Legendary actor Jodie Foster is one of the true child star success stories of Hollywood. Having begun her career as a model at age three, Foster made an acting debut at six, appearing in the CBS sitcom Mayberry R.F.D. in 1968. As her early career developed, Foster’s pivotal moment came when she met ‘New Hollywood’ director Martin Scorsese, who cast her in his 1974 comedy-drama Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
Scorsese and Foster formed a close bond during the project. When the former was casting for his masterpiece-to-be, Taxi Driver, just a year later, Foster auditioned for the role of a child prostitute, Iris. At the time, Foster was just 13 years old, and she impressively beat fellow applicants Carrie Fisher, Bo Derek, Mariel Hemingway, Kim Cattrall, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Rosanna Arquette to the role.
For her dynamic performance in the 1976 blockbuster opposite Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, Foster earned her first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’. The movie was a historic accomplishment in cinema history, launching Foster firmly under the spotlight. Naturally, her teen years wouldn’t be comparable to those of her classmates.
Through her youth, Foster studied at a French lycée (secondary school) in Los Angeles, which she once described to Andy Warhol for his Interview magazine: “It’s great, man. All the teachers are like 21 or 22 and have long hair and beards and everything. Being in this school, you don’t have to do anything.”
Warhol allegedly offered the 14-year-old a Bloody Mary during the interview. Despite the relaxed school allowing Foster to get away with hardly doing “anything,” the mature teen was intelligent, fluent in French and had movies like Taxi Driver and Bugsy Malone under her belt already. As if that wasn’t enough, Foster briefly pursued a career in pop music in 1977.
During her transient foray into music, Foster released two singles and made several appearances on French TV as a singer. Firstly, she sang a track titled ‘When I looked At Your Face’ for the soundtrack to a French movie, Moi, fleur bleue (released as Stop Calling Me Baby! In the US). The song was released as a single, which Foster followed up with a second single, titled ‘Je t’attends depuis la nuit des temps’, which translates to English as ‘I’ve been waiting for you since the dawn of time’.
