Jodie Foster feels “free” after break up with longtime girlfriend

Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster says she feels single and “free” since breaking up with her longtime girlfriend. The “Silence of the Lambs” star said in the current issue of UK’s Psychologies magazine that splitting from actress Cydney Bernard almost three years ago was one of the most “horrible” events in her life.

“There are three terrible things that happen to most people. One is your parents face death, the second is your kids grow up and leave you and the third is that the relationship you’ve been in forever disintegrates and you’re alone.”

Foster, who has son Charles, 12, and nine-year-old Kit with an unknown father, added that those horrible experiences should also be seen as a “sliver of opportunity” to freedom.

“I feel like you have 10 seconds to really embrace the freedom, or just get stuck. Ten seconds to take that sliver and change your life.”

The 48-year-old actress and director met Bernard on the set of the movie “Sommersby” in 1993 and were together for 14 years.

Although their relationship with Bernard was well known in Hollywood, the Academy Award-winning actress never opened about it to the public until 2007.

Foster also revealed that her mother is battling dementia and that she wants her face to be the last one her mother sees before she eventually passes away.

When asked if she would ever consider admitting her mother to a residential care facility, Foster replied, “Oh God no way. I’m going to feel good – I’m going to feel that the end honored her and that she didn’t have to lose her dignity.

“Dementia is an interesting thing. It’s the hardest thing I’ve been through and yet also strangely sacred… I’m just here to care for her. I have no axe to grind. Mine will be the last face she sees.”

Foster will appear in her self-directed Mel Gibson project “The Beaver,” the Neill Blomkamp sci-fi thriller “Elysium” and “Carnage, which is directed by Roman Polanksi, in 2012.