George Lucas, Rick McCallum, and casting director Robin Gurland auditioned over 200 actresses for the part of Padmé Amidala. They chose 16-year-old actress Natalie Portman to play the role. According to The Phantom Menace production notes, "The role required a young woman who could be believable as the ruler of that planet, but at the same time be vulnerable and open." Portman's performances in The Professional (1994) and Beautiful Girls (1996) impressed Lucas. He stated, "I was looking for someone who was young, strong, along the lines of Leia. Natalie embodied all those traits and more."Portman was a unique choice because she was unfamiliar with Star Wars. "My cousins had always been obsessed with the films, yet I hadn't even seen them before I got the part," she says. "When it all happened for me, my cousins were exclaiming, 'Oh, my God, you're in Star Wars!'" She told a CNN interviewer, "I really wasn't aware of how big a deal Star Wars was ... and when I saw the films, I really liked them, but I still didn't really understand how many ... were passionate fans of this film." Portman was, however, enthusiastic over being cast as the queen of Naboo, a character she expected to become a role model: "It was wonderful playing a young queen with so much power. I think it will be good for young women to see a strong woman of action who is also smart and a leader."In The Phantom Menace, Portman had to portray a character younger than herself. In Attack of the Clones, however, her character had aged 10 years. Portman had aged only three years between the two films. She remarks, "[Lucas] wants to make sure I seem older than Anakin in Attack of the Clones, so it's believable that I can be bossing him around, and he's a little intimidated. She looks at him as a little boy – at least for the first half of the film."Portman signed a contract to play Padmé in the three prequel films. Reactions by critics to her performances were largely negative. James Berardinelli called her acting in The Phantom Menace "lackluster," while Annlee Ellingson of Box Office Magazine said "Portman's delivery is stiff and flat, perhaps hindered by the gorgeous but cumbersome costumes." In his review of Attack of the Clones, Mike Clark of USA Today complained about Portman and Hayden Christensen, who portrayed Anakin; he wrote, "Both speak in monotone for doubly deadly effect, though when not burdened by his co-star, Christensen often finds the emotion in his limited intonations." Ed Halter of The Village Voice, reviewing Revenge of the Sith, said that "computer-generated characters like wheezing cyborg baddie General Grievous and blippeting fireplug R2-D2" "emot[ed] more convincingly than either Natalie Portman or Hayden Christensen." Nonetheless, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle described Portman's performance in Revenge of the Sith as "decorative and sympathetic."Critics have blamed Portman's performance on Lucas' direction and script. Roger Ebert, for example, charged that in Attack of the Clones "too much of ... the film is given over to a romance between Padmé and Anakin in which they're incapable of uttering anything other than the most basic and weary romantic clichés, while regarding each other as if love was something to be endured rather than cherished." He offered a similar critique for Revenge of the Sith: "To say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion."

Question: how many actresses tried out to play padme amidala?
Answer: 200 actresses