Jodie Foster presented A Private Life, Rebecca Zlotowski's Paris mystery and her first leading role in French, at its London Film Festival screening in Mayfair.
Jodie Foster, who has won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, presented Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life at Curzon Mayfair in Mayfair on Thursday 9 October 2025. The screening was part of the 69th BFI London Film Festival, and Zlotowski attended with her.
Foster was born in Los Angeles in 1962 and began as a child model. At twelve she played a child caught up in prostitution in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which brought her first Academy Award nomination.
She went on to Yale, then won her two Academy Awards for The Accused and for Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. True Detective: Night Country won her a Primetime Emmy and a Golden Globe.
Zlotowski had long wished to direct her, and the film is Foster’s first leading role in French. She plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst in Paris who suspects that a long-term patient’s death was not suicide.
The film had its world premiere out of competition at Cannes in May. The role later made Foster the first American nominated for the Lumière Award for Best Actress.
Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira, Mathieu Amalric and Vincent Lacoste complete the cast.