According to Natalie Portman, the Oscar-winning actress and one of the most popular in the world, the second Star Wars trilogy had a negative impact on her career.

Portman had only a few supporting roles on her record before getting the Amidala role in George Lucas’ much-maligned Star Wars trilogy. In Luc Besson’s modern action classic Leon: The Professional, she did, however, show a great lot of potential and skill exceeding her experience. She was on her way up, but her roles in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones took her down for a bit. She wasn’t especially good in these major roles in movies that everyone saw. Granted, there are a lot of bad things in those movies, so it’s not all her fault, but her career suffered as a result.

She struggled to find jobs between 1999 and 2003. She didn’t start clawing her way out of the rubble until Mike Nichols helped her get cast in Cold Mountain. It wasn’t easy, especially considering she still had to do Revenge of the Sith in 2005, but it was a start. Granted, she was also enrolled in Harvard at the time, which I’m sure took up a lot of her time and contributed to her limited acting opportunities.

In an interview with New York Magazine for a story honoring late filmmaker Mike Nichols, Portman states that without Nichols’ guidance, her post-Star Wars playing career would not have happened.

“Star Wars had come out around the time of Seagull, and everyone thought I was a horrible actress,” Portman says. “I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade, and no director wanted to work with me. Mike wrote a letter to Anthony Minghella and said, ‘Put her in Cold Mountain, I vouch for her.’ And then Anthony passed me on to Tom Tykwer, who passed me on to the Wachowskis. I worked with Milos Forman a few years later. He said, ‘Mike saved me. He wrote a letter so that I could get asylum in the U.S.’ He did that for 50 people, and it doesn’t make any one of us feel less special.”

Mike Nichols, best known for his 1967 picture “The Graduate,” for which he earned an Academy Award for Best Director, also has acting experience. Nichols was an improv comedian (one-half of the legendary Nichols and May act with Elaine May), stage performer, and theater director before embarking on a long career as a film director. He had a strong eye for talent, putting an unknown Dustin Hoffman in the leading role in “The Graduate.” When Nichols directed Portman in the 2001 Broadway play “The Seagull,” he testified to the scope of her talent.

Portman would demonstrate a few years later that it wasn’t her performance that dragged the Star Wars prequels down. In 2011, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Black Swan.

Portman’s career has definitely recovered. She’s starred in big-budget films like Thor and V for Vendetta, as well as independent films like Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and Hesher.

Her experience demonstrates that if you have talent and determination, you can dig yourself out of almost any quagmire. On the other hand, Portman’s prequel costar Hayden Christenson has only dived more and deeper into his role as Anakin Skywalker, and will be forever associated with it. People love Luke Skywalker, and Mark Hamill will always be recognized as Luke Skywalker. You feel horrible for Christensen because he’ll be known for ruining an iconic character for the rest of his life.

With Javier Bardem, Portman co-starred in Forman’s historical drama picture Goya’s Ghosts. She was 25 years old when the film was released in 2006. That year, the actress, who dated Jake Gyllenhaal and Gael Garca Bernal, told New York magazine that she had experienced a “big heartbreak” and that Forman consoled her.

“I was at his apartment on the floor, and he picked me up and gave me a pep talk and sent me to a doctor and straightened me out—literally peeled me off the floor,” she explained.