breach of privacy for insufficiently disguising a man who said he could be easily identified as one of the characters in the book.
In 2017, Scottish writer Damian Barr, who knew Cusk only a little, complained that she had looted his revelations about himself in his memoir to create her lead character in her novel Transit.
‘Cusk’s veil of fiction is thin. Thinner than a thin thing. Diaphanous. Gossamer,’ he said.
The Daily Mail reached out to Cusk for comment.
Cusk concedes she’s also said too much about her own life in her books. After writing Aftermath, about the vicious collapse of her marriage to a photographer, Adrian Clarke, she said her ‘dearest friend’ remonstrated with her for ever writing it. Cusk agreed ‘there was so much stuff in my own life that the divide [between life and the book] was completely breached.’
Has she done it again, only this time with a film star’s life? Cusk doesn’t dedicate Life of M to anyone although the woman who deserves a mention is obvious.
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