Natalie Portman: "Seek beauty - even in the face of darkness" (2024)

Since the tender age of 12, Natalie Portman has remained a Hollywood mainstay, with a considerable film career both in front of and behind the camera. Having recently turned 40, the Oscar-winning actor is now also celebrating a decade as the face of Miss Dior, a role as recognisable as some of her other much-lauded character portrayals.

You see, it’s not just any beauty campaign, she tells me. “It’s really an honour to get to be associated with the story,” Portman says of the famed fragrance which was conceived in 1947 as a tribute to Christian Dior’s sister, Catherine. A French Resistance fighter during World War Two, Catherine Dior’s story of unwavering resilience feels particularly relevant now, given that it's something many of us have had to demonstrate in the past 18 months – whether on the front line or not.

“I think that the easy thing to do when the world gets dark is to see the world as dark, and what’s much more challenging is to seek beauty and really insist on joy and light, even in the face of darkness,” Portman says, finding parallels between Catherine’s courage and the challenges we face today.

The original Miss Dior release represented feelings of optimism after the turbulent years of war, and there are obvious echoes of this as we emerge from post-pandemic lockdowns now, with the fashion house revealing a luminous new version of the signature scent. “I think that it’s a really beautiful symbol of what luxury and beauty can provide us in times of difficulty,” the actor says of the role fragrance plays in her life.

Beauty products, as tools of self-expression, featured as positives in Portman’s lockdowns. With many projects postponed and the majority of red carpets cancelled – or executed virtually – she saved countless hours that would have otherwise been spent in the make-up chair and instead fell back in love with doing herself up.

“I think because I always had to be made up for work, it never felt special or luxurious to me – it always felt like work. So in my own life it wasn’t as fun as I see it is for my friends.” Now the world’s changed, the story is different.

“It’s been wonderful to really use make-up to give myself joy, because I wasn’t going out anywhere, so it wasn’t ever about pleasing anyone else except myself,” she explains, “and that’s such a healthy relationship to have with make-up”.

During this last year the actor would wear lipstick because it made her feel happier that day, and “not to impress anyone in her household” – or beyond it. “That was a really nice change to have,” she muses. It also became about personal identity, rather than that of an act. “I’d ask myself: ‘What is my scent? What is my lipstick? What makes me feel most like myself?’, because it wasn’t about anyone else’s impression except my own.”

This evolution chimes with her philosophy of make-up being a means of empowerment: “I think anything that requires you to choose what you like and what makes you happy is an expression of your individualism,” she says. And she’s delighted that mainstream cultures are finally championing uniqueness.

Though there’s no denying Portman’s iconic physicality perfectly fits a very traditional view of beauty (scientists have previously named hers as ‘the most beautiful female face’), she recognises beauty’s inclusivity movement “has had an effect on all of us”. She tells me, “beauty has really expanded to mean the most individual way that someone is special is what’s most beautiful about them – not the way that they’re conforming to any sort of ideal or standard. And I think it’s been so wonderful for all of us to get to live through this shift”.

She hopes her children continue in this experience. “I would want my daughter to feel that her innermost expression and the way that she feels best is her most beautiful.” If her children are naturally inspired by ideas of beauty, she’ll encourage it; if not, she won’t. It stems from her own upbringing, too: “The biggest beauty gift I got from my mother was that she didn’t put too much pressure on any of it – it meant I didn’t really have any hang-ups.”

With so many different hats – mother of two, Hollywood superstar, director, producer, Dior ambassador – how does the off-duty Natalie Portman express herself through beauty?

“I love the Rouge Dior 999 lipstick” – a timeless crimson red. “That’s the one I put on when I feel most bold,” she notes. Naturally, she’s purloined some tricks of the trade, too. “I learned from artists to put mascara on the roots of the lashes, but not so much at the tips – which opens up the eyes. And doing the internal waterline on the top of the eyelid has been pretty life-changing for me. I’m very bad at making a straight line on top of my lashes, so that was very helpful to find a way to do it where I can follow my natural eye line.”

While she’s now synonymous with the Miss Dior scent, her first dabble with fragrance dates back to her film debut. “I got my first perfume bottle as a gift from Jean Reno when we finished filming Léon when I was 12, and I remember feeling really grown up. Perfume felt like a sign of womanhood to me.” She still applies it as her mother taught her then: “I spray the air and then walk through it – it’s more delicate that way”.

But while we may be enduringly inspired by her (as much as we’re galvanised by Portman’s own icon, Catherine Dior) she insists beauty is not about another’s experience, only the individual's. “I think it really is about finding your own joy and finding your own pleasure,” she says. “And it’s really all of our journey to really figure out what makes us happy – and then do it!”