Jodie Foster gave a really moving and surprisingly candid speech when she received the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award at the 16th annual Women in Entertainment Breakfast on Tuesday.

Toward the end of her remarks, Jodie thanked those nearest and dearest to her. Among them was “my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss.”

Lansing, who presented Jodie with the award before a crowd that included Queen Latifah and John Travolta, said of the actress-director: "Jodie Foster leads her life with dignity - she's her own person, she doesn't follow the herd. She's an original."

The two-time Oscar winner was funny and heart-warming during the speech, which brought some in attendance at the Beverly Hills Hotel to tears: “I feel fragile...unsure, struggling to figure it all out, trying to get there even though I’m not sure where there is,” she said. “I’ve been working in this business for 42 years and there’s no way you can do that and not be as nutty as a fruitcake.”

Jodie and I had a light-hearted chat prior to the breakfast. I told her that just about everyone was either gushing about her or wanted to meet her.

“Really?” she said, smiling. “I think it’s a lie. I think they’re just saying that because I’m here.”

I wondered if she ever gets tired of being feted since she’s got a boatload of awards aleady.

“Well yeah, I get tired of getting dressed up,” she admitted. “If I could get feted in my pajamas, I’d be there, I’d be like at the opening of a doorknob.”

Is Jodie, who turned 45 last month, going to do more movies since she seems to do, at most, one a year? “One movie a year is really way too much even honestly. I did two movies in a year...and it almost set me over the edge.”

She had a rare box office misfire this fall with “The Brave One” which opened at number one but went on to gross just under $37 million domestically. She's unfazed: “You make movies for the right reasons, hopefully, and that’s a movie that I’m probably more proud of than anything I’ve done in many, many, many years. Some movies aren’t for everybody.”

Jodie, the mother of two children, told me that she has learned to juggle professional commitments with family.

“The one way that I’ve been able to make sense of it is to say that my job is something I do from 9 in the morning to 6 at night or whatever it is and my life starts after that,” she said. “I’ve been able to compartmentalize and keep them separate. There are different parts to what I do for a living and part of what I do for a living is doing things like this [breakfast], part of it is being on a movie set at 4 in the morning, freezing cold and with a gun in my hand. Part of it is the thinking stuff. But when I get home, it’s a different world.”