Natalie Portman was 18 years old and already a global star.
It was 1999, and she had just appeared in “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”, with all of Hollywood watching her as the industry’s new rising star. But that same year, instead of lining up million-dollar contracts, she enrolled at Harvard University to study Psychology. She balanced filming the second Star Wars trilogy with exams and theses, something that almost no one in the industry understood.
Years later, in a graduation speech at that same university, she summed up why she did it with a phrase that is still repeated: “I don’t care if it ruins my career, I’d rather be smart than a movie star”. She graduated in 2003. Another person who took a similar path was Alan Rickman, who, before becoming an actor, attended design schools in London, where he even went on to found his own company. Two different ways of demonstrating that fame and intellect do not compete with each other.