Born in Los Angeles, California in 1962, Alicia Christian Foster (her siblings called her “Jodie”) practically grew up on screen, becoming famous while still a child. But thankfully she had a savvy head on her shoulders and navigated stardom well. She even went from being a famous child actress to being a successful filmmaker herself.
Learning to read by the age of three and learning to speak French fluently before she even turned 18, Foster was a gifted child, and when she reached college age and became an African-American literature major at Yale, she graduated magna cum laude in 1985, later receiving an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1997. But even before all that success, Foster made her television debut when she was three in a Coppertone commercial (no, she was not the Coppertone baby). Interestingly, her mother initially brought her brother Buddy Foster to the audition while Jodie tagged along, but the casting agents spotted Jodie and fell in love with her. Although Buddy got a decent amount of screen work too so don’t feel bad about his thunder getting stolen.
In addition to the commercial work, Jodie Foster got guest roles in the TV shows Mayberry R.F.D. and The Doris Day Show in the late 1960s before playing a recurring character in the sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Foster would guest star in many shows through the years like Gunsmoke, Adam-12, My Three Sons, Bonanza, Ironside, The Partridge Family, Kung Fu and Medical Center, as well as voicing animated characters in a couple of Hanna-Barbera series, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan and The Addams Family, voicing Pugsley Addams in the latter (years later she famously voiced Maggie Simpson in a Season 20 episode of The Simpsons).
She naturally also starred in TV films, and that led to a transition into theatrical films, starting with Disney’s Napoleon and Samantha (1972), playing the Samantha to Johnny Whitaker’s Napoleon opposite a real lion (classic Disney). Afterwards Foster starred in the Raquel Welch vehicle Kansas City Bomber (1972) and she played a tomboy named Audrey in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), but it was her role in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) that made her a star. Foster’s mother let her star in movies for both kids and adults because they received more income that way, and while her role as a teenage prostitute in the gritty psychological thriller was not without controversy, Foster was game, preferring to take adventurous roles rather than being typecast as innocent little sisters. She even earned the admiration of her Taxi Driver co-star Robert De Niro, who saw plenty of talent and potential in Foster. Not to mention it was the first movie role that taught Foster acting could be a serious craft rather than a hobby. As for Taxi Driver, that had since become a classic and was widely praised by audiences, critics, film festivals and award shows alike, with Foster earning an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Foster also received praise and honors for her role in Alan Parker’s satirical musical Bugsy Malone (1976) featuring children playing the roles of adults, in which she starred as a speakeasy chanteuse named Tallulah. And Foster was often a critical standout in more average fare like Echoes of a Summer (1976) and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976). Disney’s fantasy comedy Freaky Friday (1976), about a daughter played by Foster who switches bodies with her mother played by Barbara Harris, was not a classic on the level of Taxi Driver but it did end up becoming the bigger commercial hit, with the wacky body-switch premise delighting both audiences and critics.
Other films include Disney’s Candleshoe (1977), coming-of-age drama Foxes (1980), Tony Richardson’s critically praised The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), moderately successful indie crime drama Five Corners (1987) and cult classic romance Stealing Home (1988), which was mostly rejected by critics and audiences in the theater but found a fan base on television and video. One film Foster starred in this decade that was loved by both critics and audiences upon release was Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused (1988), which stars Foster as a waitress who gets gang raped and sets out to get the rapists prosecuted with the help of an attorney played by Kelly McGillis. Critics especially found the film noteworthy for the authentic-feeling way it dealt with the horrors of rape and how it effects the lives of rape victims. Foster received her first Oscar for Best Actress for that film, and it reignited her passion for acting at a time when she contemplated abandoning the profession to focus on her academics at Yale.
It’s a good thing she decided to stick it out because her next big movie was one of her best. Based on the 1988 novel by Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) starred Jodie Foster as FBI trainee Clarice Starling who is assigned to interview the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in order to get insight into another psychopathic serial killer roaming free known as “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine). The hugely disturbing but hugely praised film was not only the most successful film of Foster’s career but it also won Foster the Best Actress Oscar and the film itself won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1991.
That same year, Foster would make her directorial debut with Little Man Tate (1991), in which she stars as the average-intelligence mother of a child genius (Adam Hann Byrd), and that film was also well-liked by critics and audiences as well as kicking off her career behind the camera.
Other successful films that decade include the period romance Sommersby (1993) co-starring Richard Gere, Richard Donner’s Western comedy Maverick (1994) co-starring Mel Gibson and James Garner, Nell (1994) starring Foster as an isolated woman who has to interact with other people for the first time, and the Robert Zemeckis sci-fi drama Contact (1997) co-starring Matthew McConaughey and based on the fiction novel by Carl Sagan.
Other standout films of Foster’s include the artistically flawed but not uncreative festival favorite The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002), David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002) starring Foster as a mother and Kristen Stewart as a daughter who try to stay calm during a home invasion, war drama A Very Long Engagement (2004), the critically divisive but commercially successful Flightplan (2005), Spike Lee’s crime thriller Inside Man (2006) and the family-friendly adventure film Nim’s Island (2008). The following decade she returned to the director’s chair for psychological drama The Beaver (2011) starring Foster’s Maverick co-star Mel Gibson as a depressed husband and father who channels his issues through a beaver hand puppet, opposite Foster as his wife and Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence as their two children, although the absurdity of the premise and Mel Gibson’s personal controversies sunk its chances at the box office.
In 2011, Foster starred in Roman Polanski’s well-received black comedy Carnage about two middle-class families who are dealing with an increasingly chaotic situation co-starring Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly, but for most of the 2010s Foster directed more than acted, including the 2016 crime thriller Money Monster starring George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Jack O’Connell, but also including episodes of television shows like Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards and the sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror (she directed the episode “Arkangel”).
But Foster hasn’t retired from acting. She received praise as a nurse in Hotel Artemis (2018) despite that film being trashed by most people who saw it, and she also recently starred in sports biodrama Nyad (2023) based on Hall of Fame swimmer Diana Nyad’s autobiography Find a Way and co-starring Annette Bening in the role of Nyad. Plus Foster is set to return to television acting in the fourth season of HBO crime drama True Detective in 2024 so she hasn’t retired from TV acting either. Although she will also be the executive producer so as usual she will have some sway behind the scenes as well.
