All About Natalie Portman's Parents, Avner Hershlag and Shelley Stevens

Throughout her decades-long career, Natalie Portman has credited her parents, Avner Hershlag and Shelley Stevens, for keeping her grounded.

“I have remarkable parents,” the Black Swan actress told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “I’ve never seen disappointing behavior from them ... Neither of my parents were ever involved financially at all in my career — at all. They were just very much parents — protective parents who didn’t want me exploited.”

Portman told Rolling Stone in 2002 that her parents met in college in Ohio and continued to date long-distance when her father returned home to Israel. Two years later, Stevens went to visit Hershlag, and they got married. The couple welcomed their only child, Natalie Hershlag, in Jerusalem on June 9, 1981. Portman eventually adopted her grandmother's maiden name when she started acting.

Stevens and Hershlag later moved to the United States to raise their daughter in the suburbs of New York. According to a 2008 interview with The Independent, Hershlag is a fertility specialist, and Stevens is an artist.

Portman's work has even drawn her closer to her family. Ahead of the July 2024 premiere of Lady in the Lake, the actress revealed to PEOPLE that while doing a family tree for her mom's birthday she uncovered an intimate connection to the series' story.

"My grandmother was in her 40s during the 1960s, and she was originally from Baltimore — where this is set — in the Jewish community," Portman said. "I really got to explore what her life might have been like, what challenges she might have faced, what feelings she might have been frustrated by. And so that was really amazing to imagine."

Here's everything to know about Natalie Portman's parents, Avner Hershlag and Shelley Stevens.

They met in college

Hershlag and Stevens met at Ohio State University. Portman told Rolling Stone that her mother was selling movie tickets at the school's Jewish Student Center when she was introduced to Hershlag. Though he bought a ticket, he never made it inside the theater.

The fertility doctor told the New York Post in 2011 that he was taking courses at OSU and continued to connect with Stevens when he returned to school in Israel. "We corresponded and talked on the phone," Hershlag said. "And when I say ‘we,’ it was more me than her.”

After two years of long-distance, Stevens visited Hershlag in Israel during her cousin’s bar mitzvah tour and they decided to get married. They held their wedding in Cincinnati.

Hershlag and Stevens welcomed their daughter in 1981

Portman was born in Jerusalem on June 9, 1981, and the actress told Rolling Stone that she shares a birthday with her mother.

Because of her birthplace, Portman is a dual Israeli-American citizen. She's also her parents' only child, which she believes was crucial to her Hollywood career.

"I would never have been an actress if I weren’t an only child," she told Rolling Stone in 2002. "Because my parents would never have let me be the star of the family at the expense of another child.”

They're second-generation immigrants

Both Hershlag and Stevens' parents are immigrants. According to the 2011 historical collection of essays Great Lives from History: Jewish Americans, Hershlag's parents immigrated to Israel from Poland after World War II. In 2011, Portman opened up about this part of her family's history to Tablet Magazine.

"My grandparents didn’t talk about those years much, especially my grandfather," she said. "His younger brother, who was 14 at the time, was in hiding from the Nazis and couldn’t take it one more day and ran out and was shot in the streets. And his parents were killed at Auschwitz."

Stevens’ ancestors immigrated from Austria and Russia to the U.S., where she was born. Though Hershlag and Stevens moved their daughter to the U.S. when she was young, they still returned to Israel to visit family throughout Portman's childhood.

Hershlag and Stevens raised Portman on Long Island

In 1984, Hershlag got a job as a resident surgeon at George Washington University Medical Center. So, when Portman was 3 years old, the family packed up and moved to Washington, D.C.

They stayed there for a few years until relocating to Connecticut in 1988 after Hershlag received a fellowship at Yale University. They finally settled on Long Island in 1990 and raised their only daughter in what she described to Tablet Magazine as "classic American Jewish suburbia."

Portman later told THR that those early childhood moves taught her an invaluable skill.

“When you move to a new place as a kid, you have to learn how to adapt," she said. "You have to learn how to assess a social situation, and understand how you fit in, and then play the role that’s needed in that group.”

While filming her Apple TV+ series Lady in the Lake, Portman had one of her first experiences of feeling connected to a place her family had lived.

"There’s a Jewish deli there that’s been open for like 100 years," she told PEOPLE of working in Baltimore for the show. "Walking in and thinking my great-grandmother walked in here. I never really had that connection to place because my family was in a different city every generation, often different country every generation, so it was really wild to feel that for the first time."

Stevens was there when Portman was discovered

Portman told THR that she caught the acting bug at a young age. Her parents would take her to see shows on Broadway every weekend, and she spent many summers at performing arts camps. It was just a childhood hobby — until Portman was approached by a recruiter for a modeling agency while enjoying a slice of pizza with Stevens after a dance class.

“I was excited,” she told the outlet. “As a 10-year-old girl, it was super-flattering ... [but] I’m not interested in people judging me by what my appearance is."

So Portman asked the recruiter to connect her with an acting agent. They said yes, and the rest is history.

Hershlag resisted Portman's first movie

After a few years of auditioning, 13-year-old Portman landed a role in Luc Besson's action film Lèon: The Professional. Due to the violent and sexual nature of the movie — in which she played a young girl who is mentored by a professional assassin — Hershlag was reluctant to give his approval.

“My parents, of course, were completely concerned about the material,” she told THR. “It was violent, it was sexual, there was profanity, I was smoking in it. They were really concerned. But I was a very, very headstrong kid, and really fought with them and was like, ‘You guys are gonna ruin my life if you don’t let me do this.' ”

Portman told Vanity Fair in 2006 that her father had stipulations about how many cigarette drags she could take and curse words she could say in one scene. "I wasn't actually allowed to inhale," she said. "My dad would have people standing behind me, blowing the smoke out."

Hershlag wrote a book

Though he still works primarily as a fertility doctor specializing in in vitro fertilization, Hershlag has dabbled in his own creative pursuits. In 2010, he published a medical thriller titled Misconception about a fertility doctor who is called to the White House and becomes an unsuspecting pawn in a dangerous game of espionage.

He told the New York Post that if the novel was ever adapted for the big screen, his daughter could definitely play the lead.

"This is definitely a very, very strong part for a female protagonist who is interesting, complex, sophisticated and, yes, pretty as well,” Hershlag said. “My daughter could definitely be a great Anya.”

They're grandparents

Portman shares two children with her ex-husband, Benjamin Millepied. Her son, Aleph, was born on June 14, 2011, and her daughter, Amalia, was born on Feb. 22, 2017. Portman and Millepied were married for over a decade before they finalized their divorce in February 2024.

In her acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards in 2011, Portman said that she hoped to be the kind of parent Hershlag and Stevens were to her: "If I am a shadow as good a parent, an echo, then I will be the best in the world."