NEW YORK -- One fine spring day in Toronto last year, actress Natalie Portman found herself dancing on bubble-wrap with 70-year-old screen legend Dustin Hoffman in the middle of a city park.

Let's face it: There are far worse ways to make a living.

"Dustin was so funny there," said Portman, 26, during a news conference to promote the children's fantasy film, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, opening tomorrow.

"He brought in his own boombox with his own music. And it really is like a dream to get to dance on bubble wrap and have infinite numbers of sheets to pop. It's like, so fun."

Naturally too, getting to have a master-acting class while filming for three months with the actor who brought to life such memorable screen characters as Benjamin Braddock (1967's The Graduate) and Ratso Rizzo (1969's Midnight Cowboy) during the past forty years was pretty cool too.

"Dustin is such an original and unique person that it's just a completely different relationship than I ever had with anyone else," said Portman, who plays the protege of Hoffman's colourful toy store owner character in the movie.

"He's just so wonderful and has such a combination of being a mentor and a colleague and a parent and a friend and a kid (so) that there's many different levels to it."

Portman, whose favourite Hoffman movie is The Graduate, specifically said he helped on set in terms of creating the "wonder" part.

"He was constantly sort of sparking that spontaneity and excitement and curiosity and quest for having your own original take on whatever you're doing," she remembered. "And he would take me aside sometimes before a take and be like, 'This might be the last take we ever do of this ever in our lives.' And when you think about everything like that, it really adds this spark to it that is different."

She summed up: "He's just been so good for so long and he's equally as sweet and wacky a person as he is a good actor."

Portman got her start as a child actor, making a memorable if controversial feature debut as an orphan befriended by an assassin in 1994's The Professional.

And after a recent string of adult-themed movies -- including the relationship drama Closer, in which she played a stripper and received a Golden Globe and an Oscar nod for her efforts; and more recently the Wes Anderson short, Hotel Chevalier, a prologue to The Darjeeling Limited which features Portman naked -- she welcomed making her first kids movie.

"It was definitely appealing to me that I could make a movie that I could take my friend's kids too and that kids could enjoy. But that also was something that I really related to," she said.

Portman, who's among the current crop of young female actresses that started as child actors -- a group that includes Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson, Lindsay Lohan, Kirsten Dunst, Christina Ricci, and Claire Danes -- has been singled out as a good role model.

She left the business for four years starting in 1999 to study psychology at Harvard -- only filming the Star Wars prequels in her downtime -- and has since declared her interest in directing one day.

"I'm just trying to be like a good person and trying to be like a person too," said Portman, whose next film to hit the screen will be the historical drama The Other Boleyn Girl opposite Johansson.

"Make mistakes and hope they don't end up in the newspaper, hope they don't influence other people. But you can't stop being a flawed person. You have to fall on your face a lot. But I've been lucky enough that most of my big falls have been missed by tabloids. And obviously other people have not been so lucky."

How good is Portman? 'Marriage-destroying good'

You could say Natalie Portman's male co-stars in Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium were taken with the lovely-looking and well-educated actress.

Jason Bateman -- who is married to and has a child with Paul Anka's daughter Amanda -- jokingly describes Portman as "marriage-destroying good."

"She couldn't be nicer, prettier, more talented, smarter, she's an incredible weapon but I restrained myself, I survived.

"No," he continued more seriously.

"She's fantastic. I was very, very lucky to work with her."

Meanwhile, Dustin Hoffman's fondness dates all the way back to when he first met Portman years ago backstage while she was starring on Broadway in the title role of The Diary of Anne Frank.

"It was an image I won't forget," Hoffman told reporters. "There she was in her room with her mother, who was peeking out, deciding whether she even wanted to let my wife and I in, because Natalie had just finished the performance and she had her sitting down and doing high school finals. And she did let us in.

"And I did a very bad thing, which was I called up my son in Los Angeles and I said, 'I got her!' And he's hated me ever since. But I put him on the phone with Natalie Portman. And he's like, 'Dad, don't pimp for me anymore, please!' It's one of my flaws.

"I guess, I'm so old, I don't think of her as marriage destroying," continued Hoffman.

"No, I go right for the voyeuristic aspect, and say, 'Maybe, she'll marry my son! I can't be her boyfriend or her lover, I'll be her father-in-law!" It's a healthy transference."