Jodie Foster

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Jodie Foster
Foster in Paris at the 2011 César Awards ceremony
Born	Alicia Christian Foster November 19, 1962 (age 52) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Education	Bachelor's degree (magna cum laude)
Alma mater	Yale University
Occupation	Actress, producer, director
Years active	1966–present
Spouse(s)	Alexandra Hedison (m. 2014)
Partner(s)	Cydney Bernard (1993-2008)
Children	Charles Foster Christopher Foster^[1]
Parents	Evelyn Ella "Brandy" (née Almond) Lucius Fisher Foster III

Academy Awards
Best Actress 1988 The Accused 1991 The Silence of the Lambs
Golden Globe Awards
Best Actress - Drama 1988 The Accused 1991 The Silence of the Lambs Cecil B. DeMille Award 2013
BAFTA Awards
Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles 1976 Bugsy Malone ; Taxi Driver Best Actress in a Supporting Role 1976 Bugsy Malone ; Taxi Driver Best Actress in a Leading Role 1991 The Silence of the Lambs
Screen Actors Guild Awards
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role 1994 Nell

Alicia Christian Foster (born November 19, 1962),^[2] known professionally as Jodie Foster, is an American actress, film director, and producer. Foster began acting in commercials at the age of three, and her first significant role came in 1976 as a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1989, for playing a rape victim in The Accused. In 1991, she starred in The Silence of the Lambs as Clarice Starling, a gifted FBI trainee, assisting in a hunt for a serial killer. This performance received international acclaim and her second Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her third Best Actress Academy Award nomination for playing a backwoods hermit in Nell (1994). Her other best-known work includes Contact (1997), Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), Inside Man (2006) and The Brave One (2007).
Foster made her directorial debut in 1991 with Little Man Tate; she also directed the films Home for the Holidays (1995) and The Beaver (2011). In addition to her two Academy Awards, she has won three BAFTA Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, the Cecil B DeMille Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Early life

Foster was born in Los Angeles, California, youngest of four children born to Evelyn Ella "Brandy" (née Almond) and Lucius Fisher Foster II. Her father, a decorated U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel turned real estate broker, came from a wealthy background and left his wife before Foster was born.^[3] Foster has two older sisters, Lucinda "Cindy" Foster (b. 1954) and Constance "Connie" Foster (b. 1955), and an older brother, Lucius Fisher "Buddy" Foster (b. 1957), who was also a child actor.^[4]^[5] Evelyn supported her children by working for a film producer.^[5]
Foster attended a French-language prep school, the Lycée français de Los Angeles, and graduated in 1980. She frequently stayed and worked in France as a teenager, and speaks French fluently. She then attended Yale University, earning a bachelor's degree in literature in 1985. She was scheduled to graduate in 1984, but the shooting of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr., in which Hinckley's fascination with Foster created unwanted adverse publicity for her,^[6] caused her to take a semester's leave of absence from Yale.^[7]^[8] She also received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the university in 1997.^[9]
Due to her French fluency, Foster has dubbed herself in French-language versions of most of her films.^[10]^[11] In 2004, she took a minor role in the French WWI film, A Very Long Engagement. She also understands German^[12]^[13] and Spanish and can converse in Italian.^[14]^[15]

Career

Child star

Jodie Foster with Christopher Connelly in TV's Paper Moon, 1974

Foster made nearly 50 film and television appearances before she attended college. She began her career at age three as a Coppertone girl in a television commercial^[16] and debuted as a television actress in a 1968 episode of Mayberry R.F.D.^[17] She was managed by her mother.^[18] In 1969, she appeared in a Christmas episode of Gunsmoke, where she was credited as "Jody Foster". She is also credited as "Jodi Foster" for her 1970 Daniel Boone role and credited as "Jodie Foster" for her 1970 Adam-12 role. Although not a regular on The Courtship of Eddie's Father, she appeared from time to time as Eddie's friend Joey Kelly.^[19] She made her film debut in the 1970 TV movie Menace on the Mountain, worked with Martin Scorsese, Ellen Burstyn and Diane Ladd in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore in 1974, and was featured as Tallulah in Bugsy Malone in 1976. As a child, Foster made a number of Disney movies, including One Little Indian (1973), and Napoleon and Samantha (1972), in which she was grabbed by a circus lion.^[20] Foster continued to star in Disney films into her early teens. In 1973 she played the character of Becky in Tom Sawyer. On television, she appeared in an episode of The Partridge Family titled "The Eleven-Year Itch", co-starred with Christopher Connelly in the 1974 TV series 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 music 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."^[21] She hosted Saturday Night Live at age 14,^[22] making her the youngest person to host at that time until Drew Barrymore hosted at the age of seven.^[23] 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 really be making movies in the '70s with some great filmmakers – the most exciting time, for me, in American Cinema. I learned a lot from some 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.^[24]

Foster made her debut (and only official) musical recordings in France in 1977: two seven-inch singles, "Je T'attends Depuis la Nuit des Temps" b/w "La Vie C'est Chouette"^[25] and "When I Looked at Your Face" backed with "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 (fr).
Foster starred in five films in 1976: Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone, Freaky Friday, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and Echoes of a Summer. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Taxi Driver. She won two British Academy Film Awards in 1977: the BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performances in Bugsy Malone opposite Scott Baio and Taxi Driver opposite Robert De Niro. She received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance in Freaky Friday. Foster also starred as the title character (opposite Martin Sheen) in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, for which she received the Saturn Award for Best Actress at the age of 15, the youngest actress to receive the award. The film also won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film. As a teenager, she also starred in the Disney adventure Candleshoe (1977) and the coming-of-age drama Foxes (1980).

Adult career

Foster at the 61st Academy Awards Governor's Ball on March 29, 1989. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Accused

Foster made the transition to more mature roles as an adult, but it was not without initial difficulty, as several of the films in her early adult career in the 1980s, such as The Hotel New Hampshire,^[26] Five Corners,^[27] and Stealing Home,^[28] were financially unsuccessful. Due to this, she had to audition for the main role of gang rape victim Sarah Tobias in The Accused, which was to become her breakthrough role as an adult. Based on a true story, the film depicts Tobias' struggle to receive justice for herself. It received mainly positive reviews and earned Foster a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award as well as a nomination for a BAFTA Award.^[29]
In 1991, she starred as FBI trainee Clarice Starling in the thriller The Silence of the Lambs opposite Anthony Hopkins. The film became an unexpected box office hit, grossing nearly $273 million in theaters^[30] and became Foster's first blockbuster.^[31] She also received her second Academy Award and Golden Globe Award, as well as her first BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her performance. The same year saw the release of Foster's debut feature film as a director, Little Man Tate. It was a critically acclaimed^[32] drama about a child prodigy, in which she also co-starred as the child's mother. The following year, Foster founded a production company called Egg Pictures in Los Angeles, which produced primarily independent films for distribution by other companies. She said that she did not have the ambition to produce "big mainstream popcorn" movies and, as a child, independent films had made her more interested in the movie business than mainstream ones.^[24] The company was closed down in 2001.
Foster's next roles included playing a prostitute in Woody Allen's comedy Shadows and Fog and Laurel Sommersby in the American Civil War drama Sommersby. She starred in two films in 1994, first in the commercially successful western spoof Maverick^[33] and later in Nell, in which she played an isolated woman, raised speaking an invented language, who finds it difficult to be confronted with civilization for the first time. Her performance in Nell earned her nominations for her fourth Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and an MTV Movie Award, and won her a Screen Actors Guild Award and a People's Choice Award, among others.
The following year Foster released her second film as a director, Home for the Holidays (1995), a black comedy starring Holly Hunter and Robert Downey Jr.. In 1996, Women in Film awarded her the Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.^[34] In the same year, Foster was awarded with the Berlinale Camera award at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival.^[35]
Foster made her debut in a science fiction film in 1997, when she starred opposite Matthew McConaughey in Contact, based on the novel by scientist Carl Sagan. She portrayed a scientist searching for extraterrestrial 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."^{[citation needed]} Contact was 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."^[36] The film was another commercial success^[37] and earned Foster nominations for numerous awards, including a Golden Globe. In 1998, an asteroid, 17744 Jodiefoster, was named in her honor.^[38] Her next starring role was in Anna and the King, a remake of the 1946 film based on Margaret Landon's 1944 novel, which became an international commercial success.^[39]

Foster with co-star Mel Gibson at the premiere of The Beaver at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. The film was Foster's third feature film as a director

In 2002, Foster took over the lead role in the thriller Panic Room after Nicole Kidman dropped out due to a previous injury.^[40] The film costarred Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Dwight Yoakam and Kristen Stewart and was directed by David Fincher. It grossed over $30 million in its opening weekend in the United States, Foster's biggest box office opening success of her career so far.^[24] Her next screen appearance was in a supporting role in the French film Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement) (2004), following which she returned to English-language films with the thriller Flightplan (2005), which opened once again in the top position at the U.S. box office and was a worldwide hit.^[41] She portrayed a woman whose daughter disappears on an airplane that her character, an engineer, helped to design.^[42]
In 2006, Foster co-starred in Inside Man, a thriller directed by Spike Lee and starring Denzel Washington and Clive Owen, which again opened at the top of the U.S. box office and became another international hit.^[43] In 2007, she starred in The Brave One directed by Neil Jordan and co-starring Terrence Howard, another urban thriller that opened at No. 1 at the U.S. box office.^[44] Her performance in the film earned her a sixth Golden Globe for Best Actress nomination and another People's Choice nomination, for Favorite Female Action Star. Commenting on her latest roles, she has said she enjoys appearing in mainstream genre films that have a "real heart to them."^[45]
In 2008, Foster starred in Nim's Island alongside Gerard Butler and Abigail Breslin, portraying a reclusive writer who is contacted by a young girl after her father goes missing at sea. The film was the first comedy that Foster starred in since Maverick in 1994, and was also a commercial success.^[46] The following year, Foster provided a voice for Maggie in a tetralogy episode of The Simpsons titled "Four Great Women and a Manicure."^[47]
Foster returned to directing in 2011 with the black comedy The Beaver, starring herself and her friend and Maverick co-star Mel Gibson.^[48] Based on a script by Kyle Killen, it tells the story of a depressed CEO of a toy company, who develops an alternative personality based on a beaver hand puppet.^[49] It premiered in March 2011 at the South by Southwest film festival and received mixed reviews.^[50] It was a box office flop, making only approximately $1 million during its first month after its general release in May 2011.^[51]^[52] The same year, Foster also appeared in Roman Polanski's Carnage alongside John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz. The film centres around four parents whose initially peaceful meeting to discuss an incident between their sons gradually descends to a conflict. It premiered at the 68th Venice International Film Festival in September 2011, and garnered mainly positive reviews.^[53] Foster received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.
Foster was honoured with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, awarded annually to actors and filmmakers "who have had a definite impact on the world of entertainment", at the 70th Golden Globe Awards in January 2013.^[54]
Foster appeared in the science fiction film Elysium, which was released in August 2013.^[55] Also during this year, Foster directed an episode of the Netflix original television series Orange Is the New Black.^[56] Two new directorial projects, independent film Money Monster and television series Angie's Body, have also been announced.^[57]^[58]
In 2014, Foster narrated "Women in Space", an episode of season 2 of Makers: Women Who Make America.^[59]

Target of fan obsession

Main article: Attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan

John Hinckley, Jr. became obsessed with Foster after watching Taxi Driver a number of times,^[60]^[61] and 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 attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan (shooting and wounding Reagan and three others) 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.^[62]^[63]
The incident caused Foster intense discomfort and reporters have been warned in advance not to bring up the subject in front of her; she has been known to walk out of interviews at the mention of Hinckley's name.^[64] In 1991, Foster canceled an interview with NBC's Today Show when she discovered Hinckley would be mentioned in the introduction.^[64] Foster's only public reactions to the incident up to that time were a press conference afterwards and an article titled "Why Me?" that she wrote for Esquire in December 1982. In that article she wrote that returning to work on the film Svengali with Peter O'Toole "made me fall in love with acting again"^[65] after the assassination attempt had shaken her confidence. In 1999, she discussed the experience with Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes II.^[66]
Another man, Edward Richardson, followed Foster around Yale and planned to shoot her, but decided against it because she was "too pretty".^[64]

Personal life

Foster has two sons: Charles "Charlie" Foster (born 1998) and Christopher "Kit" Foster (born 2001).^[1]^[67]
Foster acknowledged coming out in a speech at the 70th Golden Globe Awards,^[68]^[69]^[70]^[71] and many news outlets afterwards described her as lesbian or gay,^[72] although some sources noted that Foster did not use the words gay or lesbian in her speech.^[73] Foster broke up with her long-time partner, movie producer Cydney Bernard, in 2008. They had been together since 1993.^[74] Foster also thanked Mel Gibson as one of the people who "saved" her.^[75] In April 2014, Foster married actress and photographer Alexandra Hedison.^[76]^[77]
Foster is an atheist.^[78]^[79]^[80] She has stated she has "great respect for all religions" and spends "a lot of time studying divine texts, whether it's Eastern religion or Western religion."^[81]^[82] She and her children celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah.^[83]