Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster (born Alicia Christian Foster; November 19, 1962) is an American actress, film director, and producer.
Foster began acting in commercials at the age of three, and had her first significant role at the age of 13 in the 1976 film Taxi Driver as the preteen prostitute Iris, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The following year, she starred in the cult film The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. She won the 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. Foster's performance in the film received international acclaim and her second Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her fourth Academy Award nomination for playing a hermit in Nell (1994). She has also starred in other films, including Bugsy Malone (1976), Freaky Friday (1976), Candleshoe (1977), Maverick (1994), Contact (1997), Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), Inside Man (2006), The Brave One (2007), Nim's Island (2008), and Carnage (2011), for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy.
Foster's films have spanned a wide variety of genres, from family films to horror. In addition to her two Academy Awards, she has won three BAFTA Awards for two films, two Golden Globe Awards, including the Cecil B DeMille Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and has received two Emmy Award nominations.

Early life

Foster was born November 19, 1962 in Los Angeles, California. She is the 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. 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. Evelyn supported her children by working as a film producer.
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 the language 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, caused her to take a semester's leave of absence from Yale. She received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the university in 1997.
Due to her French fluency, Foster has dubbed herself in French-language versions of most of her films. In 2004, she took a minor role in the French WWI film, A Very Long Engagement. She also understands German^[13][14] and Spanish and can converse in Italian.

Career

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 commercialand debuted as a television actress in a 1968 episode of Mayberry R.F.D. She was managed by her mother. In 1969, she appeared in an 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. She made her film debut in the 1970 TV movie Menace on the Mountain 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 mauled by a circus lion. Foster continued to star in Disney films into her early teens. 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." 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 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.

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" 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.
Foster starred in three films in 1976: Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone, and Freaky Friday. 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 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance in Freaky Friday. As a teenager, she also starred in the Disney adventure Candleshoe (1977) and the coming-of-age drama Foxes (1980).

Adult career

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 were financially unsuccessful. These included 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 and a nomination for a BAFTA Award as Best Actress for her role as a rape survivor. She starred as FBI trainee Clarice Starling in the 1991 thriller The Silence of the Lambs, for which she won her second Academy Award and Golden Globe, and won her first BAFTA Award for Best Actress. This is the film for which Foster has won the most awards. This "sleeper" film marked a breakthrough in her career, grossing nearly $273 million in theaters and becoming her first blockbuster.
Foster 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.^[25] In 1992, Foster founded a production company called Egg Pictures in Los Angeles. It primarily produced independent films for distribution by other companies until it was closed in 2001. Foster 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. She played Laurel Sommersby in Sommersby opposite Richard Gere, who would comment that "She's very much a close-up actress, because her thoughts are clear."
Foster starred in two films in 1994, first in the hugely successful western spoof Maverick and later in Nell, in which she starred as 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. 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. In the same year, Foster was awarded with the Berlinale Camera award at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival.
In 1997, she starred alongside Matthew McConaughey in the science-fiction movie 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." Contact was her first sci-fi 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."
The film was another commercial success and earned Foster nominations for numerous awards, including a Golden Globe. In 1998, an asteroid, 17744 Jodiefoster, was named in her honor. In 1999, she starred in Anna and the King, a remake of the 1946 film based on Margaret Landon's 1944 novel, which became an international commercial success.^[40]
In 2002, Foster took over the lead role in the thriller Panic Room after Nicole Kidman dropped out due to a previous injury. 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. She then performed in the French-language film Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement) (2004), speaking French fluently throughout. She returned to English-language films with the 2005 thriller Flightplan, which opened once again in the top position at the U.S. box office and was a worldwide hit. She portrayed a woman whose daughter disappears on an airplane that her character, an engineer, helped to design.
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. 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. 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."
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 has starred in since Maverick in 1994, and was also a commercial success.
Foster was set to direct, as well as reunite with actor Robert De Niro, for the film Sugarland; however, the film was shelved indefinitely in 2007. Foster is developing a biographical film of Leni Riefenstahl. She directed and starred opposite her Maverick co-star Mel Gibson in a black comedy titled The Beaver, which came out in May 2011.
Foster provided her voice for Maggie in a tetralogy episode of The Simpsons titled "Four Great Women and a Manicure."
In March 2011, Foster said she planned to direct a family-oriented science-fiction thriller. At that point, she said, the project remained in the scripting stage.

Target of fan obsession

John Hinckley, Jr., became obsessed with Foster after watching Taxi Driver a number of times, 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.
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.  In 1991, Foster canceled an interview with NBC's Today Show when she discovered Hinckley would be mentioned in the introduction. Foster's only public reactions to this 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" after the assassination attempt had shaken her confidence. In 1999, she discussed the experience with Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes II.
Another man, Edward Richardson, followed Foster around Yale and planned to shoot her, but decided against it because she "was too pretty."

Personal life

Foster has two sons: Charles "Charlie" Foster (b. July 20, 1998) and Christopher "Kit" Foster (b. September 29, 2001).
Foster is an atheist. Foster 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." She and her children celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah.
Foster broke up with her long-time girlfriend, Cydney Bernard, in 2008. Foster and Cydney had been dating since 1993.
In her acceptance remarks upon receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards, she commented about her sexual orientation: "I already did my coming out about 1,000 years ago back in the stone age, those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers, and then gradually and proudly to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met." She thanked her former partner of 20 years, production manager Cydney Bernard, calling her "my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life".