Posted by Adam

Tuesday January 5, 2010

MAGGIE Gyllenhaal couldn’t wait to get back to work after giving birth.

The actress — who welcomed daughter Ramona, her first child with husband Peter Sarsgaard on October 3, 2006 — says maternity leave made her pine for the bright lights of Hollywood.

“I had been focused almost completely on my daughter for three years, focused on being a mother and I had this kind of surge of a feeling that I needed to do something for me, that I was also a woman and an actress and not just a mother,” said Maggie.

“I had so much kind of built up and kind of welling in me that needed to be expressed from having become a mom. I just had to get back to work. Do something for me.”

Gyllenhaal, 32, recently revealed she wants to be like British actress Emma Thompson, her costar in new movie Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang.

“I want to be her when I grow up,” she said. “Emma was the one who said to me — when I was a newlywed, I had no nanny and I was working on this movie. She said, ‘You have to let yourself drop the ball. Human beings do that. If you don’t, some really important part of you won’t survive.’ She wrote it to me in a text. I think about it all the time.”

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