Preparing for Black Swan

It's normally not my style to post a Yahoo! video clip, but I found this interview with Natalie Portman fascinating. She began training for her role in "Black Swan" a full year before the shoot, cross-training and practicing ballet for 5 hours a day, and working with a series of professional teachers on such things as "pronation" and hand movement. Portman says she did take dance as a child, but quite at the age of 13 and so essentially had to "start from scratch" - given the results, that's an impressive amount of catch-up.

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