Natalie Portman was 13 years old when she realized that becoming famous could also mean being watched in a way that frightened her.
It was 1994 and Léon had just made his face one of the most recognizable in cinema.
In the film he played Mathilda, a 12-year-old girl who, after the death of the family, found refuge next to Léon, an adult assassin played by Jean Reno.
The relationship between the two characters would continue to argue for years.
Mathilda developed feelings for Léon and in some scenes tried to openly declare them. A sequence in which he proposed to become his lover aroused a strong discomfort during a test projection and was excluded from the first distributed version of the film.
Jean Reno chose, however, to interpret Léon while maintaining a very clear boundary: the character did not return the avances of the girl and appeared, outside her work, almost childish and unable to manage that kind of relationship.
For Natalie Portman, however, what happened after the film was even more difficult.
Years later he said he had opened one of the first letters received by a fan.
Inside he found the description of the sexual fantasy of a man who had her as the protagonist.
He was only 13.
It wasn't an isolated episode.
At the same time, a radio came to count backwards until the day when he was 18, while some commentators publicly spoke about changes in his body.
Portman explained that it was then that he began to associate the fact of being considered attractive to something dangerous.
And that fear came directly into his career.
To protect himself, he consciously built a very serious and conservative image. He tried to avoid too romantic roles, scenes with kisses and situations that could still feed that kind of attention.
He didn't want to stop acting.
He wanted to avoid others deciding how to look at her.
Over the years she would become one of the most important actresses of her generation, to win an Oscar and to work in some of the most famous Hollywood productions.
But behind that early career there was also a much more intimate consequence.
At age 13, Natalie Portman had already learned that success was not only applause.
Sometimes she forced a girl still a child to change her way of acting just to feel safer.