Jodie
Foster
Alicia
Christian Foster was born 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” Jodie 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, Jodie 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, Jodie Foster made what she has referred
to as the film that changed her life--the dark, violent Taxi Driver,
directed by Martin Scorsese. Her performance won her an Academy
Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Unlike many young actors, Jodie 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,
Jodie Foster was dragged unwillingly into the international
spotlight when John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate President
Ronald Reagan, stating as his primary motive the desire to impress
the nineteen-year-old actress and Yale freshman. Jodie 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.
Jodie 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, Jodie
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.
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 Jodie Foster
production company, Egg Pictures. Jodie 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 Jodie Foster has the option to produce,
direct, and/or star in. In late 1999, Jodie Foster
starred in Anna and the King. She is set to direct and produce Disney’s
Flora Plum in 2000, but has reportedly turned down the opportunity
to re-team with Anthony Hopkins in the much-awaited sequel to The
Silence of the Lambs, called Hannibal. Today she lives in the San
Fernando Valley with her son, Charles, who was born on July 20,
1998.
