Darren Aronofsky’s seventh-grade teacher stole the show at the premiere of “Noah.”
The director was first inspired to make the epic back at Coney Island’s Mark Twain JHS when Vera Fried assigned his class to write about peace.
His poem on Noah’s ark wound up winning a UN-sponsored contest, and Aronofsky recalled while introducing the film at the Ziegfeld that Fried made him read it to the whole school.
In return, he asked her to read it to a star crowd, including Russell Crowe, Emma Watson and Jennifer Connelly.
Fried wowed them and said she didn’t remember Aronofsky when he first contacted her about the film.
“I had no idea. I taught 2,000 kids!” she told us. “I Googled him. He wrote in his e-mail, ‘I never became a real writer, just a filmmaker.’ He’s the master of understatement.”
She even got a cameo in the biblical blockbuster. “[On set] everyone said, ‘You’re the person who put us to work.’ I felt like I put more people to work than Obama that year.”
A Central Park Boathouse party followed.