Here is the coincidence. That whole bit about the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth--it applies. Lo. Lee. Ta. Na. Ta. Lee. Same thing.

As it happens, Natalie Portman has never read Nabokov's 1955 novel, though she has been compared often to its radiant girleen, and she turned down the opportunity to play her in the latest film version, directed by Adrian Lyne. The possibility of inciting people to pederasty repulsed her, she says; more wholesome offers beckoned, including the chance to star on Broadway in The Diary of Anne Frank. And so, it was settled. (Or, to only slightly paraphrase Nabokov: Given the choice between a Frank and a Humburger, Natalie plumped for the former.)

For those who adore Portman's precocious style, all is not lost. Playing the most famous young victim of the Holocaust is a very far cry from playing a nymphet, it's true, but Anne Frank wasn't a saint, either. History may have turned her into one, but Portman, fortunately, also sees the rest of her, and she has no qualms about making Anne disagreeable if the occasion so requires. "There are times when Anne is being so bratty," she says. "She's always asking people if they think she's pretty, she spends hours in the bathroom curling her hair, and she gets into huge fights with her mother and Mrs. Van Daan..." Strangely, this role may allow Portman to be more of a teenager and less of a saint than Beautiful Girls--the Ted Demme confection that made her a star--ever allowed her to be. As Timothy Hutton's darling, she was electrifying, heartbreaking, but she wasn't real: she had all the great lines, we caught her only in glimpses, and the force that oppressed her was a poignant and comely premature maturity--not a caged adolescence or the Nazis.

To research Anne, her first role on Broadway, Portman visited the Frank home in Amsterdam, where she was delighted to find pictures of movie stars all over the young girl's walls. Portman herself is Jewish--Israeli-born, in fact--but her identity, she says, "is more Israeli than Jewish...My family isn't really religious at all. I believe in God and a lot of the Jewish laws, but some of it, especially the stuff about 'Thank God I'm not a woman,' makes me cringe." She is, however, considering joining the Israeli Army--"though I'm kind of a pacifist," she notes.

For now, more mundane concerns loom. Portman plans to commute after each performance to Long Island, where she lives with her family, so she can continue attending her public high school. She's 16, it's her junior year, and there are SATs and honors courses to fret about. Asked whether her brains partly account for her untimely maturity, she thinks for a minute. "It could be that I'm an only child, though frankly, I've never understood it," she says. "People have always told me things about themselves that I have had no idea about." Like the time an actor, whom she is too polite to name, confided that he was desperately looking for someone to mother his child. "This is when I was 12," she says. "He was asking my advice on who would be good for him." She stops. "You know, I wish guys my age were this fascinated by me."