Natalie Portman for president? The veteran actors and directors who have worked with Portman since her explosive screen debut at age 11 in The Professional say the sky's the limit for the fragile-looking, heartbreakingly talented 17-year -old. She will follow up her latest role, as Queen Amidala in this month's Star Wars Prequel, with the lead in the film version of Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here this fall. But Portman's world is more than stardust glamour, Leslie Bennetts reports--it's also a matter of advanced-placement calculus, Harvard vs. Yale, and finding out what lies beyond Hollywood's enthusiastic embrace.

When the buzzer sounds, the discussion of arterial blood flow in advanced -placement biology ends abruptly, and the room empties out fast. The corridors are teeming with noisy high-school students changing classes, including some busty suburban Lolitas in skintight sweaters and diamond studs, wearing full makeup and flinging their long hair around like weapons. If anyone challenged you to identify the movie star in their midst, you'd never pick out Natalie Portman.

As she heads for her Japanese class, she virtually disappears into the crowd: small and slight, hugging her books to her chest, skirting the oncoming hordes by sticking close to the shelter of the walls. She looks younger than many of her peers, and fragile as an orchid. While other kids zip into the parking lot in their own cars, Portman doesn't have a driver's license; her mother drives her to school and picks her up, making sure she has her vegetarian brown-bag lunch and enough healthy extras to survive the day. By 10 AM, Portman is eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in class, like a kindergartener who can't get through the morning without snacktime.

Who would imagine that this girl made her explosive screen debut at the age of 11 in The Professional, playing an orphan who apprentices herself to a hit man because her only goal in life is to learn to blow people away? Who would guess that Portman has gone head-to-head with the likes of Gary Oldman and Jean Reno in The Professional, Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close in Mars Attacks!, and Al Pacino in Heat--or that in Beautiful Girls she stole not only her scenes but virtually the whole movie from Tim Hutton, Uma Thurman, and Matt Dillon? In person, Portman has an indisputably lovely face, but she's not really a head -turner. Put her in front of a camera, however, and that face will break your heart. It's no wonder that Portman--whose very first movie had critics describing her as a "ravishing little gamine"--has already been hailed as a young Audrey Hepburn.

Even now, her skinny blue-jeaned legs still betraying an awkward coltishness and her porcelain features devoid of makeup, she could pass as a pre-teen. It's hard to visualize her in the carnal embrace of Darth Vader, let alone as the mother of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia.

But soon, decked out in exotic makeup and the fantastical regalia of an elaborate royal headdress, Portman will be revealed as Amidala, the teen queen of the planet Naboo, in the Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace. "The queen is strong and powerful, but she's still 14," says George Lucas, who's directed the film. "I wanted somebody who could be commanding, but who could still be young. I was looking for somebody who was smart and strong and a terrific actress, and Natalie met all those qualifications."

And after the inevitable frenzy of Star Wars madness this spring, Portman will encore with her starring role opposite Susan Sarandon in the film version of the acclaimed Mona Simpson novel Anywhere But Here, which will be released in the fall.

By then Portman will have turned 18 and headed off to college. But right now she's still 17, it's spring of senior year, and the conversation in the corridors of her high school tends towards the predictable: "Did you get into Brown?" "She didn't get into Yale!" While the other seniors sweat it out, Portman has no such worries; she's already been accepted early at Harvard and Yale, and is waiting to hear from several other schools which will no doubt clamor for the honor of enrolling her.

Most affluent suburban kids have a hard enough time getting their homework done, let alone making their beds or raking the lawn. But Portman, in addition to shooting a shelfful of movies, managed to spend the better part of a year starring in The Diary of Anne Frank, performing eight times a week on Broadway while still attending school out on Long Island--and keeping up her 99 grade -point average to boot. "When I'm really busy, I just get so much more done," she says calmly. "It was really stressful, but I'm not afraid of doing a lot of stuff now." Her solution to the brutal schedule dictated by The Diary of Anne Frank was simple: "I didn't really sleep."

The play represented her first Broadway outing; Portman has never had so much as an acting lesson. But even the old pros were impressed. "When we get vain about what we're doing, it's always interesting to see a child who knows everything," says the veteran Broadway star George Hearn, who played Anne's father. "She was born to do this. She's formidable."

Portman acknowledges she has a lot to learn about stage technique, but on film her subtlety really shines. "She knew exactly what to do," says Tim Hutton, who played a 29-year-old man who becomes infatuated with Natalie's 13-year-old character in Beautiful Girls. "The scenes with her were the scenes I looked forward to the most, because I knew there would be real clarity coming from her. She knew what she wanted, but she was also extremely free in the choices she made. Every take was different. Some people do the same thing over and over again, but Natalie really listens, so if I did something different in take two, she made these beautiful adjustments. To do that at the age of 44 is extraordinary, but at 13..."

Although critics have sometimes noted Portman's inexperience, she has generally dazzled them as well. What she lacks in technique, she makes up for in magic: "She gives off a pure rosebud freshness that can't be faked," gushed The New York Times's Ben Brantley in his review of The Diary of Anne Frank. Brantley also rhapsodized over Portman's "radiance", found "an ineffable grace in her awkwardness," and added that "her very skin seems to glow with the promise of miraculous transformations."

Pretty heady stuff for a teenager. And in some ways Portman does seem to be a typical schoolgirl. "See what she's really like?" a friend of hers says jokingly, showing me his notebook--where Natalie has written "Big Dork." But the real Natalie is a prototypical Good Girl. Today her government teacher lectures the class about cheating, complaining that it has gotten "so outrageous" no one even bothers to conceal it anymore. Portman sits there quietly with her lengthy paper, which is painstakingly handwritten in tiny, meticulous writing; her obvious care is rewarded with a grade of 100 scrawled at the top. "I'm a little obsessive-compulsive," she concedes sheepishly.

Portman is about as likely to cheat on a paper as she is to become a Hell's Angels' biker chick. For lunch, we go to a neighborhood pizza parlor with her best friend (who works in a cancer-research lab in her spare time). But service is slow, and Portman begins to fret about getting back on time for her next class. Although the morning gossip had focused on the fact that many seniors are cutting virtually every class, God forbid that Portman should two minutes of advanced-placement calculus.

During a free period, she and her friends hang out in the cafeteria, where the talk revolves around the senior prom. Portman, who doesn't have a boyfriend, has a lot of guy friends but isn't expecting any of them to escort her. "Boys want to go to the prom with someone they can fool around with," she explains. And she has already made it clear that someone isn't her.

Portman tries hard to stay true to her ideals. Unlike her parents, she has been a vegetarian since she was 8, and she's grown stricter over the years, eliminating fish when she was 11 and cheeses when she was 15, because so many contain rennet. "It's taken from animals' stomachs," she says earnestly. "Cutting out gelatin was hard for me--giving up gummy worms and Jell-O."

That's Natalie: while other teen idols worry about giving up hard drugs and staying out of rehab, Portman allows herself only a moment of wistfulness for having to stay off gummy worms.

So is she a goody-goody? "I would never say someone else is bad because they do something, but for myself, I'm kind of conservative," she admits. "I've never tried smoking, I don't drink, I've never tried any drugs. I don't condemn people who do; I've just never wanted to. I don't really like high-school parties. My closest friends are very straight, compared with a lot of other kids. It's definitely odd; I've probably had the most adult experiences--I've been working since I was 11, getting paid--but on the other hand there's a lot of things I haven't experienced that a lot of other kids have."

Of course, all this leaves any adult wondering how Portman's parents managed to create this paragon of wholesome values and exceptional accomplishment. "They're not really strict; they just don't have anything to worry about," she muses. "I'm an only child. All my vacations are with my parents. You really learn to function as an adult."

In fact, she is a curious mixture. In some ways Portman has seemed like a miniature adult for years. "She's a really smart girl who has had a very rarefied upbringing, who has been raised with a lot on confidence and self -esteem, so she seems older than she is in many ways," says Susan Sarandon. "I felt at times that I was working with an equal. She has a natural grace that doesn't make her seem as if she's of her generation."

And yet there remains something oddly childlike about Portman. One night she and I have dinner at an Italian restaurant near her home, where the only person to recognize her is a relative who happens to be dining there. When Portman's father comes to pick her up, he joins us for coffee, and he and Natalie hold hands at the table. An Israeli-born doctor, he works as a fertility specialist while his wife occupies herself as a full-time mother.

Portman isn't their real name; Natalie took her grandmother's maiden name as a professional pseudonym to protect her privacy. Her parents are very insistent about that--I'm not allowed to mention their name, the town they live in, or the school Natalie goes to--and they are even hoping to keep her choice of college a secret, for "security reasons" (although Jodie Foster was quite open about going to Yale and Brooke Shields never hid the fact that she went to Princeton).

Portman's parents also work hard to make sure that their adored daughter doesn't simulate anything on-screen that she hasn't already experienced in her own life. Portman, who was born in Israel, was first discovered in a Long Island pizza parlor, where she was approached by a Revlon scout who wanted to know if she was interested in modeling. She wasn't, but the encounter led to her acquiring an agent, and she soon landed the daunting role of the tough, damaged would-be assassin in The Professional.

Her parents were "very worried" when she went into show business, she says, and they are still extremely protective. "They talk to the director for hours before every project I do, to make sure I'm not going to be doing anything that's going to be hurting me in my personal life," Portman says. "Just being up there on -screen and larger than life, you get people who have weird thoughts about you. It's hard enough being in the public eye at my age."

When Wayne Wang chose Portman to play the daughter in Anywhere But Here, her parents objected to a scene in which the girl has her first sexual experience with a boy. "At one point her parents even turned down the movie because of that scene," says Wang. "Everything was at a standstill; I was very upset. I really wanted her. So we eventually went back and rewrote the scene. It's not explicit now; they don't have sex on-screen. Sometimes I think Natalie's parents were overprotective, but if I look at it from their point of view, in this industry you almost need to overcompensate, and maybe that's good. If I had a daughter like Natalie, I would probably do exactly what her parents are doing."

The story line of Anywhere But Here provides an ironic counterpoint to the changes Natalie is facing in her personal life. "The movie is about letting go, about letting your daughter live her life at some point," Wang explains. "Natalie is a disciplined kid, but there are moments in this movie when she really has to dig deep and be very angry. That's the hardest part for her. She's very controlled, very cerebral, and it's harder for her to access the anger and rebellion and say, 'Let me go.' There's one scene in the movie where she had to do that--it's the final dramatic moment between mother and daughter--and we did a lot of takes. I had to keep pushing; we shot it two separate times. We just had to keep working on it."

The unusual closeness between Natalie and her parents makes it difficult to imagine this hothouse flower ever striking out on her own. She has enjoyed an extraordinary level of support in everything she does; her mother has always accompanied her on location, while her father thinks nothing of getting up at three A.M. to help her study for an exam.

"My parents have always stressed education over success, over money, over everything," Portman explains. "I grew up reading over my father's shoulder, watching him study for his exams. I have a strong work ethic, and my parents have also passed down a love of learning to me. I really enjoy it; that's why I do well."

The family's standards are high: "If I brought home a 94, it would be 'Where are the other six points?'" Portman says. "My father expected the best from me."

In return, she thinks the world of her mother and father. "My parents are very sane," she says. "They practice what they preach. My parents can say, 'Don't drink,' or 'Don't do drugs,' because they don't. There's an honesty I have with my parents that a lot of kids can't have. I'll hang out with my parents on a Friday night when my friends are going to a party I don't want to go to."

Not surprisingly, the family dynamic has generated talk in the entertainment industry, but those who know Portman best feel that her parents get a bum rap. "Someone in the business had tried to warn me about her parents being invasive, but they gave her space when she needed it," says James Lapine, the director of The Diary of Anne Frank. "They're very down-to-earth people. I found them to be concerned parents, not stage parents."

The designer Isaac Mizrahi, who used Portman as the muse for his "Isaac" ad campaign, had a similar experience. "I heard her parents were very overptotective, that they watch every single step of what she does, but when I met them I realized they were just concerned with their darling daughter," he says. "They value her, and they weren't going to let her go down the scary path so many actresses go down. I think that's why Natalie feels lighthearted; she feels cared for. I think her parents are doing everything right. She's sort of a miracle, that she hasn't become this egomaniacal little bitch like the kid stars you hear about. She was an absolute dream to work with."

Most of Portman's colleagues end up being amazed at how sensible she is. "She's so centered, so together," says Lapine. "She's somebody you can speak your mind to, because she won't have a meltdown. She has a kind of maturity many adult actors don't have."

And unlike most actors, who claim (usually falsely) never to read their own reviews and who delight in trashing the critics, Portman is even philosophical about bad notices. "When it's a good review, it's a great feeling, because you feel like people understood what you're doing," she says. "Obviously it doesn't feel good to see something negative, but when it's bad, sometimes it's helpful, because I do respect those people's opinions. I never get too offended by it."

Indeed, Portman thinks that what's noteworthy is not how mature she is, but how immature many of her peers are. "I think a lot of people my age are behind," she says, sounding as matter-of-fact and detached as if she were discussing the weather. "They're less mature than they should be. A lot of kids I know have kind of been handed everything. I didn't come from a hard-knock life, but I've worked hard. Most of the people where I live get their car on their 16th birthday. Most of them don't really care about school. I see a lot of people who seem to have no interests. There's a lack of individualism. They're born into a world where you don't have to prove anything to anybody. A lot of families have inherited their businesses; others have worked so hard they want their families to be comfortable, so they're not pushing their kids. I've gravitated toward friends that are more rounded--toward people with ambitions."

Even the entertainment business has failed to undermine Portman's values. "People think the film industry is going to corrupt me, but I feel like it's kept me more innocent, in a way," she says. "I wasn't really home when my friends were trying pot for the first time. I was always around adults who wouldn't smoke or curse or do anything like that around me. I don't do things that are dangerous to myself. I don't want to hurt myself."

The combination of Portman's intelligence, looks, talent, and maturity has awed most of the adults who have worked with her. "That little pip-squeak Natalie- -the one who's going to be my boss in five years?" says Ted Demme, the director of Beautiful Girls. "She's going to be running a studio and acting and producing and doing whatever she wants. I don't see any limits for her--and you can't say that about many people. If she told me, 'I'm quitting acting and I'm going to be president,' I'd believe her. If she told me, 'I'm going to be a brain surgeon,' or 'I'm going to be an Israeli paratrooper'--I would believe anything she told me."

"She's getting ready to be a huge star," says Michael Rapaport, who was Tim Hutton's "alcoholic high-school buddy shit-for-brains," as Natalie's character described him, in Beautiful Girls. "I've already told her to remember the little people she used to know when it comes to giving out parts."

When George Lucas cast her as Queen Amidala, he exacted a three-picture commitment from her, so Natalie already knows she'll be filming new Star Wars movies during the summer of 2000 and the summer of 2002. Other than that, however, the future is an open question. "Huge star" may be one job opening, but there are lots of others; so far her career aspirations have included doctor, astronaut, and Broadway dancer.

"I'm taking it day by day." Natalie says. "Right now I like acting, but if something else sparks my interest in college, I'll do that. It's so limiting to say, 'This is it for the rest of my life.' There are so many things that interest me--I love math, science, literature, languages."

And so far acting hasn't cost her anything. "I've had really good experiences," she says. "I haven't had any bad experiences with anyone I've worked with, actors or directors. I can't think of anything I've missed out on. So I missed some TV-watching hours?" She rolls her eyes. "I feel like I'm having the best of both worlds."

She grins, and as she looks up at me through those long dark eyelashes, it's impossible to tell whether her wide, doelike gaze betrays a hint of guile or is purely innocent. "It's nice to be able to use the business rather than have it use you," she says demurely.