Should Mara Jade really have had a dancer's figure?

For many fans, Mara Jade is arguably the most popular character from the old Legends Star Wars books. In constructing the character who would eventually marry the iconic Luke Skywalker, author Timothy Zahn must have felt the pressure to come up with someone memorable, someone fans would find worthy of the son of Darth Vader. With her strength, her feistiness, and her Force talents, her creator hit on a personality fans would love.

Of course, she had to be beautiful. Green eyes, long red hair, and of course, her dancer’s figure. To most people in the western world, a dancer’s body is synonymous with elegance, beauty, and grace.

That’s to folks who don’t understand what dancers really go through to sport the figures they do. Padme Amidala actress Natalie Portman certainly found that out when she trained like a madwoman for her Oscar-winning part as a ballerina consumed by mental illness in 2010’s Black Swan.

According to TheThings.com, Robert Brace, who used to dance with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, told Today.com, "Her body looked accurate. There are certain things a dancer would notice because she hasn't been training for four years, but she had to get a rush job done and she looked like a dancer." He explained, "It's very extreme. The diets are not healthy. There are a lot of food and calorie restrictions, lots of coffee and cigarettes to keep the weight down. The body is restricting calories, the pressure of competition is intense. All day she trained."

Portman said of her time preparing for that role, "I was barely eating, I was working 16 hours a day. I was almost method-acting without intending to. I do wonder now how people can do this kind of role when they have a family."

New York Post reporter Mary Huhn, who researched Natalie's training regimen and tried it herself to lose weight for her wedding, reported that Natalie was eating 1200 calories a day. It's been reported that Natalie lost twenty pounds to play the dancer in Black Swan. However, fitness expert Alexandra Kovacs, BsC, BA, estimates she weighs about 117 at her 5’3” height normally. “Doing ballet, swimming, and stretching eight hours a day, while consuming 1,200 calories daily, isn’t particularly healthy! That’s the recommended calorie intake for a child, not for an active adult,” she writes. While Mary Helen Bowers, the retired New York City Ballet Corps dancer who trained Natalie, discusses her workout regimen for the film here.

One may argue that the lifestyle of a real ballerina may be different since they're watching their weight from their earliest ballet classes and not crash dieting for a movie role. However, "Some will not eat breakfast, then a small salad for lunch, a small amount of nuts, fruit and nothing in the evening," Brace says of the women--real dancers--who surrounded Portman during the shoot. "If you desire it enough, you'll make it work. It's extremely common in that world and if she got wrapped up in the role, that's the body image they have to portray. After a while, it's going to take its toll psychologically."

And as "Ruby," a former New York City Ballet professional, who writes under an assumed name, attests, this kind of brutal training and calorie restriction isn’t just for actresses struggling to lose weight in a hurry, but a way of life for many who dance on the stage.

If you look like a real ballet dancer, you don't look like the photos and drawings we've all seen over the years of Mara Jade. Mila Kunis, who starred in Black Swan alongside Portman and had to undergo the same training regimen, said, "Aesthetically, I had to look like a ballerina and hold myself like one. By the end, I was 95 [pounds]. All you saw was bone. It looked disgusting, but in photographs and on film it looked amazing. It took me five months to lose the weight."

And Reddit poster jujubee_54, encountering Portman on a New York street in 2009, wrote, “I saw her on the street during this filming. Walked a whole block next to her without realizing it because I couldn’t look away from her legs. They were so small, I couldn’t understand how they held a person up. I remember feeling really sad for the person and then looked up.“

Losing twenty pounds from a 117-pound frame takes a woman down to 97 pounds. That's a BMI of 16. According to DanceIvy.com, the average five-foot-two-inch ballerina weighs 85 lbs, while a five-foot-six ballerina should weigh 105.6. As you can see on this BMI chart, these weights for these heights aren’t even on the chart. This means that your average ballerina has a BMI of 15, which is very medically underweight. Olga Leibrandt did some more exhaustive research that more than backs this up.

For reference, here is what a 15 BMI might look like and how dangerously underweight that really is. As I researched this piece, I wondered what the requirements for a Broadway dancer are. Certainly, they wouldn't be as stringent as ballet. Maybe Mara Jade has a Broadway dancer's figure? Sadly, apparently not.

It goes without saying that the job description of badass-Emperor's-hand-turned-wife-of-the-galaxy's-greatest-Jedi requires muscularity, stamina, and strength. It doesn't sound like a job one could do well while twenty pounds medically underweight.

Yet, the stereotype of the dancer's figure as the ideal persists, perpetuating unrealistic body images everywhere, even in the Star Wars universe.