We know that Natalie Portman studied ballet as a kid and had a year of intensive training for the film, but that doesn't add up to being a ballerina. However, it seems that many people believe that Portman did her own dancing in Black Swan." Perron followed up the next week with a second blog post on the subject.
Sarah Lane, a soloist with New York's American Ballet Theatre who served as Portman's dancing double, said in a recent interview with EW.com that the actress performed only 5% of her full-body dancing scenes.
How long did it take Natalie Portman to train for Black Swan?
Portman and Kunis started training six months before the start of filming in order to attain a body type and muscle tone more similar to those of professional dancers. Portman worked out for five hours a day, doing ballet, cross-training, and swimming. A few months closer to filming, she began choreography training.
Natalie Portman took on the diet and training of a real ballerina. She would eat a few grapes for breakfast, a small salad for lunch, and a few more grapes for dinner while working 16hrs a day. She lost 20lbs for the role.
She also needed to portray a gifted ballet dancer, and persuasively enough for the character to appear as threatening competition to Nina. Yet unlike Portman, Kunis had never studied ballet. So what did she do to prepare for the role of a classical ballet dancer? She became the pupil of Alexandra Blacker.
To perfect her dancing, she was required to practice ballet for three months, for three hours a day (with the same coach who worked with both Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in Black Swan). When speaking to E!
Natalie Portman dropped 20 pounds to play a ballerina in "Black Swan." Portman was on a carrots-and-almond diet, working five-to-eight hours a day for a year to slim her already trim figure down for the lead role in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan."
Natalie Portman studied ballet from the ages 4 to 12, at which point she turned her focus to her acting career. That early training helped prepare her for her latest role, as a ballerina with a (very) dark side in Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller Black Swan.
The easiest rough estimate of how many calories a dancer requires during heavy training is 45-50 calories per kilogram of body weight for females and 50-55 calories per kilogram of body weight for males. For a more accurate assessment, dancers should consult a dietitian.
Did Natalie Portman meet her husband on Black Swan?
2009: Portman and Millepied met on the set of 'Black Swan'
Not only did she win her first and only Oscar for her role as dancer Nina Sayers, but she also met her future husband while working on the Darren Aronofsky movie, which filmed from late 2009 to 2010.
Can child stars go on to credible careers? With her Ivy League credentials and a performance in Black Swan that's put her in line for an Oscar, Natalie Portman proves it can be done... At 29, Natalie Portman has already been in the business a long time.
Portman and Millepied met back on the set of her 2010 movie Black Swan. Millepied, a trained dancer, worked as a choreographer on the ballet-focused movie for which Portman won her Best Actress Oscar. The couple married in August 2012 and marked their 11th wedding anniversary last month.
Natalie was born Natalie Hershlag on June 9, 1981, in Jerusalem, Israel. She is the only child of Avner Hershlag, an Israeli-born doctor, and Shelley Stevens, an American-born artist (from Cincinnati, Ohio), who also acts as Natalie's agent. Her parents are both of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.
Did Natalie Portman wear pointe shoes in Black Swan?
The way she wears her clothes and slouches around in her practice-kit is well-observed, and the minutiae of darning and breaking in pointe shoes is spot-on. Portman acted well in Black Swan, but if she has failed to acknowledge Lane's contribution, she may have acted pretty gracelessly too.
The “en Pointe” technique in classical ballet is one of the most challenging to execute. In this move, a dancer has to support their entire bodyweight on their feet, which are fully extended.
She still made it to America, and eventually had a small pandemic wedding with Mike. However, her married life made Natalie unhappy, which led to "stress eating." Natalie says she is on antidepressants, and gained 30 pounds following her arrival in the U.S.
Over the ten months of pre-filming, Portman deducted herself to start training at 4:30 am every day through a varied workout. “We worked on building her upper body three times a week, which included arm, back, chest exercises, boxing, skipping and running,” she said.
At the age of three, Goldie began taking ballet and tap dance lessons, and at the age of ten she danced in the chorus of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production of "The Nutcracker". At the age of 19 she ran and instructed a ballet school, having dropped out of college where she was majoring in drama.
After Theron spent a year modelling throughout Europe, she and her mother moved to the United States, both New York City and Miami. In New York, she attended the Joffrey Ballet School, where she trained as a ballet dancer until a knee injury closed this career path.
