Veteran actress Jessica Lange is adding children's author to her resume after releasing a new picture book for kids.

The Tootsie star, who is already a published photographer, reveals she originally penned It's About a Little Bird as a Christmas present for her grandkids, using her own life experiences and pictures to create the story, about two young sisters who discover an antique birdcage.

The 64 year old tells The Associated Press, "I didn't do it in that kind of deliberate way. It wasn't something that I had determined to do. It started really because I'm a photographer and I shoot black-and-white film. So that's kind of how it started, working on some of my own black-and-white imagery and hand-tinting them.

"One morning I woke up, I was up at my farm at upstate New York..., and this story just kind of came to me and I thought, 'I'm going to write this for my granddaughters, make this a story for them.'

"From there, it was one of those things where somebody said, 'Why don't you print this?'"

And Lange tells Parents magazine, the tale of smuggling a pet canary to the U.S. from Italy, was inspired by a real story: "There is an element of make believe, but a lot of it is true. The whole thing with the little bird happened. It’s true where I got the bird, how I got it back."