Jodie Foster is a great actress, but her roles are far too few. However it has just been announced that she is set to play Leni Riefenstahl in a new, and undoubtedly controversial film.

Leni Riefenstahl is the woman who became Adolf Hitler's favourite director with her films becoming a part of the Nazi war propaganda. The indepth article over at The Guardian explains more about her life, as does the Wikipedia entry, however here's a little excerpt:

Riefenstahl, born in Berlin in 1902, became a dancer and star of silent cinema, before moving into directing. At a 1932 Nazi rally she saw Hitler speak for the first time. It was a mesmerising experience for her, and Hitler in turn saw the young film-maker as someone who could bring Nazi ideals of physical purity to life through the medium of film.

It was a task she accomplished with terrifying skill. She first filmed a Nuremberg rally in 1933. A year later came her masterpiece, Triumph of the Will, a documentary that glorified Hitler and the Nuremberg rallies. Though banned in some places in America, it was a huge success in Europe and is often seen as one of the most brilliant pieces of propaganda ever made. It made use of ground-breaking photographic techniques and innovative editing to imbue the Nazis with a mythic quality that was deeply effective.

She has been implicated with the Nazi movement and is said to have knowledge of what the Nazi's were doing and even used slave labour from concentration camps on her films, yet she denied this even to her death in 2003 aged 101. She claimed that she was unaware of what was really happening and was blinded by the same propaganda she was part of.

Interestingly she did not want Jodie Foster to play her because she thought that Foster would not allow her to refuse any of the film, she thought that Sharon Stone would be a better option.

This sounds a superb role for Foster, and another controversial and challenging role for her to get into. I just wish she would do more as I love her on screen, in any role.