Jodie Foster says her mom inspired to take up her firs French speaking lead role

Los Angeles, Sep 11 (IANS) Hollywood actress Jodie Foster, who is known for ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and others, has credited her late mom for inspiring her to take on her first French-speaking lead role.

The actress essays the role of a psychiatrist Lilian Steiner in her upcoming film ‘A Private Life’, reports ‘People’ magazine.

The actress told ‘People’, “I’m always finding bits and pieces of my mom in everything I do”. From a young age, the actress was always fascinated by languages and would practice different accents for fun.

She explained that her mom enrolled her in French school because she had “fantasies about Europe”. “She had this big idea that I would leave and I would work in France and I would make French movies”, the actress said.

As per ‘People’, she recalled watching French films “over and over” with her mother. “She would say to me, ‘Tell me about the plot’. And then I would have to tell her what happened. She probably knew what happened, but it was like, ‘I want you to work on this language thing’”.

While working on ‘A Private Life’, Foster said she saw similarities between her character and her mother, "My mom, when she went to France, became someone new. She walked the streets, and she’d go to Metros, and she’d go to the flea market. And her life had this whole new, she was a whole new character”.

“Much like Lilian, who leaves everything behind to join some fantasy that she has of what it would be to be a French person, which is kind of what the movie is, it’s Paris the way it looked in the old days, and drink little cups of coffee, and her apartment. That was very much like my mom”, she added.

--IANS

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