This post is mainly just a chance to write about Natalie Portman. I mean she personifies eye candy!
She's also an extremely interesting young woman (a Harvard graduate who was initially rejected for her first movie role - in The Professional - but persisted until offered the part).
Well it turns out Portman's got a little lobbying muscle up on Capitol Hill. She's been working on microfinance issues, and made a splash in recent congressional testimony.
The New York Times has the story:
In 2004, Natalie Portman, then a 22-year-old fresh from college, went to Capitol Hill to talk to Congress on behalf of the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or Finca, a microfinance organization for which she served as “ambassador.” She found herself wondering what she was doing there, but her colleagues assured her: “We got the meetings because of you.” For lawmakers, Natalie Portman was not simply a young woman — she was the beautiful Padmé from “Star Wars.” “And I was like, ‘That seems totally nuts to me,’ ” Portman told me recently. It’s the way it works, I guess. I’m not particularly proud that in our country I can get a meeting with a representative more easily than the head of a nonprofit can.”
Well, who is? But it is the way it works. Stars — movie stars, rock stars, sports stars — exercise a ludicrous influence over the public consciousness. Many are happy to exploit that power; others are wrecked by it. In recent years, stars have learned that their intense presentness in people’s daily lives and their access to the uppermost realms of politics, business and the media offer them a peculiar kind of moral position, should they care to use it. And many of those with the most leverage — Bono and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and George Clooney and, yes, Natalie Portman — have increasingly chosen to mount that pedestal. Hollywood celebrities have become central players on deeply political issues like development aid, refugees and government-sponsored violence in Darfur.
Portman's made her celebrity impact in microlending, small-scale credit financing in Third World countries, whereby the world's poor get loans for start-up businesses. (Microlending's a great thing in principle, although unscrupulous lenders in the developing world have turned microfinance opportunities into the next subprime frontier).
Perhaps Portman will join Angelina Jolie in backing a long-term American commitment to Iraq. Now that'd be a great use of Hollywood firepower!
Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times
