Discovered in a pizza parlor five years ago, Natalie Portman is about to make her stage debut as Anne Frank on Broadway, and will star in the upcoming "Star Wars" prequel. How does it feel to be living every 16-year-old's dream?

When it comes to youth, there's disaffected, and then there's unaffected. And as soon as the full English tea appears at her table at London's swanky Savoy hotel, it is clear which category Natalie Portman fits into. This sweet 16-year-old actress may have played some of the oldest little girls that audiences have seen since Jodie Foster hit the big screen, but at the sight of the tiered silver tray bearing tiny little sandwiches and pristine pastries, Portman can barely contain a coltish excitement, and her big brown eyes grow to the size of scones. In the space of about an hour, she manages to devour a couple of those, along with the better part of a pot of strawberry jam, any sandwiches that can remotely be classified as vegetarian and several pastries she emphatically pronounces "the best."

Portman has been liberated for a few hours from the arduous filming of George Lucas' hotly anticipated Star Wars prequel, in which she plays the Young Queen, future mother of twins Luke and Leia, and she's like a kid playing hooky. She acts as if all of life is a sumptuous English tea laid out before her, ready for her enthusiastic consumption. One moment she's gushing, like the teenager she is, over Patrick Swayze -- "I think I became an actress just so there would be a possibility that I might meet him one day, 'cause he's just, like, so amazing" - - and the next she is pondering the implications of class distinctions in Britain and America. Already, this sort of wide-eyed precocity has become a Portman trademark: She made a riveting screen debut at 13, playing a wise-beyond -her-years assassin's companion in Luc Besson's The Professional, and she memorably proclaimed herself to be an "old soul" in last year's Beautiful Girls, in which she was the girl-next-door object of Timothy Hutton's fantasies. But some how it is Portman's innocence that dazzles, disarming everything in its path. This is what Broadway director James Lapine saw when he cast her in the title role in his new production of The Diary of Anne Frank, opening in December at Broadway's Music Box theater. "She has a magnetic quality, the same that one imagines Anne Frank would have had," Lapine notes. "What Natalie has is real emotional presence and intelligence. Boy, is she smart."

Portman also feels a deep girl-to-girl connection with the German-Jewish teenager who spent two years hiding in a secret annex to escape Nazi persecution, and she had been looking for a chance to play the role. She first read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl when she was 12, and, she says laughing, "I thought I was Anne Frank for a while." Born in Israel, Portman now lives on Long Island, NY, with her American mother, her Israeli, infertility-specialist father and her dog, Noodles. "Obviously I've never experienced to any extent what she went through, but that's not what the book's about," Portman says. "That's the amazing thing. If I were locked up in an attic for years, my diary would be all about how miserable I was, and she's just writing about playing and boys and clothes. I think that when you never expect anyone to read your diary, you're so honest, and that's what I love about it -- that she's not embarrassed to talk about how selfish she is, and how vain, because she doesn't think anyone is goi ng to read it."

Portman confesses to moments of vanity herself, though none are in evidence, and to a minor case of nerves about her professional stage debut (summer camp doesn't count). She is also an honor student who worries about how she will juggle appearing nightly on Broadway with the demands of her all-important junior year of high school, filled with SATs and college decisions. She loves languages -- she is fluent in Hebrew and is studying French and Japanese -- and science, and though she has considered becoming a doctor, at the moment she is thinking that when she "grows up" she might like to have a "subsistence farm," where she can be surrounded by "a really great family and lots of kids and lots of animals." At least, that's her current plan, but, she adds, "I'm a Gemini, so I change my mind every day." Acting, she insists, is something she simply lucked into after she was discovered by a Revlon scout at a Long Island pizza parlor; it is not her vocation. "I'm not sure that once I'm out of school I'll be able t o act anymore," she says. "I have this amazing relationship with acting right now, because I can go back to my life and be a normal person."

Ah, but what is normal? It turns out that young Natalie has given this one a lot of thought. She excitedly whips out a piece of paper on which she has scribbled a quotation she discovered that morning at a Laurie Anderson exhibit: "The word normal is kind of a trick word, since it describes the way things are, but also the way things should be," she reads. And above all, though this talented teenager may want a normal life, she does not want to be a normal person. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone," she says, "because it has kind of become synonymous with being ordinary -- unextraordinary." In that department, though, Natalie Portman has nothing to worry about.