French actress Marion Cotillard, who won the Best Actress Academy Award last week for her portrayal of tragic singer Edith Piaf in "La Vie En Rose," became the focus of a major controversy caused by comments she made a year ago in regard with the 2001 September 11 attacks.

The 32-year-old actress made statements questioning the official version of the events on 9/11 in an interview with French television program "Paris Premiere - Paris Derniere" over a year ago.

"I think we're lied to about a number of things," Cotillard said referring to the World Trade Center attacks in particular, hinting at a conspiracy by the United States government for political ends.

"We see other towers of the same kind hit by planes. Are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, that burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed."

The actress then went on to offer a possible motivation for an inside job destroying the towers and causing the deaths of thousands, saying "It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them."

Moreover, Cotillard shared her doubts regarding Neil Armstrong's famous Moon landing in 1969, asking "Did a man really walk on the moon?"

"I have seen quite a few documentaries on the matter, and really, I’m not at all convinced. At any rate I don’t believe everything I hear," she explained. 

Despite having won a Bafta, Golden Globe and a César for her performance in "La Vie En Rose," Cotillard is facing a huge backlash in the US over her comments, which resurfaced Saturday on the French magazine Web site Marianne2.

"This could be a powder keg issue for thousands of firefighters and the families of victims who may picket her next film with my full support," 9/11 first responder/fireman Mike Lennon was quoted by Hollywood Today as saying. "Having human remains in my hands on a dozen occasions makes her ignorant statements despicable."

Cotillard is shortly due to fly to Chicago to star alongside Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies," a gangster movie expected to be her first big money-spinner.

"She has a fundamental right to come over here and film a movie, but for her to say 9/11 was a government conspiracy, you have to ask, why does she want to come here and shoot a movie?" added Lennon, who made a documentary on the events surrounding the horrific disaster. "There will be backlash and she will suffer the consequences of what she said."