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Jodie Foster (born November 19, 1962) is
a two-time Academy Award-winning American actress,
director, and producer. She has also won two Golden
Globes, BAFTA and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
After appearing as a child in several commercials,
Foster won her first role in the 1970 TV movie Menace On
The Mountain, followed by several Disney productions.
Foster did not experience her breakout role until 1976,
when she received moderate recognition but great acclaim
for her role as a pre-teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver,
receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting
Actress.
She won an Oscar for Best Actress in 1988, for playing a
rape victim in The Accused. In 1991, she starred in The
Silence of the Lambs as Clarice Starling, a gifted FBI
Agent investigating a serial killer. For this
performance she received international acclaim and
another Oscar for Best Actress. Her films and roles have
spanned a wide variety of genres, including thrillers,
crime, romance, comedy, children's movies, and science
fiction. Popular later films include the box office
successes Contact (1997), Panic Room (2002), Flightplan
(2005) and Inside Man (2006).
Foster is one of the most private actors in Hollywood,
keeping much of her personal life out of the media
spotlight. She has two children, Charles, born in 1998,
and Kit, born in 2001, though she has never discussed
their father.
Early life: Foster was born as Alicia Christian
Foster to Lucius Foster III and Evelyn 'Brandy' (née
Almond) in Los Angeles, California. Her father, an Air
Force colonel turned real estate broker, came from a
wealthy background and left Foster's family a few months
before she was born; her mother supported the family by
working as a film producer. She attended an exclusive
French-speaking prep school, the Lycée Français de Los
Angeles, and graduated valedictorian before going to
Yale University where she earned a B.A. in literature
and graduated magna cum laude in 1985.
While at Yale, Foster, like fellow 1985 Yale graduate
Jennifer Beals of Flashdance fame, led a fairly normal
life, considering her celebrity status. She would often
spend time with friends at the local dive bar Anchor,
and she occasionally partied in the haunts of one of the
secret societies, the Manuscript Society (a scene
recounting such an event is noted in Tom Perrotta's
novel Joe College).
Early career, 1970–1979: Foster made nearly 50
film and television appearances before she attended
college. She began her career at age three as the
Coppertone Girl in a television commercial and debuted
as a television actress in a 1968 episode of Mayberry
R.F.D. She made her film debut in the 1970 TV movie
Menace On The Mountain. Foster made a number of Disney
movies, including Napoleon and Samantha (1972), One
Little Indian (1973), Freaky Friday (1976) and
Candleshoe (1977). She also co-starred with Christopher
Connelly in the 1974 TV series version of Paper Moon and
alongside Martin Sheen in the 1976 cult film The Little
Girl Who Lives Down the Lane.
As a teenager, Foster made several appearances on the
French pop circuit as a singer. Commenting on her years
as a child actress, which she describes as an
"actor’s career," Foster has said that
"it was very clear to me at a young age that I had
to fight for my life and that if I didn’t, my life
would get gobbled up and taken away from me." She
hosted Saturday Night Live at age 14, making her the
youngest person to host at that time until Drew
Barrymore hosted at the age of seven.
She also said, "I think all of us
when we look back on our childhood, we always think of
it as somebody else. It's just a completely different
place. But I was lucky to be around in the '70s and to
be really making movies in the '70s with some great
filmmakers — the most exciting time, for me, in
American cinema. And I learned a lot from very
interesting artists, and I learned a lot about the
business at a young age. Because, for whatever reason, I
was paying attention. So it was kind of invaluable in my
career."
Foster was originally considered for the role of
Princess Leia in Star Wars, but was unable to pull out
of her contract with Disney. She made her debut (and
only official) musical recordings in France in 1977: two
7" singles, "Je T'attends Depuis la Nuit des
Temps" b/w "La Vie C'est Chouette" and
"When I Looked at Your Face" b/w "La Vie
C'est Chouette." The A-side of the former is sung
in French, the A-side of the latter in English. The
B-side of both is mostly spoken word and is performed in
both French and English. These three recordings were
included on the soundtrack to Foster's 1977 French film
Moi, fleur bleue.
At age 14, Foster was nominated for the Academy Award
For Best Supporting Actress for her role as a pre-teen
prostitute in Martin Scorsese's film, Taxi Driver
opposite Robert De Niro. De Niro's character, the
deranged Travis Bickle, intends to "save" her
from life on the streets. When that doesn't work, he
tries to assassinate a presidential candidate. After
this fails, he shoots Iris' pimp.
John Hinckley Jr., a deranged fan, became obsessed with
her after seeing the film repeatedly, and he stalked her
while she attended Yale, sending her love letters to her
campus mail box and even talking to her on the phone. On
March 30, 1981, he shot U.S. President Ronald Reagan and
three other people, and claimed his motive was to
impress Foster, then a Yale freshman. The media stormed
the Yale campus in April "like a cavalry
invasion," and followed Foster relentlessly. In
1982, Foster was called to testify during his trial.
After she responded to a question by
saying that "I don’t have any relationship with
John Hinckley," Hinckley threw a pen at her and
yelled "I’ll get you, Foster!" Another man,
Edward Richardson, followed Foster around Yale and
planned to shoot her, but decided against it because she
"was too pretty." This all caused intense
discomfort to Foster, who has been known to walk out of
interviews if Hinckley's name is even mentioned.
Foster's only public reactions to this were a press
conference afterwards and an article entitled Why Me?,
which she wrote for Esquire in December 1982, about two
years after the assassination attempt. In 1999 she
discussed the experience with Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes
II. The punk rock band Jodie Foster's Army is named in
reference to Hinckley's actions.
Adult career, 1980-present: Unlike other child
stars such as Shirley Temple or Tatum O'Neal, Foster
successfully made the transition to adult roles, but not
without initial difficulty. Several of her post-Taxi
Driver works were financially unsuccessful, such as
Foxes, The Hotel New Hampshire, Five Corners, and
Stealing Home. She had to audition for her role in The
Accused. She won the part and the first of her two
Golden Globes and Academy Awards as Best Actress for her
role as a gang-rape survivor. She earned her second as
FBI agent Clarice Starling, opposite Anthony Hopkins as
Hannibal Lecter, in the 1991 film, The Silence of the
Lambs.
She played Laural Sommersby in Sommersby and Annabelle
Bransford in the 1994 film Maverick. Sommersby co-star
Richard Gere would comment that "She's very much a
close-up actress, because her thoughts are clear."
In 1997 she starred alongside Matthew McConaughey in the
sci-fi movie Contact, based on the novel by scientist
Carl Sagan. She portrayed a scientist searching for
extra-terrestrial life in the SETI project. She
commented on the script that "I have to have some
acute personal connection with the material. And that's
pretty hard for me to find." Contact was also her
first science fiction film, and her first experience
with a bluescreen. She commented, "Blue walls, blue
roof. It was just blue, blue, blue. And I was rotated on
a lazy Susan with the camera moving on a computerized
arm. It was really tough." In 1998, an asteroid,
17744 Jodiefoster, was named in her honor.
She made her directorial debut in 1991 with Little Man
Tate, a critically acclaimed drama about a child
prodigy, in which she also co-starred as the child's
mother. She also directed Home For The Holidays (1995),
a black comedy starring Holly Hunter and Robert Downey
Jr. In 1992, Foster founded a production company called
Egg Pictures in Los Angeles. It primarily produced
independent films until it was closed in 2001. Foster
said that she didn't have the ambition to produce
"big mainstream popcorn" movies, and as a
child independent films made her more interested in the
movie business than mainstream ones. She began working
as a producer in 1994 with the acclaimed Nell, the story
of a young woman raised in an isolated place who has to
return to civilization. She later commented that it was
difficult being an actress and a producer for Nell.
She took over the lead role in Panic Room after Nicole
Kidman was injured. She has performed in French-language
films, such as Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004),
and dubs her own voice in American movies for releases
in French-speaking countries.
After taking time away from the spotlight, Foster
returned in the 2005 film Flightplan. Foster portrayed a
woman whose daughter disappears on an airplane that
Foster's character, an engineer, had helped to design.
Foster's most recent film, Inside Man, a thriller
co-starring Denzel Washington and Clive Owen, was
released on March 24, 2006, and opened at #1 at the box
office. Her next film will be The Brave One, a thriller
that is being filmed in New York City, both in Manhattan
and Brooklyn. It is directed by Neil Jordan and co-stars
Terrence Howard. Commenting on her latest roles, Foster
has said that she enjoys appearing in mainstream genre
films that have a "real heart to them."
Indeed, many of her most successful films since the
millennium have been thrillers.
At the 2007 Academy Awards she referred to the death of
Randy Stone two weeks prior and called him her best
friend. She enjoys physical activity while making
movies. She commented that doing nude scenes is "a
little scary."
Foster was set to direct, as well as reunite with actor
Robert DeNiro, for the film Sugarland. Unfortunately the
film was shelved indefinitely in 2007. Foster's upcoming
roles include Nim's Island, where she portrays a
reclusive writer who is contacted by a young girl,
played by Abigail Breslin, and the bio-flick, Leni
Riefenstahl.
Personal life and recognition: She has two
sisters and a brother, Lucinda "Cindy" Foster
(born 1954), Constance "Connie" Foster (b.
1955), and Lucius "Buddy" Foster (b. 1957).
During the filming of both Taxi Driver and The Little
Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Connie was her stand-in.
Foster is intensely private about certain aspects of her
personal life. Foster pulled out of the film Double
Jeopardy when she became pregnant, and filmed Panic Room
during the first months of her second pregnancy. She has
two sons, Charles (b. 1998) and Kit (b. 2001); Foster
has never disclosed or discussed their father. Foster
does not follow any "traditional religion,"
but has "great respect for all religions" and
enjoys reading religious texts.
She gave the Class of 2006 University of Pennsylvania
commencement address on May 15, 2006, the university's
250th commencement. The university also conferred on her
the Doctor of Arts (honoris causa) degree for her
lifelong achievement and contribution to film in both
acting and directing. Her commencement address is
available in Webcast (jump to 1:44:08) and MP3 format. |
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