Aisle never get hitched; Loved-up Natalie doesn't need wedding vows.

Byline: BY SIOBHAN SYNNOT

NATALIE PORTMAN has vowed never to marry because she doesn't need a piece of paper to prove her love.

The Star Wars actress, who's dating fashion designer Nathan Bogle, has no intention of walking down the aisle.

Natalie, 26, also reckons the legal aspects in America are unfair because gay couples don't have the same rights.

"I'm into monogamy. But I'm not really into marriage," says Natalie.

"I hate the legal aspect - what does the state have to do with it?

"Why are they making rules that say my lover can stay in the USA if they're foreign or share my health care benefits because I'm straight - but if you're gay you can't?"

It's another principled stand by an actress keen to make a difference.

She first burst on to the screen in 1994's action thriller Leon. Natalie played a Lolita-style sidekick to a professional assassin.

The film was relatively innocent - but the leering attention she got was far more uncomfortable for Natalie.

She says: "I was reading reviews that discussed my development. It was incredibly upsetting for a 13-year-old to have men talking about me like that.

"It scared me so much that it dictated many of my choices afterwards."

The creepy fan mail that followed also disturbed her.

She says: "I was a kid, excited about being famous then you read some fan letter and it's terrifying.

"It made me reluctant to do overtly sexy stuff for a long time."

No wonder Natalie once thought of giving up on Hollywood. As a teen star she played Queen Amidala in the most recent Star Wars trilogy but reviews were not kind.

And she was not impressed by the scripts being offered to women.

"I feel like there's two categories of women's roles," Natalie says. "One is the muse of some sort of artist or you're the girl who makes the guy change. Or it's stripper/prostitutes."

For a while it looked as if she wasn't interested in movies. She took a break and focused on her studies, working under her real name Natalie Hershlag in the hope of having some privacy. Proving she has both brains and beauty, Natalie went to Harvard university. She has a psychology degree, speaks Hebrew and her work has appeared in scientific journals.

She has also devoted much of he time as an Ambassador of Hope for Finca, a foundation that provides loans to poor, would-be female entrepreneurs around the world Natalie says: "It's an amazing way to help make a woman, who normally wouldn't have these opportunities, proactive in taking care of herself."

She has avoided having her social life splashed across the gossip columns, partly because she refuses to discuss who's she dating although Jake Gyllenhaal, Hayden Christensen and Spanish hunk Gael Garcia Bernal have all been named as old boyfriends.

Natalie's latest role is in The Other Boleyn Girl where she plays ambitious Anne Boleyn who is determined to be Henry VIII's new queen, only to be sent to the chopping block within a few years of the marriage by her husband.

Scarlett Johansson plays her meeker, sweeter sister Mary - and Natalie is keen to kill off rumours of regal disputes over who got which role.

"When I read the script both roles were still uncast," she says.

"I wanted to play Anne because the character was someone I hadn't done before. I knew playing a sort of villainess would be a big challenge."

And she had to master a cut-glass English accent too.

"It was a challenge but we had a great dialect coach. Doing a posh accent is easier as it's an exaggeration of what we think of as British," laughs Natalie.

But playing someone as driven as Anne Boleyn was more of a challenge than perfecting her British vowels.

She says: "I've been ambitious but not aggressively. I've never stepped on whoever it took to get what I want."

Spoken like a true Queen of Hearts.

CAPTION(S):

Fame game ... Natalie Portman has been in the public eye since the age of 13 picture: MARK ABRAHMS; Boleyn Girl... Natalie as the ill-fated Anne