Natalie Portman is to play a Jewish woman in 1960s Baltimore, the hometown of the star’s grandmother, in her first-ever major TV role.

The Israel-born actress once said she didn’t want to take up any more Jewish roles. But now she is now set to star in Lady of the Lake, based on the best-selling book by Laura Lippman, in a series she is also producing.

Like many of Hollywood’s top actresses frustrated by the lack of stories for women over 30, the star has set up her own production company. MountainA – founded with Portman’s fellow Israeli-American filmmaker Alma Har’el – will showcase female-focused stories, often starring her.

Lady of the Lake, which will appear on Apple TV+, is a complicated murder mystery with a nuanced key character, Madeline “Maddy” Schwartz. It touches not only on feminism but also the knotty race relations of 1960s Baltimore, a source of tension that still reverberates in the city today.

Portman, 41, will play Maddie, who has left her life as a pampered housewife and husband of 20 years because she wants to live a passionate and meaningful life.

Through her contacts she is able to help the Baltimore police find a murdered girl’s corpse and this leads to a new job as an investigative reporter. Then she discovers the story of Cleo Sherwood, a missing black woman whose body was discovered in the fountain of the city park lake.

As part of her investigations, Maddie stumbles into the complex world of race relations. While she has good intentions, things often don’t work out as she’d hoped. Portman says it is this that attracted her to the story, set in the city that was once home to her maternal grandmother.

“You can experience oppression and still be blind to how you’re oppressing others,” Portman, who has said she didn’t want to play a Jewish role again because they were almost always about the Holocaust, told American showbiz magazine Variety. “You think that you can’t also step on someone else’s neck. It’s the tragedy of being oppressed and an oppressor.”

For Portman, who co-owns a professional women’s football team and has been passionate in the fight for pay parity for men and women, the project ticks post-#MeToo and BLM boxes with the production also having a diverse team behind the camera. “This is the best crew I’ve ever worked with, and while it is so much more representative than any other set I’ve worked on, we still have a lot of work to do if we want to truly reflect society,” she says.

While she is presently in the middle of filming Lady of the Lake, her latest film Thor: Love and Thunder, is released next Friday (8 July) with her starring as astrophysicist-turned-superhero Dr Jane Foster. It is her most action-orientated role to date and to look the part she spent 10 months in training to look as muscle-bound as her male counterparts.

“On Black Swan I was asked to get as small as possible, here I was asked to get as big as possible,” she says of her role in the film, which is directed by Taika Waititi.

“That’s an amazing challenge – and also state of mind as a woman.”