Inside the literary scandal surrounding Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman has many close friends in her adopted hometown of Paris — but the acclaimed writer Rachel Cusk is not one of them, sources insist to Page Six.

Nonetheless, the two women are in the middle of a literary scandal that has insiders buzzing from Hollywood to France.

Cusk’s novel, “Life of M,” out August 25, details a writer’s relationship with a former child star living in Paris as she attempts to write her autobiography. The former child star sure seems like Portman’s doppelgänger — from her failed marriage to her intense Method preparation for the movie “Black Swan” — and it’s not the most flattering portrait.

Pages Six told that despite incorrect rumors Portman, 45, who is expecting her third child and first baby with her partner, French musician Tanguy Destable, is furious about the project, she does find the book “annoying.”

Seen by Page Six, “Life of M” is a thin, 100-page book that unpicks the concept of fame — and you certainly can see the parallels between the Oscar winner and the character M.

“The writer and the publisher are narrowly skating the line of not trying to hide who they make it out to be, even if they don’t comment on it,” said a top publishing source familiar with the situation. 

Portman found fame acting at age 12 in the 1994 film “Léon: The Professional” — a role that has been criticized as uncomfortably sexualized. Cusk’s character M was also a child actor and tells the narrator “that starring in a film had immediately brought her childhood to an end.” 

In April, Portman told Jenna Ortega, while in discussion for “Interview” magazine, that she had endured a “long Lolita phase.”

“There’s a public understanding of me that’s different from who I am,” she said. “I’ve talked about it a little before — about how, as a kid, I was really sexualized, which I think happens to a lot of young girls who are onscreen. I felt very scared by it.”

At the time “Léon” was made, Portman’s mother, Shelley Stevens, stepped in to ensure that certain scenes involving her daughter and her co-star, Jean Reno, who was 44 at the time of filming, were removed from the final movie. A similar situation also happens to M in the book.

For her role as a ballet dancer in “Black Swan,” which won her an Academy Award in 2011, Portman underwent a grueling year of training with the New York City Ballet. 

M, too, starred in a film about ballet — for which she trained with “starved and chain-smoking ballerinas.”

“Her body began to mimic theirs,” Cusk writes. “She became obsessive about her attempts to master certain postures and sequences.”

Cusk’s character undergoes romantic turmoil. “Even love,” she writes of M, “has failed to grip her entirely, or perhaps especially love, because it is there that she has felt most distinctly the impossibility of total sincerity.”

Portman divorced her husband, ballet dancer Benjamin Millepied, the father of her two children, Aleph, 15, and Amalia, 9, in March 2024 after 11 years of marriage and amid cheating claims.

The writer even alludes to a romance similar to Portman and Millipied’s, which sparked on the set of “Black Swan” while he was in a long term romance with ballerina Isabella Boylston, who was Portman’s stand-in on the movie.

There are even small but telling details like when M is described as smiling out from billboards, “wreathed in the pink flowers of spring” — which sounds a lot of Portman’s ads as the longtime face of Miss Dior.

A source in the French capital who knows both women told Page Six this week: “Of course Rachel is writing about Natalie!”

“This is how she goes about her writing,” said the publishing source. “Rachel steals from people’s lives and mines acquaintances.”

Portman and Cusk looked friendly in September 2021 when the actress selected the writer’s “Second Place” — which was long-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize — for her online book club and hosted an interview discussion with Cusk, calling her “one of my favorite writers.”

She later announced Cusk’s novel “Parade” as her June 2024 book club pick.

But a source in the know insisted, “They hardly know each other … they have met maybe five or six times, total. Rachel appeared on Natalie’s Instagram book club, and Natalie’s always been a fan of her writing, but they don’t go out and they don’t hang out together.

“Natalie is in an amazing place in her life,” the source added. “She has an incredible partner and very close girlfriends; Rachel Cusk is not one of them, contrary to what she might like you to believe.”

Indeed, the source alleged, “The idea that they’re close friends being torn apart is a fabrication of a publisher trying to sell a book.”

We have reached out to reps for both Portman and Cusk.

There’s even been online speculation that the actress may have granted the author permission for a roman à clef.

But the star, Page Six is told by multiple sources, in no way colluded with Cusk on the book.

“Yes, both Rachel and Natalie live in Paris. Yes, there are references to ‘Black Swan’ and ‘Leon,’” said the source in the know. “But there is no deep exposé. You don’t get to the inner most working of who the character of M is.”

For Valerie Stivers, who broke the story, Cusk is “not dismantling Natalie Portman in the desire to be mean.

“She’s using Natalie as a literary stand in for elite culture and elite people and as an opportunity to develop her idea that maybe ‘the self’ doesn’t exist,” Stivers, a senior editor at UnHerd, told Page Six. “Who better than an actress to symbolize that? Is it lies, is it true — it doesn’t matter. Cusk thinks we’re all actors. She’s always playing games with identity.”

But, Stivers admitted, “Whether or not Cusk was friends with Portman, the character, M, is obviously based on her, and has captured something real about Portman’s quest to be normal.

“And what Cusk narrator’s concludes is that she’s not succeeding. Outside of the bounds of art, if they were friends, that conclusion is pretty mean.”

Cusk, who lives in Paris, has won a slew of prestigious literary awards in her career, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Prix Femina étranger and Italy’s Malaparte Prize

She has been mired in controversy. 

In her first memoir, “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” — described by The New York Times as “career suicide” — Cusk described motherhood as “a form of disability.”

And her 2009 memoir “The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy” was pulled and pulped shortly after publication — after a tourist recognized a critical depiction of himself in the text and threatened a libel and privacy lawsuit, leading to an out-of-court settlement and the destruction of the first print run.

“Novelists always draw from their own experiences to create characters, and Rachel is no different — she’s also one of the best in the business,” said the French source who knows both women. “There are masses of similarities between Natalie and M., and that’s how it should be.

The friend also points out that Cusk and her publishers have made “absolutely no effort at all” to deny claims that she wrote about Portman.

“Rachel is an artist who is under no obligation — legal or moral — to explain where she gets her inspiration from. All that matters, is that she’s written a superb book which will undoubtedly be another bestseller”.

Aside from a new baby, Portman has new campaigns with Dior and Tiffany coming out this fall. She will star in “The Gallerist” and, early next year, Lena Dunham’s “Good Sex.”

By the end of “The Life of M,” the actress character tells the narrator, “I don’t like the way you portray me. You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity. You’ve made it seem like I’m unable to love.”

For Portman, insiders said, nothing could be further from the truth.

“Natalie is pretty comfortable with who she is. Her friends know who she is,” said the Hollywood source. “I doubt this is keeping her up at night.”

Additional reporting by Peter Allen in Paris.