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Jodie Foster Embraces French Language and Insecurity in New Lead Role
After a prolific six-decade career spanning dozens of films, acclaimed actress Jodie Foster is embarking on a new cinematic journey, taking on her first solo lead role entirely in French in the film A Private Life (Vie privée).
Foster portrays Parisian therapist Lilian Steiner with remarkable fluency, showing hardly a trace of an American accent. Her comfort in the role was so convincing that director Rebecca Zlotowski intentionally incorporated brief English asides and expletives to remind audiences of Foster’s American origins. “People suddenly were just completely confused that I wasn’t a French person,” Foster revealed.
Despite her apparent ease, Foster admits to a distinct shift in her persona when speaking French. “I have a different personality in French than I do in English,” she told Morning Edition host Leila Fadel during a recent visit to NPR’s New York studios.
She attributes her higher-pitched French voice to the instructors at Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles, the private school where she learned the language. Prior to A Private Life, Foster had also held smaller roles in three other French films, including 2004’s A Very Long Engagement.
Foster candidly discussed the vulnerability she experiences when speaking French: “I’m just much more insecure and kind of vulnerable because I never know whether I’m communicating properly. And, you know, am I going to find that word at the last minute?” This very frustration is woven into the fabric of the film’s script, as Lilian Steiner is introduced as a perpetually frazzled therapist, seemingly detached from her patients and even her newborn grandson.
The character’s emotional turmoil manifests physically when her eyes begin to water incessantly. Steiner, a Freudian psychoanalyst, dismisses this as mere “water coming out of her eyes,” rather than acknowledging it as crying. Foster explains the fitting irony: “In true Freudian fashion [she] is having a physical demonstration of a psychic ill.”
This “psychic ill” stems from the suspected murder of a patient, played by Franco-Belgian social drama star Virginie Efira, initially believed to be a suicide. Steiner, however, suspects foul play and launches her own darkly comedic, albeit inconclusive, investigation. She enlists the help of her ex-husband, portrayed by French cinema veteran Daniel Auteuil, leading to a rekindling of their past romance.
The film’s French title, Vie privée, carries a powerful double entendre, as Foster elaborates: “So private life, meaning everything that you think that would mean the opposite of a public life – an internal life. But private also means has been deprived of, so somebody who has been deprived of life, meaning somebody who’s died potentially.”
In her own life, Foster has fiercely guarded her privacy, a necessity in her decades-long career. “I had to say I will go to Disneyland and I will not have a film crew following me…
I will go to college and I will not give everything to the public eye, in order to make sure that I survived intact,” she stated. After a demanding early career, Foster became more selective with her roles, aiming to bring greater depth to her performances.
“I really was careful to make sure that I had real life and I worked more sporadically than most other actors,” she said.
Today, Foster expresses particular enthusiasm for collaborating with women directors and for her own directing endeavors. She notes a significant shift in the industry, recalling that in the first four decades of her career, she worked with only one female director, Mary Lambert for 1987’s Siesta.
“It’s been a shift that’s a long time coming… But it came very, very late,” she observed, acknowledging that the prevailing bias against women directors has only “recently” begun to change in mainstream cinema.
Looking ahead, Foster hopes to participate in more French films, perhaps even directing one herself. “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do and something that would be a great challenge for me,” she shared.
She also took the opportunity to encourage American audiences to embrace learning other languages. “It’s surprising how Americans don’t hear other languages… how you can go your whole life without really hearing other languages spoken in your state,” she remarked. “We have to make an effort to connect to a wider world and understand that we’re all part of the same universe.”