Jodie Foster biography

Actress, director, and producer. Born Alicia Christian Foster, on November 19, 1962, in Los Angeles, California. Foster’s father, Lucian, left the family before she was born; her mother, Evelyn, supported herself and her four children by working for a film producer. Advertising executives for Coppertone suntan lotion “discovered” Foster when she tagged along with her older brother Buddy, a child actor, to one of his auditions. At age three, she became the tow-headed, bare-bottomed “Coppertone girl” in a now-famous ad campaign.
By age eight, Foster had expanded her acting repertoire to include nearly forty commercials, as well as appearances on television shows such as The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Bonanza, and The Partridge Family. By the time she was ten years old, her acting jobs were supporting the entire Foster family. Her feature film debut came in 1972 with the Disney film Napoleon and Samantha. In the next five years, she appeared in no fewer than eleven more films, bringing to each role a precocious intelligence that impressed both critics and filmmakers.

In 1976, Foster made what she has referred to as the film that changed her life--the dark, violent Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese. Foster played Iris, a twelve year-old prostitute befriended by the dangerously unbalanced taxi driver Travis Bickle, played by Robert DeNiro. The role was entirely different from any the fourteen-year-old actress had ever played before. “It was the first time anyone asked me to create a character that wasn’t myself,” Foster told The New York Times Magazine in 1991. “It was the first time I realized that acting wasn’t this hobby you just sort of did, but that there was actually some craft.” Her performance won her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Unlike many young actors, Foster, who learned to read at age three, chose not to sacrifice her education to her growing film career. After graduating in 1980 from Los Angeles Lycee Francais (where she delivered the valedictory address in perfect French), she enrolled at Yale University. In March 1981, however, Foster was dragged unwillingly into the international spotlight when John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, stating as his primary Foster was so affected by Hinckley’s actions and the subsequent media frenzy that she published an article in Esquire plaintively entitled “Why Me?” and refused to speak publicly about the incident any further.

Foster graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 1985 with a B.A. in Literature. She made a number of films during and in the few years after college, but none attracted as much attention or won her as much acclaim as Taxi Driver. In 1988, however, Foster finally gained respect as an adult actress--along with an Academy Award--for her portrayal of Sarah Tobias, the working-class victim of a brutal gang rape in The Accused. Her next great performance came three years later in the haunting thriller, The Silence of the Lambs. With darkened hair and a West Virginia twang, Foster played fledgling FBI agent Clarice Starling opposite the mesmerizing Anthony Hopkins as psychologist-cum-serial-killer Hannibal Lecter. At the 1991 Academy Awards, the film won Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Actor and Best Actress.

At age twenty-nine, with two Best Actress Oscars and nearly thirty film roles under her belt, Foster had already turned her attention to other aspects of the movie business. Her directorial debut came in 1991 with Little Man Tate, a moderately well-received film about a child prodigy and his protective single mother (played by Foster). In 1992, Polygram Filmed Entertaiment committed to finance three films for Foster’s production company, Egg Pictures. Foster produced and starred in the first of those films, 1994’s Nell; her performance as a woman who lives in the woods and speaks in her own invented language earned her a fourth Oscar nomination.

Over the past several years, Foster directed her second film, 1995’s comedy Home for the Holidays and delivered a Golden Globe-nominated performance as an astronomer looking for extraterrestrial life in 1997’s Contact. Egg Pictures has several pictures in development, all of which Foster has the option to produce, direct, and/or star in. In late 1999, Foster starred in Anna and the King, a remake of the classic story of widowed schoolteacher Anna Leonowens and the King of Siam made famous in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, to mixed reviews. She is set to direct and produce Disney’s Flora Plum, starring Russell Crowe and Claire Danes, but turned down the opportunity to reteam with Anthony Hopkins in Hannibal, the much-awaited sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. She also stepped in for Nicole Kidman in the upcoming thriller The Panic Room.

With her unconventional beauty and fierce intelligence, Foster has emerged as one of America’s most well-respected actors and filmmakers.

motive the desire to impress the nineteen-year-old actressand Yale freshman. She reportedly received $15 million for Anna and the King, making her one of only a few actresses to command such an amount.

Foster is known as a fiercely private woman who refuses to reveal too much about her personal life. She has two sons: Charles, born in 1998, and Kit, born in September 2001, and will not identify the father of either child. .