MORE BIG-SCREEN ARAMAIC: Babylonian and Sanskrit too.

Alexandra Maria Lara has 'Youth'
Attracting the eye of Francis Ford Coppola
By KATJA EICHINGER (Variety)

Given her lineage, Alexandra Maria Lara just might have the acting gene stamped in her DNA. Her father, Romanian actor Valentin Platareanu, had been running Bucharest National Theater before emigrating to Berlin, where he founded the Charlottenburg Acting Academy. Lara soon followed in her father's footsteps, attending classes there and eventually landing a part in a German TV series at the age of 16. She has never looked back.

"My first part came along by accident and then everything happened really fast," recalls Lara, now 28. "I've never tried to force anything. So far I've been very fortunate to get some great parts, but maybe it's exactly because I never pushed too hard."

While she's played significant roles in such miniseries as "Napoleon," "Der Wunschbaum" and "Doctor Zhivago," it wasn't until she held her own as the personal secretary Traudl Junge to Bruno Ganz's Hitler in "Downfall" that her career experienced a dramatic upswing and attracted the attention of Francis Ford Coppola.

For the filmmaker's much-anticipated "Youth Without Youth," Coppola's first directing effort in 10 years and based on a WWII-era novella by Romanian writer Mircea Eliade, she had to master speaking ancient tongues such as Aramaic, Sanskrit and Babylonian.

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My emphasis. By "master speaking" I assume they mean "learn to pronounce words in." I doubt very much that she really learned any of these languages. Nevertheless, a movie adaptation of a novel by Eliade with ancient languages sounds pretty interesting.