Just over ten years ago, Jodie Foster hinted that she was retiring from acting forever, but now she is succeeding as an actress in film and television for the first time at the same time in her long career (and personally she has also been married for a decade with Alexandra Hedison).

Jodie Foster and Alexandra Hedison, a few days ago during the last Golden Globes ceremony EARL GIBSON III/GOLDEN GLOBES 2024/GETTY IMAGES

It has been a long time since Jodie Foster (Los Angeles, California, 1962) has experienced a moment as sweet as the one she is experiencing now. For the first time in her long and successful career – we must remember that she debuted in the world of show business making advertisements when she was only three years old , so she is about to celebrate six decades as an actress – she is succeeding in film and television. At the same time, while personally he is absolutely happy with his wife, the photographer, director and also actress Alexandra Hedison (Los Angeles, 1969), whom he will accompany this week at the Sundance Festival for the premiere of her short ALOK .

Foster, who during the past decade was especially focused on directing – on the big screen she released The Beaver (2011), with Mel Gibson and Jennifer Lawrence ; and Money Monster (2016), with Julia Roberts and George Clooney , which did not work very well at the box office or with critics, but the episodes he directed of Black Mirror, Orange is the New Black or House of Cards were better received –, has returned strongly to acting after the pandemic.

In 2021 we saw her in The Mauritanian , a film for which she won a Golden Globe for best supporting actress, and this year she is being one of the great protagonists of the awards season thanks to Nyad (in which she shares the bill with Annette Bening and which can be seen right now on Netflix ), for which she has received nominations again at the Golden Globes , the Critics Choice Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and is in the shortlist of favorites to be a candidate for the Oscars ( to which he has not returned since 1995 for Nell , after having received two statuettes for The Silence of the Lambs and Accused ), something that will be known next week.

And this week the first episode of the fourth season of True Detective (titled True Detective: Night Country ), starring herself and Kali Reis, arrived on HBO, garnering very good audience data and the best reviews the series has received. anthology since its first installment, the now legendary one led by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

Although in the cinema he has been savoring the honeys of success since the 70s – when he appeared in Taxi Driver (1976) he was barely 14 years old – on television he is doing it practically for the first time. She also began acting as a child on the small screen in some iconic series of the 70s such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza or Ironside , but always in single episodes. Her only recurring roles were to provide the voice of Pugsley Addams in the animated version of The Addams Family (1973) and to play Addie Loggins in the series version of Paper Moon (1974), based on the film by Peter Bogdanovich released the previous year, which was a ratings failure and only lasted 13 episodes.

After that, she was away from the cathode medium for 20 years until she returned to it in the mid-90s. She did it for two of the most successful series at that time, Frasier and The X-Files , but only to provide her voice in a very specific way. in an episode of each of them (in 2009 she also dubbed Maggie Simpson in an episode of The Simpsons ). With the turn of the century and the arrival of the so-called golden age of series, he has only participated in some of the most notable ones behind the cameras, as we mentioned before, and we had to wait until now, at 61 years old, to that Foster fully immerses herself as an actress in the fourth season of True Detective , in which she also serves as executive producer and which is set in cold Alaska, although it was filmed in Iceland with a large budget of 60 million dollars.

The relevance of both this and Nyad has returned Jodie Foster, in addition to award ceremonies, to the media spotlight: she is also making more public appearances and interviews than in a long time, in which she does not bite her tongue, she says. what she thinks and demonstrates more charisma and personality than many of the stars who are three decades younger than her.

Precisely, a few days ago he made headlines after criticizing the work ethic of Generation Z performers in an interview for The Guardian : “They are really annoying, especially at work,” he said. “They tell you: ‘No, I’m not feeling well today, I’ll come at 10:30.’ In emails, for example, I tell them that something is grammatically incorrect, that they haven’t checked the spelling, and they reply: ‘Why? I was going to do it? Isn’t that a little limiting?”

However, she, who has known the industry in depth since she was a child and has seen its evolution firsthand, also believes that it has changed for the better in many aspects: if in 1991, when she released her first film as a director ( Little Tate ) with 28 years old, declared to Time magazine that “this is not a business that treats well” women who want to be filmmakers, now the reality is very different, as she acknowledged to the same medium a few days ago .

“When I was young, there weren’t really any American female directors, maybe there were a few ,” she told Time . “I don’t consider that I was allowed to be a director, but that is no longer the case. I couldn’t feel more proud to see what Greta Gerwig has achieved with Barbie . Not just because she was recognized, but because she had people behind her telling her: ‘You’re not a risk.’ “I never believed this would happen and it makes me smile.”

A smile that he also maintains in his personal life, just over a decade after the night in which he changed his public profile. It was at the 2013 Golden Globes, at the ceremony in which she received the lifetime achievement award and in which she gave one of the most memorable speeches in the history of the awards .

“Charlie, Kit, you’ve seen it. Your mother can also lose her temper. I can’t help but get intense. This seems like the end of an era and the beginning of something different. It’s scary and exciting, I’m never going to set foot on this stage again. Or anyone else, for that matter. The change. You have to love him,” she said, implying that she was retiring, something that as we have seen has not happened, but what is truly remembered is what came next:

“I hope you are not disappointed that I am not going to give a big speech in which I come out because I already came out like 1,000 years ago , in the Stone Age when a young girl told her trusted friends, family and workers to gradually end up telling everyone she knew very proudly,” she said. “It would be impossible for me to be here without recognizing one of the great loves of my life and the heroic mother of my children, my former partner in love but soul mate and sister in my life. My confessor, my counselor, my dearest friend for twenty years. Cydney Bernard. Thanks Cyd. I am so proud of our modern family. Our children, my reason to breathe, my blood and my soul. “Guys, in case you don’t realize, this song, all of this… this song is for you.”

Indeed, more than a coming out of the closet, it was a very personal way of reclaiming his identity with undoubted strength, especially coming from someone who suffered harassment from many publications that questioned his sexual orientation in a very inelegant way in a different era. , in the early 90s, at the height of his fame.

And he met Cydney Bernard, whom he refers to as the mother of his children, on the set of Sommersby in 1993, a film on which Bernard worked as a production coordinator. They were in a relationship until 2008 and their two children were born in 1998 and 2001 (Foster is the biological mother). Even though the romantic part is over, the relationship between the two could not be closer, as the actress herself explained in that legendary speech.

Jodie Foster and Alexandra Hedison in 2013, the year they began their relationship STEFANIE KEENAN/GETTY IMAGES
Curiously, in the same year as the Golden Globes, Jodie met her current partner, Alexandra Hedison, whom she married just over 12 months after starting the relationship, in April 2014.