Jodie Foster has, literally, given her life to showbusiness. She began modeling at age three, as the charming but embarrassingly exposed little girl on the Coppertone Tanning Lotion billboards. Roles in some forty commercials and such television shows as The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1969), Mayberry RFD (1969), The Partridge Family (1970), and My Three Sons (1972) led to her first movie, Napoleon and Samantha (1972). Before her big break -- an Oscar nominated performance at age 14 in Taxi Driver (which also won for the young actor a New York Film Critics Circle award, a Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association award and two British Academy awards) -- Foster had more than 18 television shows and eleven movies to her credit. Fellow cast members remember her precocious intelligence and dedication, and a marked businesslike attitude.
It was her role in Taxi Driver, though, that rendered the actor years of unwanted off-camera publicity. A crime, -- nothing less than a presidential near-assassination -- was committed with Foster’s film character as the muse. The experience led the then Yale freshman to shun future media attention, and to write an essay for Esquire magazine entitled, Why Me?
Foster’s high-calibre education continued (from the exclusive Lycee Francais in Los Angeles to graduation with an Honours B.A. in Literature from Yale) as did her (lower calibre) movie career. Her co-starring role in Bugsy Malone garnered two British Academy Awards, but fourteen films, deemed unworthy of the Foster’s bright talent, followed, among them Candleshoe (1977), Carny (1980), Svengali (1983), The Hotel New Hampshire (1984) and Siesta (1987).
The parts did get better, beginning in 1987 with Five Corners, for which Foster earned an Independent Spirit Award. The actor, though, came into her own with The Accused (1988) for which she received an Oscar, a Golden Globe nomination, and a New York Film Critics Circle nomination. She carried on working steadily until the enormous success of The Silence of the Lambs (1991 - Oscar, British Academy Award, New York Film Critics Circle award, Chicago Film Critics’ award, and Golden Globe).
That same year Foster directed and starred in Little Man Tate for a Los Angeles Film Teachers’ Association award. Shadows and Fog (1992), Sommersby (1993), Maverick (1994), Contact (1997) and Anna and the King (1999) were played out before the camera, and Nell (1994 - Screen Actors Guild award, Oscar nomination and Golden Globe nomination), was produced by the actor. Foster’s Egg Pictures has since produced Home for the Holidays (1995). Egg Pictures has six films in various development stages, including the movies Flora Plum, The Leni Riefenstahl Project and Mace and Mardi. If that weren’t enough, Foster’s home-life is busy as well — she is a single mother to son Charles, born in 1998.
An unconventional upbringing has resulted in an unconventional star. Foster is not only “thoroughly likeable [and] emotionally stable” but one of Hollywood’s most respected players. Her faculty for balancing artistic integrity with commercial success will ensure a lifetime of delivering to her public the best that Hollywood can offer.
