November 19, 2012. Copyright 2012, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Actress who built on child stardom to become director and double Oscar winner, Jodie Foster turns 50
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, November 19, Graphic News:  By any standards, Jodie Foster's childhood was brief. "I spent a lot of time not in school," the Bugsy Malone star has said, "so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age." In fact, by the time she was old enough to start school in her home city of Los Angeles, Foster, supported and managed by her divorced mother Brandy, had already made her first TV commercial -- for the suntan lotion Coppertone -- and soon became the family breadwinner, with more than 50 film and television credits to her name by the time she went to college. 

Her decision to enrol at Yale, one of America's most prestigious universities, was in part a search for anonymity and the normal student experience after years of high-profile exposure, including an acclaimed but controversial role at the age of 12 as child prostitute Iris in Martin Scorsese's violent thriller, Taxi Driver (1976). But she fell victim to an obsessed fan -- John Hinckley, Jr. -- who, after stalking her on campus and plaguing her with letters and phone calls, tried finally to get her attention by shooting President Reagan in March 1981. It's an episode journalists are warned never to raise in interviews with Foster, whose career went on to new heights in 1988 with an Academy Award-winning performance in The Accused, in which she portrayed a young woman who is gang-raped, and then, in 1991, to perhaps her best-known adult role, as FBI agent Clarice Starling opposite Anthony Hopkins' serial killer Hannibal Lecter, in The Silence of the Lambs.

While working on the historical romance Sommersby (1993), in which she co-starred with Richard Gere, Foster met film producer Cydney Bernard with whom she went on to have a 14-year relationship. Notably taciturn about her private life, Foster made a rare public acknowledgement of her then-partner in an acceptance speech at an awards ceremony in December 2007. The couple split the following year. Mother to two boys born in 1998 and 2001, Foster has never been drawn on who fathered the children or how they were conceived. On-screen she has played the mother of rising star Kristen Stewart's character, Sarah, in the 2002 box office hit Panic Room, as well as the parent of a child prodigy in her directorial debut, Little Man Tate (1991). When asked by chat show host Ellen DeGeneres in 2009 which of her many roles she considered her best work, Foster picked Nell, her 1994 depiction of an orphaned girl brought up in an isolated cabin, facing the outside world for the first time.

Jodie is Foster's professional name, taken when she was still a child; she was originally named Alicia.
/ENDS