"I really felt for Haley Joel Osment," Jodie Foster says, referring to the 11-year-old star of The Sixth Sense and his nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. "Haley was a total basket case. I told him that when I was 12 and I lost at the Oscars, I broke out in hives all over my face. Huge red welts. I guess there was a part of me that was really disappointed, but I would never have been able to show it. So I think this kid is great, because he's able to say, 'I'm disappointed.' My friend [Russell Crowe] who was with me at the Golden Globes said to him, 'C'mon, man. You lost to Tom Cruise.' Then he cheered up: 'Yeah, Tom Cruise.'"

Foster, the ultimate child of Hollywood, is 37 years old now, the mother of a 22-month-old son named Charlie and currently in preproduction in Flora Plum--a sort of All About Eve set in a 1930s traveling circus, starring Claire Danes, with Foster directing. She is busy, but on this February day she is talking about the perils of being a child star. She knows them well.

In here early performances and interviews, you can see a confidence, a ballsiness een: in a 1975 press release for Martin Scorsese's transgressive masterpiece Taxi Driver, she announced, at age 12, that she wanted to be president of the United States. But Foster's adorable bravado has eroded over the years, replaced by caution born out of her indirect involvement in the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C. When she played Iris the prostitute in Taxi Driver, her life was set on a particular path. She became a sexualized icon, and eventually the obsession of John Hinckley Jr., who saw the film and five years later modeled his behavior on Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro's character, who attempts to kill a politician to win the affection of an unattainable woman.

Even though Foster is now a powerful actress and producer in Hollywood, the winner of two Best Actress Oscars (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs), she probably won't ever escape the specter of Hinckley, the copycat creeps and the tabloid press. Her subsequent intense commitment to her privacy has cost the actress most of her spontaneity and freedom. When Charlie was born, she moved out of her Los Angeles home to a kind of safe house, in order to throw the paparazzi off her trail.

"Recently, I had this 60 Minutes thing," she says, with a tone of mounting frustrationm. "They interviewed me for four and half hours in my office. Maybe they asked me four questions abou Hinckley. And of course the promo [for the show] comes out and it's all over the AP wires. 'Jodie reveals all about John Hinckley that she never has.'"

Foster sighs deeply. "And everywhere I went -- I was doing the junket for Anna and the King -- every question was 'So you don't discuss this, but you discussed it for 60 Minutes, and how was that?' I just thought, 'I'm such an idiot. I know better.'"

Ever since she was a child supporting a family of five, she has made a pact with herself not to complain, to present a public persona of humility and gratitude and not to be a victim. Somethimes, however, her pent-up anger stabs through the surface calm.

"Just this fascination that people have with celebrity pain is gross, it's grotesque," Foster says with palpable disgust. "I like tot have some good feeling about humanity, instead, of being misanthropic. And everytime they do something like what 60 Minutes did, it just turns me into a big misanthrope: 'Fine, I'm not going to talk to anybody about anything again. I can't trust anymore.'"

When I ask her if she's grown tired of acting, the question is met by a long pause. "Well," Foster says finally, "I don't know. I love making movies, and I want to be part of them. But there's a lot about the business of being a celebrity that I can live without."

In the 1970s, Foster was a achild -- both onscreen and off -- of America's rising divorce rate. She often played bad girls without families, orphans wise beyond their years who mature into self-reliant young women, typically running on rage and forced to avenge themselves.

She landed her first significant film role, as Audrey in Martin Scorsese's 1974 hit, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, after the son of the film's star, Ellen Burstyn, spotted Foster the year before in Walt Disney's Tom Sawyer. Foster's motther, Brandy, had loved Scorsese's Mean Streets, and had taken 11-year-old Jodie to see it four times.

Brandy Foster earned a reputation early in Jodie's career as the stage mother ne plus ultra. Jodie explains, "I was that vicarious outlet. She chose all the movies that I made from the time when I was 4 years old. So of course they're about issues she was working out in her life. Why would she be more interested in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver than she was in any other movies with little girls at that time -- Nickelodeon, Bad News Bears? She wanted me to take it seriously. She wanted people, when they said my name, to think that I was somebody of significance."

Brandy was, by most accounts, micromanaging her daughter, but she was also struggling to raise four kids on her own. Jodie was born Alicia Christian Foster on November 19, 1962, five years after her closest sibling, and months after her parents had divorced. Lucius Foster II was an Air Force colonel turned real estate broker, a dreamer from a wealthy family who already had three kids from a previous marriage. In 1954, he met a pretty young woman named Evelyn "Brandy" Almond at a fencing club and married her impetuously during a trip to Tijuana, Mexico.

After they split, Brandy says she often found herself at Lucius's office asking for child support, $600 a month; it came irregularly, she says, and then the monthly sum was cut in half. She halted the Foster family's economic decline by send her children out to work. At age 8, Buddy Foster became an actor, appearing regularly in commercials and TV shows, but the legend of Jodie's precocity was already beginning. Talking at 8 months, reading at age 3, she one day trailed Buddy into an audition for a Coppertone suntan-lotion commercial. sporting a pair of ruggled panties and no shirt.

The blond 3-year-old began to vamp for the casting directors, flexing her biceps in a series of muscleman poses. When they asked her name, she replied, "Alexander the Great." She aced Buddy out of the part and became the famous little girl in the ad with the puppy tugging at her swimsuit and flashing her bum. She also quickly eclipsed her brother as the family's main breadwinner. She went on to make appearances in Gunsmoke, The Partridge Family and several Disney movies, and took over Tatum O'Neal's role in the TV version of Paper Moon, which flopped after a single season. Twelve-year-old Jodie blamed herself for the show's demise, she'd read the critics' complaints that she had played Addie with too hard an edge.

On the set of Alice, however, Foster's tomboyish act amused Scorsese mightily; in particular, he loved her impression of Robert De Niro: a pint-sized tough guy mouthing off. So when the director began casting his 1976 film Taxi Driver, he knew that he wanted Jodie to play iris. Scorsese guessed, correctly, that Foster's Iris would not simply be a Lolita-ish vamp, and that her sexuality would come across, as he desired, as a pasted-on, unnerving affectation.

At the time both he and the film's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, were familiar with a study that indirectly involved Foster. A researcher had discovered that in group therapy sessions, sexual offenders often invoked her Coppertone ad as an incitement to their crimes. The study would represent a disturbingly prescient moment in Foster's life, the first of several instances in which she'd become an unwitting sexual icon.

De Niro, Scorsese, and Harvey Keitel, who played Iris's pimp, were themselves uncomfortable about the sexuality that they were forcing onto the girl's character. When Scorsese had tried to explain what he wanted in the scene where De Niro's Travis Bickle first hires Iris, he began to giggle so uncontrollably that De Niro had to take over, explaining that the scene would end with Iris trying to unzip Bickle's fly -- although they adamantly didn't want her to try that. (Instead, her much older sister, Connie Foster, who looked a little like Jodie, was hired to stand-in -- in ths case, the hand that yanks the zipper.) Keitel had trouble particularly with the scene in which his character seduces iris. Recalls Brandy: "He said, 'God, I feel like a dirty old man with a little girl.' Jodie wasn't uncomfortable with it, because it was playacting."

The disconcerting moment when Iris dances with her manipulative pimp was improvised. Harvey Keitel decided the scene should play like a seductive Barry White song where he croons, talks, comforts her into submission. "He was nervous, she wasn't," recalls Brandy Foster. "He had a hard time with that scene."

Yet from Jodie's vantage point, Taxi Driver was the first time she tasted what it meant to be a real actor. "I remember getting out of the elevator at the Essex House, where I was staying, and saying to my mom that I never had this experience before, because it had always been just me up there," says Foster. "Just be a little more natural" -- that's what they told child actors. I'd never shaped a character before. And then I realized finally that this acting thing is not just a hobby, that it's actually a real thing you could do."

In her review in The New Yorker, the film critic Pauline Kael described Taxi Driver as "a raw, tabloid version of Notes From the Underground," although Scorsese was drawn and quartered by critics such as Robert Moss for "diving elatedly into the blood and mire." At the Cannes in May 1976, the movie won the Palme D'Or to the sound of loud booing.

Foster was nominated for an Oscar, along with De Niro, Scorsese, and the film itself. The director, who had received a threatening letter, was accompanied to the ceremony by FBI agents. "If Jodie Foster wins for what you made her do, you will pay for it with your life," the letter read. Luckily for them all, Foster lost.

Although Brandy Foster cannily alternated Jodie's provocative films with two Disney movies -- Candleshoe (1978), in which she again played an orphan. and Freaky Friday (1977), one of the few films in which Foster's character actually has parents -- Iris became a template for her roles. She often played sexualized children adrift in a strange adult world, and she disconnected herself when the emotions got tricky, powering her way through an acting technique. Years later, Foster insists that the parts she played -- whether in Taxi Driver or as the sassy, seductive gangster moll in Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker's all-child parody of gangster flicks -- weren't so much sexual as about confidence. When Tallulah [her role in Parker's film] walks into a room completely confident, throwing open a door and laying a lip lock on Bugsy, we look at that and say it must be sexual, but in fact it isn't; it's just about being confident. Most children, most child actors, are not sexual, because they're not confident with themselves yet.

"I certainly don't look back on it as having a tremendous amount of sexuality," she continues, "but then again, certain people are who they are, and I think that even as a child, I had, unbeknownst to myself, a very complicated sexuality. It's just who I am."

Privately, however, Foster was not so blithely confident about her looks, her career of her ambitions. When she was 14, the producer Dino De Laurentiis tracked her down at a sleepover birthday party at a friend's house. Like a number of producers, he wanted to circumvent her controlling agent, Harry Ufland. De Laurentiis persuaed Foster to come in for an interview by herself.

Once she was in his office, De Laurentiis asked her to take off her jacket and turn around. He made a crack about her figure, and she says she never again felt the same about her body.

"I realized immediately that I wasn't a kid anymore." says Foster. " I felt differently as an actor. I definitely felt that there was something that I was supposed to be externally, and that I was probably not going to be able to be it."

Brandy tried to inoculate her daughter from the criticism of her physical appearance. Yet when Scorsese was casting Raging Bull, she was adamant that Jodie be auditioned for the part of Jake La Motta's love interest -- ultimately played by Cathy Moriarty -- although it was clear she was too young for the part. Brandy arranged for a series of photographs to be taken that highlighted Jodie's sexual allure -- photographs that eventually ended up in a skin magazine.

The De Laurentiis meeting gnawed at her. She was asked to lose a little weight for Foxes in 1980, but she kept going -- eating only cottage cheese and playing endless games of tennis -- and weighed only 89 pounds by the time she did Carny later that year. Foster, then 16, played Donna, a teenager who runs away from home and joins the carnival. Rocker Robbie Robertson and Gary Busey, hot off an Academy Award nomination for The Buddy Holly Story, played friends who are also her two love interests.

During filming, Jodie lived in a house with Brandy, who spent the whole shoot hovering -- when she wasn't passing out copies of Koran to the cast and crew, says Baum. (Later she told Interview magazine about her intention to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca -- a controversial declaration given the ongoing hostage crisis in Iran and the anti-Arab sentiment that was rampant in America.) As ever, the cast and crew gossiped about Jodie. "People used to say, at that time, 'Jodie needs a boyfriend,'" recalls Baum. Robertson later noted that everyone wanted to sleep with her, both men and women." But as the shoot progressed, something happened amid the social mayhem to seriously concern Brandy. A young stalker was sending Jodie provocative letters. "He tried to get on the set as an extra," recalls producer Jonathan Taplin. "They had to throw him out. Her mother was freaking out about the whole thing. I mean, he was just obsessed." The Georgia police eventually arrested the man.

A year later, on March 30, 1981, it happened again. A different stalker this time, and this time the guy, John Hinckley Jr., fired six bullets at close range at President Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton that afternoon. One bullet lodge in Reagan's lung. Others hit a Secret Service agent, a police officer and Reagan's press secretary, James Brady, leaving him paralyzed.

For months before the shooting, Hinckley had stalked the actress, by then a freshman at Yale. He made several visits to New Haven, Connecticut, hung around her dorm, followed 15 feet behind her with a loaded gun in his pocket. In the fall and spring, he barraged her with letters, several even pushed under the door of her dorm room. "If you don't love me, I'm going to kill the president," he wrote in one. "Jodie Foster Love, just wait. I'll rescue you very soon. Please cooperate. J.W.H.," he wrote in another -- a missive very similar to the one that Travis Bickle sends Iris.

In Hinckley's Washington, D.C., hotel room, police found tapes of phone calls he had placed to Foster, which consisted mostly of him begging to be allowed to call her again. Her roommates can be heard giggling in the background. "They're laughing at you," Foster tells him, then can be heard saying, "I should tell him I am sitting here with a knife."

"Well, I'm not dangerous, I promise you that," Hinckley interjects, "Can I call you tomorrow night?"

"That's fine," she replies tersely, although later in the conversation her frustration bubbles over: "Oh God, oh seriously, this is really starting to bother me. Do you mind if I hang up?"

"Oh, Jodie, please ..." Hinckley can be heard moaning.

In the hotel room police also found photos of Foster and a letter -- written but never sent -- in which the would-be assassin beseeches the object of his desire: "Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a secon if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you. I will admit that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you."

Foster had gone off to college in an almost quaint search for a life she could call her own (it was the first time she had been allowed to decorate her room away from Brandy's strict aesthetic dictates, the first time she could eat with impunity or not brush her hair is she felt like it). For once, she didn't feel like a freak because of her brainpower. "It was really important for me to be someplace where my achievements were my own achievements, and where it wasn't about the movie, and it wasn't about my mom, and it was just about what I did," she recalls years later.

Perhaps most importantly, it was the first time Foster was able to develop sustaining relationships with members of her peer group. "I really had not spent that much time with people my age, you know," Foster says. "And L.A. is different. People don't really talk about what's bothering them. They just go to the beach. But the second that I came East, it was like a whole different culture of people sitting in coffee shops while it was raining, you know, pouring out their life stories. Oh, I loved it."

But Hinckley's obsession and the attack destroyed the oasis of normalcy that Foster had tried to establish for herself. Her first public responses were those of a well-trained child actress who knows the show must go on. Against the advice of many, she organized a press conference and read a statement: "I'm not here to answer questions about Taxi Driver, she said between tears. "In no way have I ever been sorry about any film I have done." It was a kind of hopeful bargain; if she told the press what they wanted to hear, as she'd done so well in the past, they would write something nice and leave her alone.

Of course, they didn't. In the public consciousness, Foster quickly transmuted from the brightest child star into the world's most famous victim, and then the punch-line of jokes on late-night TV: "Why did Israel bomb Lebanon? To impress Jodie Foster." The federal judge in Hinckley's trial ruled that Foster could give her testimony in the case via videotape. Yet an agitated Hinckley was present at her deposition. He threw a pen at her and screamed "Jodie, I'll kill you," before he was taken from the courtroom.

When she decided to go on with her part in a student production of Getting Out, Marsha Norman's prison drama about a former prostitute who serves eight years for murdering a cabdriver, the Yale police frisked every member of the audience. The $5 ticket for the production were scalped for $50. Two of them were bought by a would-be Hinckley copycat, Edward Richardson, who caught Foster's attention during both performances. He sat in the front of the audience and stared relentlessly at her, without any trace of emotion. His plan was to shoot Foster, but when he actually saw the actress, his resolve crumbled because she was "too beautiful to kill," he later told federal authorities. He claimed to have planted a bomb in Foster's dormitory which he said he would detonate if Hinckley wasn't freed. The building had to be evacuated in the middle of the night. He wrote a death threat to Foster and another to Ronald Reagan, which he left in his New Haven hotel room. Soon after, the Secret Service arrested an armed Richardson in New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Foster says she sank into depression. She gained 20 pounds, saw threats lurking in every corner. For months she was shadowed by security guards, who she says were shrieking reminders of how different she was from the other students. She was mortified when a fellow student sent a dispatch about her state of mind to People.

Foster graduated from Yale in 1984, and in the years after, she thought frequently of giving up acting. Her Hollywood career was ice-cold. She found roles in the quasi-independent realm, quirkier films where the experiences where primarily 'disappointing,' she says. Aside from her work in The Hotel New Hampshire (1984) and Five Corners (1988), she made half-dozen other forgettable or even embarrassing films, a couple of them in France, where her mother was then living. "At the time, she was definitely out of favor with the establishment, as it were," recalls Five Corners director Tony Bill, who knew Foster slightly from when he produced Taxi Driver. Bill says it was a "real battle" to get his backers to let him sign Foster. "They made all sorts of claims that she was overweight and that she was not attractive enough."

By the time The Accused and the part of Sarah Tobias -- the furious working-class woman who is gang-raped after dancing promiscuously in a bar -- came to Foster's attention in mid-1988, disillusionment and self-doubt had set in. "Sometimes as an actor you just wear the grape suit and be the best grape you can possibly be," she says. "But my ego is too huge to not do something that has an impact on the culture ... The Accused was my last try.

Scores of young women, from Demi Moore to Rosanna Arquette and Meg Tilly, trekked to Paramount to audition for the part, but "a lot of actresses didn't want to do the rape scene," recalls the film's director, Jonathan Kaplan, who'd known and admired Foster since the early '80s. Jodie wasn't invited to audition -- but Kaplan managed to get Stanley Jaffe, who along with Sherry Lansing produced the film, to at least meet with her. When the producer saw that she had lost weight, he relented and allowed her to try out the next day.

"So I did the best I could," Foster says. "I thought Sarah was a tough, broken girl, and I had a little cutoff black T-shirt on and a pair of jeans." Kaplan and Lansing were blown away, yet Paramount resisted. Kaplan remembers Lansing conveying, with total disgust, the message that the studio thought Foster "wasn't rapeable enough." Nor was she, in the executives' estimation, sympathetic.

Then Kaplan, and probably more importantly, Kelly McGillis (then a major star), threatened to quit the picture unless Foster was given the part. Foster waited for weeks to hear back from the film's producers. Days before shooting was to begin, they finally hired her. "Well let me put it this way," Foster says. "They waited as long as they could to see if someone else better came along."

Kaplan planned to shoot the rape sequence, a brutal and protracted gang rape, the first week. He drove Foster to the bar set, walked her through the storyboards of the scene. "She got really quiet. She had wanted the part so badly that she hadn't allowed herself to think about that the part entailed," says Kaplan. They rehearsed for several days, and Kaplan gave Foster the option of shooting the scene over several days or all at once using a number of cameras. Foster opted for the former, and on the appointed day, she arrived and announced, "Let's rape." Kaplan remembers her saying, "Now Jonathan, don't worry about me. I won't be all right, but I'll be OK." She asked McGillis to be present. Lansing and Jaffe stayed in the trailer.

You know, at the end of the movie, I was depressed,' she says. "I was sure that I'd stunk. I thought, 'Well, I'm going to have to give up this business.'"

The Accused went on to make more than $100 million worldwide, and for her portrayal of Sarah Tobias, Foster won her first Oscar, in 1989. (She won her second one in 1992, for The Silence of the Lambs.)

Dressed in an aquamarine gown, she looked out on Hollywood's assembled elite and thanked her mother, "who taught me that all my finger paintings were Picassos and that I didn't have to be afraid." She added, "Cruelty might be human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable, which is what this movie is all about."

Jodie Foster's self-assessment at 37: "I somehow turned out OK and I'm not even sure how that happened." Her plan now is to make "a lot fewer" movies and "to make sure the movies are something that I'm proud of and that I'm doing for the right reasons."

The next project she plans to produce and star in is a bipic of Leni Riefenstahl, the gifted, amoral and widely reviled director of Triumph of the Will, who was an architect of the Nazi propaganda-film industry. "I think whatt [Riefenstahl's] life teachers us is that she made some really bad choices. I don't know if we would have made different ones," she says, but the backtracks. "Most of us would have made different ones. But the bigger question is: Is she morally responsible for her art? It's really the question of the artist at any time, whether it's Nazi Germany or Reagan's America."

It's hard, given anything, to let pass that reference to the former president, but let's focus instead on the question Foster poses, that of the artist's ethical responsibility. Her three signature films -- Taxi Driver, The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs -- have unleashed forces into the culture that their makers didn't intend, at least consciously, and Foster has long been the poster child for the chaos sometimes bred by art. So while her forays into the middle-brow may constitute her mental-health breaks, the dark material always beckons her back.

"I think I know how to make morally complicated movies," Foster says. Then she adds with conviction: "It's one of the few things I know how to do."