It’s not getting nearly as much media coverage as Donald Trump accusing President Obama of faking his American citizenship, but Natalie Portman’s body double accusing her of faking the dance moves that won her an Oscar is far more newsworthy; not least because it actually rings true.
I’m not speaking because I feel I should be heralded. I’m just speaking because they’re completely lying about the amount of dancing that Natalie did in the movie…
They were trying to create this image, this facade, really, that Natalie had done something extraordinary. Something that is pretty much impossible… to become a professional ballerina in a year and half. Even with as hard as she worked, it takes so much more. It takes twenty-two years, it takes thirty years to become a ballerina…
Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie.
(ABC 20/20, April 15, 2011)
This is how Sarah Lane, a soloist with the American Ballet Theater, is justifying her reasons for destroying the illusion that Portman actually performed the ballet scenes that so impressed the members of the Academy. I don’t blame her.
Which means of course that, even though she nearly starved herself to death to look the part, Portman never really acted the part….
In any case, Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky clearly has a vested interest in maintaining the Portman-as-prima-ballerina illusion. No doubt this is why he gave 20/20 this self-serving (but unverified) statement:
Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film – 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. Twenty-eight are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math, that’s 80 percent Natalie Portman.
Granted, body doubles are used in movies all the time. But I doubt Sylvester Stallone would have won such acclaim for his role in Rocky if it were revealed that a professional boxer actually performed most of the fighting scenes.
Anyway, this burgeoning controversy vindicates my pick of Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right for the Oscar that went to Portman this year. (See my picks for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards in my February 28 commentary.)
Moreover, as several friends will attest, I’ve remarked on more than one occasion that Portman’s performance was off-putting because her facial expression alternated between that of a deer caught in the headlights and that of a deranged lunatic throughout the entire movie – even in dancing scenes where her big head was allegedly superimposed on Lane’s exquisite body. And I made these remarks long before Lane exposed her as a fraud.
Of course, like most actors, Portman is probably too self-obsessed to admit taking credit for dancing she did not do. Hell, she probably considers this a prerogative of her artistic license.
But if she has any self-respect she would return that Oscar. And if she refuses, the Academy should do what the Grammys did when Milli Vanilli was exposed as a lip-synching fraud: strip her of it.
Related commentaries:
83rd Annual Academy Awards