Getting to Know: Jodie Foster

Five decades ago, nine year-old Jodie Foster landed her first feature role. She had been acting for six years and already had plans to become a director. But nobody could have foreseen what lay ahead of her. No child star in Hollywood history has made such a success of their adult career and Foster has every intention of working into old age. Cinema Paradiso salutes the two-time Oscar winner who has taken risks and defied conventions in showing what can be achieved while shunning the celebrity spotlight.

Jodie Foster has spent all but three of her 58 years on screen and, for the most part, she has tended to do things her own way. Disney sought to turn her into the new Hayley Mills before she insisted on taking much riskier roles. When she got bored with these, Foster dropped out to become a student and only returned to acting on her own terms, which meant not having to play cookie-cutter girlfriends or wives. Having won a brace of Oscars by her late 20s, she seized the opportunity to direct and her sole regret is that she didn't get to make more pictures. However, she wanted a family life and raising her two sons mattered more than movies. Consequently, she has recently focused on projects that interest her, while recognising that television offers women more chances to call the shots than cinema. Such is her versatility both in front of and behind the camera that there's no telling what she'll do next. Which makes Jodie Foster one of American cinema's most intriguing talents.

The Rise of the Coppertone Girl

Six months after Lucius Foster had walked out on his pregnant wife, Evelyn, Alicia Christian Foster was born in Los Angeles on 19 November 1962. Nicknames tended to stick in the Foster household, as mother Brandy raised Jodie alongside siblings Cindy, Connie and Buddy, while working for film producer Arthur P. Jacobs. Her links with showbiz made Brandy ambitious for her children. Yet, when she took Buddy to an audition for a Coppertone sunscreen commercial, it was three year-old Jodie who caught the casting director's eye and she appeared on billboards across America with a playful dog tugging at her bathing suit.

Buddy also played a part in Jodie getting her first acting role, as she appeared in two episodes of Mayberry R.F.D. (1968), in which he played the son of a widowed farmer. Guest spots followed in programmes as different as The Doris Day Show (1969), Daniel Boone (1970), Bonanza (both 1972) and The Partridge Family (1973). She also played the recurring role of Joey Kelly in The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1969-71) and was so impressed by the fact that star Bill Bixby helmed occasional episodes that she vowed to direct herself.

As she told Brandy, however, her primary objective was to become 'a professional talker' and she seemed set to achieve her ambition when she was cast as Addie Loggins in the small-screen spin-off of Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973), which had made Tatum O'Neal the youngest Best Supporting Actress winner in Oscar history. The show wasn't a hit, however, and neither was Hanna-Barbera's cartoon version of The Addams Family (1964-65), in which the 11 year-old Jodie was cast as the voice of Pugsley, in anticipation of Nancy Cartwright voicing Bart in The Simpsons (1989-2017).

Foster's tomboyish appearance caught the eye of Disney, who gave her a starring role in the two-part teleplay, Menace on the Mountain (1970). They would also team her with Michael Douglas in Vincent McEveety's Napoleon and Samantha, only for Foster's back to be badly scratched by her lion co-star. Despite what some sources might tell you, this wasn't her feature bow, however, as she had already appeared in Jerrold Freedman's Kansas City Bomber (both 1972), which was delayed when Raquel Welch broke her wrist while training to skate in a roller derby. Don Taylor's Echoes of a Summer (1976) was also withheld for a couple of years after Foster had played Becky Thatcher in the same director's musical adaptation of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer (1973). Even before she became a teenager, however, Foster strove to leave archetypal childhood roles behind.

Making Ripples

In 1973, Brandy took her daughter to see Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and it instantly became her favourite film. The following year, she landed the role of Audrey, the tweenage daughter of a prostitute who introduces young Tommy Hyatt (Alfred Lutter) to Ripples fortified wine in Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). Ellen Burstyn won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Tommy's mother, but it was Foster who made the deeper impression on the director, who cast her as Iris, the adolescent streetwalker in Taxi Driver (1976).

In fact, Scorsese struggled to communicate with Foster and relied on co-star Robert De Niro to convey his instructions for a part that so concerned the Los Angeles Welfare Board that the 12 year-old had to be assessed by a child psychologist to ensure that she hadn't been adversely affected by the sex and violence in Paul Schrader's screenplay. Sister Connie served as Jodie's stand-in for the more sexually suggestive sequences, but Foster was fascinated by the story and the way it was told. She also relished the challenge of creating a complex character. As she later revealed, 'It was the first time I realised that acting wasn't this hobby you just sort of did, but that there was actually some craft.'

At just 14, Foster received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and added the BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer to her win in the same category. Forty-five years on, it seems inconceivable that Foster should have lost out to Beatrice Straight for her five-minute turn as William Holden's jilted wife in Sidney Lumet's Network or that John G. Avildsen's Rocky (both 1976) should have pipped Taxi Driver to Best Picture after it had won the Palme d'or at Cannes. That year's festival had also seen the launch of Bugsy Malone, a musical pastiche of the classic gangster format, in which Foster had played speakeasy chanteuse Tallulah and so bowled over Alan Parker that he remarked that she was the only person on set who could have taken over as director if he had been hit by a bus.

While this was good, clean fun (in spite of the excess of splurge), Foster found herself playing a much darker character in Nicolas Gessner's The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), as English poet's daughter Rynn Jacobs receives the unwelcome attention of landlady Cora Hallett (Alexis Smith) and her adult son, Frank (Martin Sheen), while celebrating her 13th birthday on Halloween in the seaside town of Wells Harbor, Maine, A few weeks after this picture was released, Foster became the youngest host to that point of Saturday Night Live before ending the year with her penultimate outing for Disney, as she landed a Golden Globe for her comic performance in Gary Nelson's Freaky Friday (1976), as Annabel Andrews, who changes places with her mother, Ellen (Barbara Harris), after making an ill-advised wish on Friday 13th.

Growing Up in the Public Glare

Despite the glowing reviews she had received throughout 1976, Foster realised that she had to devote herself to her education. During a nine-month stay in France, she proved herself fluent in Éric Le Hung's Moi, fleur bleue (aka Stop Calling Me Baby!) and signed off from Disney with Norman Tokar's Candleshoe (both 1977). But she rarely worked while studying at the Lycée Française de Los Angeles, although she did venture into the teenpic in playing Valley Girl Jeanie in Adrian Lyne's first feature, Foxes (1980).

She also acted in pictures like Tony Richardson's John Irving adaptation, The Hotel New Hampshire and Claude Chabrol's interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Blood of Others (both 1984), while at Yale University, where she majored in literature and wrote a thesis on African American author Toni Morrison before graduating magna cum laude in 1985. Her time in New Haven, Connecticut was blighted, however, when obsessive fan John Hinckley. Jr. tried to impress her by attempting to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on 30 March 1981. What she didn't know when she performed in a play on campus six days later, however, was that another stalker had bought a ticket and only decided not to kill her during the actual performance.

On returning to acting full time, Foster made her debut as a producer on Michael Laughlin's Mesmerized (1986), a drama set in 1880s New Zealand that was based on a story by the acclaimed Polish director, Jerzy Skolimowski, several of whose other films are available on high-quality DVD and Blu-ray from Cinema Paradiso. Unfortunately, audiences didn't buy Foster as an 18 year-old orphan who exacts her revenge on John Lithgow's cruel older husband. But she won an Independent Spirit Award for her work in Tony Bill's Five Corners (1987), as a teenager who is stalked by the man who had tried to rape her in the Bronx in 1964. Despite this success, however, Foster was still finding her feet in grown-up roles and she learned one of the most valuable lessons of her career while making Siesta (1987) in Spain, when Mary Lambert (her only female director to date) ticked her off for disrespecting the cast and crew for behaving like a star on set.

Within a year, Foster's new approach to acting paid off when she won the Oscar for Best Actress for playing waitress Sarah Tobias in Jonathan Kaplan's The Accused (1988). Loosely based on an actual case, the contentious scenario followed the efforts of Deputy District Attorney Kathryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis) to prosecute the onlookers of a barroom gang rape after the perpetrators had made a plea bargain. The provocative material prompted many to brand it misogynist. But Foster was unrepentant. 'You have to take those risks,' she told one interviewer, 'or all you're ever going to be is mediocre.'

She would win a second Academy Award when she followed Dennis Hopper's Catchfire (1990) with Jonathan Demme's adaptation of Thomas Harris's bestseller, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which paired Foster's FBI trainee Clarice Starling with Anthony Hopkins's jailed serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, and followed Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) and Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) by winning the Big Five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay.

Despite the acclaim and box-office takings of over $270 million, the film was condemned by some for its attitude to the brutalisation of women and the fact that murderer Jame 'Buffalo Bill' Gumb (Ted Levine) was transgender. Yet Foster insisted that Clarice was 'a real female hero' at a time when American cinema was dominated by action men and she reaffirmed her pride in the project in January 2021 when she reunited with Hopkins for a virtual chat to mark its 30th anniversary. During the encounter, Foster confessed that she fell into acting and has never felt like she has an actor's personality. 'Much to my chagrin,' she revealed, 'it does not come naturally to me, or easily. I'm much more of a reader or a thinker. I'm a chess mover.'

Going Her Own Way

Foster ended 1991 by fulfilling a long-held ambition to work with Woody Allen, when she played Dorrie in Shadows and Fog, a monochrome homage to German Expressionism, a topic that Cinema Paradiso covered in a 100 Years special. But she had also taken an important step towards shaping her future, when she made her directorial debut (see below) and formed her own production company. Three years passed before Egg Pictures made its bow, by which time Foster had been feted for playing a woman who believes that the husband who has returned from the Civil War (Richard Gere) is an impostor in Jon Amiel's Sommersby (1993) - which was reworked from Daniel Vigne's 16th-century saga, The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) - and for reminding audiences of her under-used gift for comedy in Richard Donner's Maverick (1994), in which a roguish gambler (Mel Gibson) meets his match in Foster's Wild West con artist. But Michael Apted's Nell (1994) proved a much more demanding role and earned Foster another Oscar nomination for her potent portrayal of a woman who had been raised in a remote Appalachian cabin speaking her own language.

Although this may not be her most decorated or commercially validated performance, it remains one of Foster's favourites, as she loved the 'idea of a woman who defies categorisation, a creature who is labelled and categorised by people based on their own problems and their own prejudices'. Indeed, the part of Nell Kellty sums up Foster's approach to both her career and the fiercely guarded private life she has shared with Cydney Bernard - with whom she had two sons, Charlie and Kit - and her photographer wife, Alexandra Hedison. But Nell would be her last feature for three years, as she took an enforced sabbatical from acting around the time she was in talks to reunite with Michael Douglas in David Fincher's The Game (1997). The problems began when Fincher and Douglas disagreed over expanding Foster's part and she sued Polygram for $14.5 million for taking herself off the market in the expectation of making the picture. During this period, she contented herself with voicing characters in episodes of Frasier (1994-2003) and The X Files (1993-2002) before settling the lawsuit out of court.

When Foster did return to the screen, she had her first taste of blue-screen filming while making Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997), an effects-laden adaptation of a Carl Sagan novel that brought a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as Eleanor Arroway, a scientist with the SETI programme monitoring radio waves for evidence of extraterrestrial life forms in the universe. However, she stayed behind the scenes as the executive producer of Jane Anderson's TV adoption drama, The Baby Dance (1998), before going back in time with Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-fat to play her first historical character, 19th-century governess Anna Leonowens, in Andy Tennant's Anna and the King (1999). Much was made of Foster's $15 million fee and her English accent, as the critics unfavourably compared the stars to Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison in John Cromwell's Anna and the King of Siam (1946) and Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner in Walter Lang's The King and I (1956).

Busy on the domestic front, Foster opted not to reunite with Anthony Hopkins on Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001), with the result that Julianne Moore took on the part of Clarice Starling. Indeed, Foster confined her film activities over the next three years to an executive role on Keith Gordon's Waking the Dead (2000), in which coast guard Billy Crudup struggles to come to terms with the car crash death of his politically conscious girlfriend Jennifer Connelly. The 1970s also loomed large in Peter Care's The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002), in which Foster took the supporting role of Sister Assumpta, a nun teaching at the school in Savannah, Georgia where Kieran Culkin and Emile Hirsch create their own comic-book as part of their rebellion against St Agatha's strict Catholic codes.

This proved to be the last picture released under the Egg banner, however, as Foster declared that producing was 'a really thankless, bad job'. She was also becoming more selective in her acting assignments, although she stepped in at short notice to play Sarah Altman in David Fincher's Panic Room (2002) when Nicole Kidman was forced to quit 20 days into shooting because of a knee injury sustained while making Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge (2001). Following a French-speaking cameo opposite Audrey Tautou in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's poignant Great War drama, A Very Long Engagement (2004), Foster returned to thriller mode in Robert Schwentke's Flightplan (2005), Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006) and Neil Jordan's The Brave One (2007).

In the first, she plays a mother investigating the mid-air disappearance of her six year-old daughter, while the second sees her playing a Wall Street fixer trying to help NYPD cop Denzel Washington end the bank heist being led by the conniving Clive Owen. The last cast Foster as a New York radio host who turns vigilante after no one is brought to book for the murder of her fiancé. Containing echoes of Taxi Driver, this bleak dissection of modern urban living earned Foster her sixth Golden Globe nomination.

Calling the Shots

A change of pace took Foster back to the kidpic, as she plays the novelist whose intrepid hero (Gerard Butler) prompts Abigail Breslin to go in search of adventure iin Jennifer Flackett and Mark Lewin's Nim's Island (2008), She remained in comic mode to voice Maggie playing the idealistic architect from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead in the 'Four Great Women and a Manicure' episode of The Simpson's (1989-) and to cameo as herself being pestered by the paparazzi in Katherine Dieckmann's Motherhood (both 2009). However, there were murmurs that these choices suggested someone who had lost interest in acting. Once critic accused her style of having become 'more like lecturing than acting' before complaining that she was no longer an artistic gambler in operating 'like someone who's already won a lifetime achievement award and doesn't want to choose any films that might mar her record'.

Yet, while Foster was finding worthwhile roles harder to come by, she was also turning her attention towards directing. The BBC had afforded her an early opportunity, when the 13 year-old had made a short entitled 'The Hands of Time' for a report from the set of Freaky Friday. Her next effort was also in miniature, as she contributed 'Do Not Open This Box' to the horror series, Tales From the Darkside (1983-88). Three years later, Foster made her feature bow with Little Man Tate (1991), a drama with autobiographical allusions in which she also starred as the working-class mother who fears that psychologist Dianne Wiest will deprive her prodigiously talented son, Adam Hann-Byrd, of a normal childhood if she enrols him in a programme for gifted kids.

Despite being lauded for her direction, Foster confessed that she had failed to live up to her own expectations and she fell further short in the eyes of many critics while remaining solely behind the camera for Home For the Holidays (1995), a Thanksgiving comedy that sees stressed out Holly Hunter flee Chicago for Baltimore with daughter Claire Danes to spend a 'normal' weekend with parents Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning and siblings Robert Downey, Jr. and Cynthia Stevenson. Frustratingly, the muted response posed problems when Foster sought to greenlight other projects, such as Flora Plum, a circus story set during the Great Depression that was to have starred Russell Crowe and Claire Danes; Sugarland, a drama about migrant workers with Robert De Niro; and a biopic of Leni Riefenstahl, the German director who had been responsible for the Nazi propaganda documentary, Triumph of the Will (1935).

The latter enterprise provoked outrage among Hollywood Jewish groups, who were also unimpressed when Foster teamed with Mel Gibson for The Beaver (2011), in the wake of the actor being accused of making an anti-Semitic remark to the Malibu police officer arresting him for drunken driving. Yet Foster stuck by Gibson, even after stories emerged about his tempestuous relationship with ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva. Indeed, she also co-starred as the wife of Gibson's toy executive, who communicates exclusively through a beaver glove puppet after suffering a breakdown. Some also questioned Foster's decision that same year to work with Roman Polanski on Carnage, an adaptation of Yasmina Reza's acclaimed play that landed her another Golden Globe nomination in the company of John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz.

Shortly after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2013 Golden Globes, Foster scored a box-office hit alongside Matt Damon in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium, which is set in 2154 and pits an ailing Earth dweller against the steely secretary of defence determined to keep interlopers out of the orbiting habitat whose residents live in the lap of luxury. Once again, however, Foster felt the need to retreat behind the camera. As she told one interviewer: 'Being in your 50s is a transitional period for actors - you're not old enough to play the old characters and not young enough to play the young ones, so I felt like, OK, this is my time to direct’.

In addition to two episodes of Orange Is the New Black (2013-19), one of which was nominated for a Primetime Emmy, Foster also directed for House of Cards (2013-18), Black Mirror (2011-18) and Tales From the Loop (2020). She also executive produced and narrated Pamela B. Green's documentary about a pioneering French-American film-maker, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018). But she returned to features with Money Monster (2016), a thriller in which distraught investor Jack O'Connell barricades himself into the television studio in which financial expert George Clooney is hosting his show and demands access to Dominic West, the CEO of the crashed company that has wiped out the intruder's life savings.

Foster continues to act, however, notably adding years to her appearance to play The Nurse in Drew Pearce's Hotel Artemis (2018), a tense tech noir set in 2028 in a hospital that solely treats criminals. She also impresses as lawyer Nancy Hollander in Kevin Macdonald's The Mauritanian (2020), a fact-based study of insularity and ignorance that also stars Tahar Rahim as Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who spent 14 years in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay without a single charge being brought against him. According to rumours, Foster's next picture will keep her behind the camera, as she heads back to 1911 for a saga based on Seymour Reit's non-fiction tome, The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa. Whatever she does, however, is bound to have integrity and intelligence. But such is the restlessness of her imagination that there's no second guessing what Jodie Foster will come up with next.