Jodie Foster is an American actress, director, and producer.
Her birth name is Alicia Christian Foster.
Foster was born on November 19, 1962 in Los Angeles.
She is the daughter of Evelyn Ella “Brandy” (née Almond) and Lucius Fisher Foster III, an Air Force lieutenant colonel and later real estate broker.
Foster has two older sister Cindy Foster Jones and Connie Foster and an older brother Buddy Foster.
Her older siblings nicknamed her “Jodie”, a name she has used in her profession.
Foster began her professional career as a very young child in television, appearing first in commercials.
Despite never having taken an acting class, she dove headlong into show business in 1968 with her first television show, Mayberry R.F.D. From there, she would continue on to a busy career as a child actress, with Brandy Foster always by her side, playing the dual role of manager and mother.
She appeared in a number of Disney films, beginning with Napoleon and Samantha (1972).
Jodie first drew attention from critics with her appearance in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) alongside Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, where she played a prostitute at the tender age of 12 and received her first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
She went on to have a very successful career in her early teens with leading roles in the Disney films Freaky Friday (1976) with Barbara Harris and Candleshoe (1977) opposite veteran film legends David Niven and Helen Hayes. The last film she made during this era was the coming-of-age drama Foxes (1980), before enrolling at Yale University.
During her freshman year at Yale, she was attached to a worldwide scandal when a crazed and obsessed fan named John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan to impress her.
Jodie graduated from Yale in 1985 with a degree in literature.
Foster’s breakthrough into adult roles came with her performance as a rape survivor in The Accused, a drama based on a real criminal case, which was released in October 1988. For this performance she won both an Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Actress, establishing her as one of Hollywood’s most esteemed serious actresses.
Foster’s first film release after the success of The Accused was the thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991). She played FBI trainee Clarice Starling, who is sent to interview incarcerated serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in order to solve another serial murder case; Foster later named the role one of her favorites. Foster received largely favorable reviews and won Academy, Golden Globe, and BAFTA awards for her portrayal of Starling.
Later in 1991, Foster also starred in the unsuccessful low-budget thriller Catchfire, which had been filmed before Silence, but was released after it in an attempt to profit from its success.
In October 1991, Foster made her big screen directorial debut with the drama Little Man Tate, in which she also costarred.
Foster’s final film appearance in 1991 came in a small role as a prostitute in Shadows and Fog , directed by Woody Allen, with whom she had wanted to collaborate since the 1970s.
Then, she played title role in Nell (1994), co-starring Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson. Foster considers her performance in Nell as her best one.
The second film that Foster directed was Home for the Holidays, released in 1995. It starred Holly Hunter and Robert Downey Jr. and was described as a black comedy “set around a nightmarish Thanksgiving”.
After Nell in 1994, Foster did not act in any new projects until 1997, aside from voicing characters in episodes of Frasier in 1996 and The X-Files in early 1997.
Her next big screen role was in the science fiction drama Contact (1997) opposite Matthew McConaughey. The film was a huge hit and brought her a Golden Globe nomination.
She starred in the non-musical remake of The King and I (1956) entitled Anna and the King (1999), which was only modestly received in the U.S. but was very successful overseas.
Foster’s first project of the new decade was Keith Gordon’s film Waking the Dead (2000), which she produced.
She decided not to reprise the role of Clarice Starling in Hannibal (2001), which eventually went to Julianne Moore.
Than she headlined the thriller Panic Room (2002), which co-starred Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam, and Jared Leto.
She then appeared in two low-profile projects: the independent film The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002) and the foreign film A Very Long Engagement (2004).
Then she appeared in Flightplan (2005), in which she played a woman whose daughter vanishes during an overnight flight.
It was followed by Spike Lee’s critically and commercially successful Inside Man (2006), about a bank heist on Wall Street, which co-starred Denzel Washington and Clive Owen.
Her next film was the revenge thriller The Brave One (2007), which earned her another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress.
Her last film role of the decade was in the children’s adventure film Nim’s Island (2008), in which she portrayed an agoraphobic writer opposite Gerard Butler and Abigail Breslin.
In 2011 she directed and appeared in The Beaver, a drama about a depressed man (played by Mel Gibson) who finds a remedy of sorts in a hand puppet.
In 2011, Foster also appeared as part of an ensemble cast with John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz in Roman Polanski’s comedy Carnage, focusing on middle class parents whose meeting to settle an incident between their sons descends into chaos.
In January 2013, Foster received the honorary Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 70th Golden Globe Awards.
Her next film role was playing Secretary of Defense Delacourt opposite Matt Damon in the science fiction action film Elysium (2013).
In 2016, she directed her next film, Money Monster, which stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
Foster has often been cited as one of the best actresses of her generation. In addition to her two Academy Awards, Foster has won three BAFTA Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award and the Cecil B DeMille Award. For her work as a director, Foster has been nominated for two Directors Guild of America Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Jodie Foster has an estimated net worth of $100 million.
She lives in Los Angeles, and had two sons, Charles “Charlie” Foster (b. 1998) and Christopher “Kit” Foster (b. 2001), while partnered with Cydney Bernard. She met Bernard on the set of Sommersby (1993) and was in a relationship with her from 1993 to 2008. In April 2014, Foster married actress and photographer Alexandra Hedison.
She has never revealed the identity of the father(s) of her two children.
As a child, she was attacked by a lion and carried briefly in its mouth while filming Disney’s Napoleon and Samantha (1972).
For Somersbi (1993), Foster learned how to handle a horse-pulled buckboard.
Foster was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6927 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on May 4, 2016.
She enjoys kickboxing, yoga, karate, aerobics, and weightlifting and collects fancy kitchenware and B&W photos.
Her favorite actors are Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart and her favorite actresses are Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton and Katharine Hepburn.
Her favorite movie is The 400 Blows (1959).
An asteroid, 17744 Jodiefoster, was named after her (1998).
Foster has said that her only regret is that she would love to live life without knowing what it’s like to be famous.