The 61-year-old actress started out in Hollywood as a child with films such as ‘Taxi Driver’ and the original ‘Freaky Friday’ before making a successful transition into an Oscar-winning career as an adult but reflected that it was perhaps her early stardom that made her yearn to be a “real person” in most of her movie roles.

She told ‘Entertainment Tonight’: “I don’t want to be thought about in a rarified way. I think that’s what I like about my work; if you really look at it there’s a rawness to it and there’s a reality baseness to it. I never dreamed of wearing big wigs and being some kind of fantasy.

“I was always interested in having a real life, and maybe that’s because I did grow up in the film [world] and I didn’t get to go to strange places in America and learn about things. So it’s my way, I think, of having the experience of being a real person.”

On Friday (19.04.24), the ‘Silence of the Lambs’ star – who is now married to Alexandra Hedison but has sons Charlie, 25, and 21-year-old Kit with ex-girlfriend Cydney Bernard – was honoured with a hand and footprint ceremony during the TCM Classic Film Festival at the TCL Chinese Theatre and admitted that it felt “surreal” to be at the tourist destination on Hollywood Boulevard because it was somewhere her mother always discouraged her visiting when she was younger.

She said: “It’s just surreal to be on the Boulevard, you know? When I was kid, my mom said that if she found us on Hollywood Boulevard that we shouldn’t bother coming home ’cause that’s how dangerous it was in the ’70s and we grew up five blocks from here.”