Jodie Foster - Multitalented Actor, Producer, and Director 1962-

This is not a business that is kind to women, but it needs them. The female pioneers have to be 10 times better than a man. Maybe someday there will be an old-girl network.
—Jonii; FOSTER,

ON THE HOLLYWOOD HI M INDUSTRY
odie Foster’s career began when she was three years old ‘and her mother could not find a baby-sitter. Brandy Foster had divorced her husband, Lucius Fisher Foster III, while pregnant with her fourth child. After she gave birth to Alicia Christian (”Jodie”) on November 19, 1962, Brandy realized that the few hundred dollars of alimony she received monthly was not enough to support her family.
Fortunately, a friend named Josephine Hill invited Brandy and her four children—Cindy, Connie, Buddy, and the infant Jodie—to move into her home. Before long, the Foster children were calling Brandy’s friend “Aunt Jo” and treating her son, Chris, as though he were another sibling. After a neighbor
spoke about her son’s appearances in TV commercials, Brandy decided to take her son, Buddy, to audition as well. Before long, the boy was earning $25,000 a year. The income allowed Brandy to buy a comfortable family home in Hollywood.
But on the day of Buddy’s audition for a Coppertone suntan lotion ad, Brandy found herself without a baby-sitter and took three-year-old Jodie along. As Buddy auditioned, Jodie began mimicking her adored older brother. The charmed executives hired her on the spot.
Over the next rwo years, Jodie appeared in scores of commercials. She claims she had a great time. “Most kids, all they have is school,” she said in 1991- “[Acting] spared me from being a regular everyday kid slob.” Buddy and Jodie were also successful in TV series roles. Buddy had a four-year run in Mayberry, R.F.D., which ran until 1972; Jodie got a part in one of the show’s episodes when she was seven years old. A string of TV roles followed on programs stich as The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Julia. She even received the title role in a pilot called My Sister Hank (the series never aired).
Brandy Foster made it clear to her show business children that they were no better than their peers. “All of us were in it together,” Jodie remembers. “My mom worked, we all did. Just to survive.” Brandy also introduced her children to a variety of cultural experiences. She served international dishes, watched foreign films with her children, and collected and taught them about antique furniture. Jodie’believes that this atmosphere helped her become a well-rounded and open-minded adult.
Jodie made excellent grades in school, even with career demands. On the set she juggled homework and acting with the poise of an adult. “She was just right there, just whatever was needed,” says director John Badham. That dedication was sorely tested during her first feature film, Napoleon and Samantha (1972). While on location in Oregon, eight-year-old Jodie was mauled by one of the lions working with the actors. The alarmed trainer managed to get the animal to drop the child, and she was rushed to the hospital for shots and stitches. She was back to work in ten days.
In 1972 Brandy enrolled Jodie in the exclusive Lycee Francais. By the time Jodie graduated as valedictorian in 1980, she was a rising star in Hollywood. She’d made twelve films, including an enormously controversial role as a twelve-year-old prostitute in Taxi Driver (1976), and Bugsy Malone (1976), which was named Best Film at the Cannes Film Festival. She also received a Golden Globe Award for her role in the 1977 Disney movie Freaky Friday and earned Best Newcomer and Best Supporting Actress awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for Bugsy Malone and Taxi Driver.
Foster enrolled in Yale University in September 1980. After the media attention of Hollywood, she was relieved to blend in with the academic crowd. But her attempt at anonymity was shattered on March 30, 1981, when a man named John Hinckley Jr. fired at President Ronald Reagan as he left a Washington, D.C., hotel. The assassination attempt was disturbing enough, but the story that emerged afterward was shocking. Among Hinckley’s possessions was an unmailed letter to Jodie Foster, declaring that he was going to kill the president to win her affection.
Foster was devastated. She admitted to reporters and investigators that she’d received unsolicited letters from the disturbed young man but stressed that none of them suggested Hinckley would resort to violence. Although she was poised throughout the media frenzy, the incident shook her to the core. She realized the high price of being a celebrity—and she refused to become a victim of her own fame. “If they wanted weakness,” she said of the media, “I wasn’t about to give it to them.”
Foster took a few film roles while at Yale, notably The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), in which she costarred with Rob Lowe and Nastassja Kinski. After she graduated in 1985, however, her next films were disappointments. Not until 1988, when she starred as rape victim Sarah Tobias m The Accused, did Foster regain her momentum. Her remarkable and harrowing performance earned her a Best Actress Academy Award.
Three years later Foster won a second Best Actress Oscar for playing FBI agent Clarice Starling in the film version of Thomas Harris’s best-seller The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Foster costarred with Anthony Hopkins, whose chilling portrayal of serial killer Hannibal the Cannibal brought him the Best Actor Oscar. (The film was named Best Picture.) That year she also donned the director’s hat with Little Man Tate, in which she costarred.
In 1992 Foster founded her own production company, Egg Pictures, and produced the company’s first project in 1994. Nell was the story of a backwoods woman who speaks a mysterious language and has lived in isolation since birth. Foster found the title role distinctly challenging. “You have a woman who wears her emotions on the outside,” she explained. “I … spend my whole life wearing my emotions on the inside.” The movie received mixed reviews, but Foster got an Academy Award nomination.
Her second Egg Pictures project, Home for the Holidays (1995), was a hilariously touching comedy about a dysfunctional family, starring Holly Hunter. Foster returned to acting in 1997 with Contact, in which she played a pragmatic astronomer who discovers radio communications from alien life forms.
In 1998 Foster surprised fans and friends when she announced that she was pregnant. She refused to name the father, explaining that she would raise her child alone. Charles Foster was born on July 20; Jodie proudly declared motherhood “the biggest adventure of my life.” After costarring with Chow Yun-Fat in Anna and the King (1999), she was executive producer of Waking the Dead (2000) and produced The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002). She also starred in the thriller Panic Room (2002). Jodie Hosier still strives to lead a private, normal life. Those who know her say that the key to her success is talent and intelligence, but also self-discipline. Foster agrees. “You must have self-knowledge and an understanding of your limits,” she once said when describing her work. “[BJy quelling her fears and confronting her enemies,” one interviewer wrote, Jodie Foster becomes “something no other American actress of our time has embodied with such consistency and aplomb: a hero.”
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