Long before Jodie Foster had played her most notable adult roles, including those in The Silence of the Lambs, The Accused, Nell and Contact, and before she had made the transition to becoming an acclaimed director with the likes of Little Man Tate, The Beaver and Money Monster, she was an acclaimed child and teen star.

Foster had come through as a child model and a teen idol in a number of Disney movies like Napoleon and Samantha and the original Freaky Friday. However, one of her most notorious roles came in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 psychological thriller Taxi Driver, in which she played a teen prostitute and was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’.

The Los Angeles-born actor had already worked with Scorsese on his 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, so she knew what would be expected of her when she collaborated with the legendary film director, who was himself, at that point, still relatively early into his movie-making career.

Foster’s mother had worried that her daughter’s acting career would be over by the time she was an adult, so she suggested that she begin playing more mature roles. In playing a child prostitute, Foster had to undergo a psychiatric assessment and be accompanied by a social worker on set, although this extra work played dividends in her final performance.

Taxi Driver, which saw Robert De Niro play Travis Bickle, a traumatised Vietnam War veteran who takes a job as a late-night cabbie in New York City and eventually takes responsibility for helping Foster’s character, Iris, escape from her life as a prostitute and the clutches of her pimp, Harvey Keitel’s ‘Sport’.

The film was written by Paul Schrader, who once explained how he had come up with the character of Iris during a drunken night in New York City. He revealed in an interview with Film Comment, “When I was in New York, I was feeling particularly blue in a bar at around three AM. I noticed a girl and ended up picking her up. I should have been forewarned when she was so easy to pick up; I’m very bad at it. The only reason I tried it that night is that I was so drunk.”

When Schrader returned to his hotel room, “shocked” at his “success”, he learned that the girl he had ”picked up” was “1) a [sex worker]; (2) underage; and (3) a junkie.” Straight away, despite his drunken stupor, the writer knew that he had found a missing piece to his Taxi Driver story, and he immediately contacted Scorsese to tell him the news.

He explained: “I sent Marty a note saying: ‘Iris is in my room. We’re having breakfast at nine. Will you please join us?’ So we came down, Marty came down, and a lot of the character of Iris was rewritten from this girl who had a concentration span of about twenty seconds. Her name was Garth.”

So it only took Schrader a strange drunken meeting with an underage junkie sex worker called Garth to get the inspiration for Foster’s character in Taxi Driver. The consequences were that the film got one of its most important narrative facets, and Foster’s career was changed forever, as she announced herself as being capable of playing roles in more adult-theme movies.