Like you, I’ve watched Natalie Portman grow up on the movie screen. Maybe that’s why I feel a weird sort of parental pride in the actress she has become.

After all, it’s a slippery slope putting a child on the set. Everyone can come up with a list of those burnouts. But Portman won’t be among them. She got A’s in high school, studied psychology at Harvard and has her head on straight.

And the best is yet to come. On Sunday the 29-year-old was awarded the Golden Globe for actress in a drama for her performance as a psychotic ballerina in “Black Swan.” It was her second Globe win — her first was for 2004’s “Closer” — and it merely confirmed what everyone in the industry already knew: Portman is the one to beat in this year’s Oscar race for best actress.

Today marks the opening of her “No Strings Attached,” a romantic comedy co-starring Ashton Kutcher. They play friends who, in the absence of other romantic interests, agree to share extra … benefits.

If “Black Swan” was one seemingly destined for the art-house crowd (it crossed over to the mainstream), the raunchy and sexy “Strings” was custom-made for a Friday night trip to the megaplex.

But the two films nicely represent the yin and yang of Portman’s career. Here’s a young actress who can slide effortlessly between the brainless adventure of “Star Wars” and the artistic ambition of “Closer.” And even when she’s doing a big popular film, she rarely leaves us thinking she only did it for the money.

Starting young

Born in Israel, Portman did most of her growing up in the New York area. At age 11 she was discovered by a Revlon exec in a local pizza parlor. She had a brief stint as a child model but decided that acting was more interesting than posing. She tackled numerous roles at the Usdan performing arts camp near the family home on Long Island.

Her first movie put her on the map. In Luc Besson’s 1994 action film “The Professional” (in France it was titled “Leon”), the then-13-year-old played Mathilda, an orphan taken in by a shambling, antisocial professional assassin (Jean Reno). The child softens the heart of this killer and, ironically, demands to become his apprentice.

The critics immediately noticed Portman. Most echoed Roger Ebert, who wrote, “She’s something like the Jodie Foster character in ‘Taxi Driver’… old for her years.” In my review in The Star I agreed but added that I was troubled by “some costume and performing choices which tend to present young Mathilda as a sexual object. ‘The Professional’ isn’t quite pedophilia, but it’s flirting with it.”

But the dueling ideas of innocence and sexuality have run through Portman’s entire career. She has made savvy choices that increase her marketability while also advancing her craft, gaining fans in megaplexes and arthouses alike.

Thus she has acted in films by notables such as Michael Mann (1995’s “Heat”), Woody Allen (1996’s “Everyone Says I Love You”), Tim Burton (1996’s “Mars Attacks!”), Anthony Minghella (2003’s “Cold Mountain”) and Mike Nichols (“Closer” for which she also received an Oscar nomination).

She also has dabbled in films designed to appeal to her own generation (“Garden State”) and isn’t averse to the big tent-pole picture. By appearing as Queen Padme Amidala in the three “Star Wars” prequels, she may not have exactly stretched her acting muscles, but she established herself as a household name with millions of young moviegoers.

And, of course, there are the marginal, artsy efforts like “Goya’s Ghosts” (2006) and “New York, I Love You” (2009), which she seems to have tackled simply for the thrill of doing something different.

Erotic undercurrents

In “Black Swan” Portman plays Nina, a dancer so devoted to her art that she has never truly lived. The inability of the virginal Nina to express sexual passion on the stage is hindering her performance in “Swan Lake.”

Halfway through the film Nina has a hot and heavy encounter with a fellow dancer (played by Mila Kunis); the sex may all be in Nina’s troubled head, but it’s also up there on the screen for everyone to see.

But this is nothing new. The troubling erotic undercurrents in “The Professional” led to “Beautiful Girls” (’96), in which Portman played a precocious adolescent whose beauty and brains prove almost too attractive to a directionless 30-something man (Timothy Hutton).

Portman, who is expecting her first child with her fiancé (her “Black Swan” choreographer), has played mothers, too. In “Where the Heart Is” (’00) she was a pregnant Southern teen who secretly takes up residence in a big box store and wins the hearts of the local folk. In “Cold Mountain” she played a Civil War widow slowly starving to death with her baby; she invites into her home and bed a fugitive Confederate soldier. In 2009’s “Brothers,” she played a wife and mom torn between brothers played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire.

Dramatically, her “Star Wars” films were mostly awful, but the narrative of her character was essentially, “When is she going to hook up with Darth Vader? And why?”

The eroticism of Portman’s characters often is more overt. In “Closer” she was a mysterious and seductive American who works as a pole dancer in a London club. In 2008’s “The Other Boleyn Girl” she was Anne Boleyn, whose carnal charms bewitch Henry VIII. In the 13-minute “Hotel Chevalier,” a short prologue to Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Unlimited” (2007), she played the lover of Jason Schwartzman’s character. It’s a role that reportedly distressed Portman, due to the unwanted attention she received for taking her clothes off.

“No Strings” finds her excelling at romantic comedy and giving a performance of unexpected depth as a woman who fears human intimacy. This is quite a resume. She’s only 29, but she’s already been acting for more than half her life. Imagine what she might do with the rest of her time.