The Brilliance of Jodie Foster

by Sheryl Altman
Biography Today, November 1999

Modesty is probably the last thing you'd expect from a woman who made her acting debut clad in a skimpy swimsuit for a coppertone commercial. But Jodie Foster has a hard time taking a complement When told that Sherry Lansing, the chairman of Paramount Pictures, calls her "a woman that every woman in America admires," Foster's response is a long, slow whistle through her front teeth. "Wow, that sound mighty impressive," she says. "But I'm not sure it's true. Me? A role model? God, I hope not. I don't think I could handle any more pressure."

Yet she's proven, time and again, that she can handle it-- after all, she's been in show business all her life, first as a child star and now as an adult actress, director, and producer. "I've been a public figure forever," she tells Biography Magazine. "I haven't known anything else. It's not like people who become actors when they're 23 or 24, who've lived anonymously before. My experience is very different from theirs-- they tend to want to be the center of attention, and I don't. I always thought that was such an invasive, dangerous place to be."

Never was that more true than during her college years at Yale, when Foster unwittingly became the object of John Hinckley Jr,'s obsession and the catalyst in his plot to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Given that strange history, it's understandable that she's much more eager to discuss her new movie, Anna and the King, than, say, the derails of being a new mother. "I'm not being evasive," she says. "I just don't know how to keep people from invading my privacy, and it's a very disheartening process. So it's become my nature to be as private as possible because I've always had to figure out a way to have a real life." But rather than take potshots at the press when they overstep their bounds (and they often do: a gossip columnist broke the story of her pregnancy), she is cool, collected, and always gracious. "No prob, no prob," she repeats when the interview stretches long over the amount of time her assistant has scheduled. "Just stop me if I talk too much."

Which would be impossible, since Foster has a lifetime of experiences To relate, even at the young age of 37. "I've had so many things said about me over the years," she says. "I think people have this image of me--they think l'm brainy. I don't think it's the wrong image; I just don't think it's everything. I guess that's my image in the way that Marilyn Monroe had her image. Sexy doesn't identify every part of her, and smart doesn't identify every part of me. So how then does one begin to scratch the surface of one of Hollywood's most successful-and most elusive--actresses. Foster mulls it over for a few seconds. as if piecing together a complex puzzle. "I guess,"she says finally, "you start at the beginning and see where it goes from there."

She was born Alicia Christian Foster on November 19, 1962, and nicknamed Jodie by her family. Her father, Lucius, an Air Force pilot and real-estate developer, left her mother, Evelyn (nick- named Brandy), and her three older siblings, Cindy, Connie, and Buddy, only a few months before she was born. Brandy raised her children in L.A. on a frugal single-parent budget, working for a producer and later in public relations to make ends meet. She has said that it was evident early on that little Jodie was no ordinary youngster: She could read by the time she was 3 and was the family's breadwinner by age 8. "In L.A., every other child was in the film industry," Foster recalls. "My brother wanted to be in commercials because some body who lived across the street was. And I just fell right into it because of him." When Buddy, then 9 and a successful child actor on the sitcom Mayberry RFD.,was auditioning for a Coppertone commercial, his little sister toddled onto the set, charmed advertising execs, and won the job.

With Brandy managing her, Foster landed numerous commercials and made guest appearances on more than 50 TV shows including The Partridge Family, Bonanza, and The Courtship of Eddie 's Father before she was 12. When she wasn't working, Foster says she led "a pretty normal American family existence," except for Brandy's penchant for exotic culture. "European films were her passion," Foster says. "She loved Europe, and she loved dreaming of going there. The films she took me to became my touchstones as a child. When I think of why I want to be a director, I think of the Truffaut movies 1 saw as a kid, the things that really touched me." But they were far from the kinds of film roles she was being offered as a child actress. Foster did a string of Afterschool Specials and Disney movies in the early '70s, including a musical version of Tom Sawyer (she played Becky Thatcher). "There wasn't a lot of depth to my roles," she says."just kid parts in kid movies."

Then, in 1974, Martin Scorsese cast her as a streetwise tomboy in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. The role was small, but it caught the critics' attention--and won Scorsese's admiration. When he was casting his next film, Taxi Driver, he hired Foster to play Iris, a tough 12 year-old prostitute, The movie, Foster says, changed her life forever. 'Scorsese was a hero of mine," she says. "Taxi Driver was a big step for me because it was the first time that anyone had asked me to play a real character that wasn't myself. Before then, every one just said, 'Act natural,' I was being given an opportunity to do a grown-up job."

And she did her job well, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Sup- porting Actress in the process. "That Oscar night was amazing and unforgettable," she says. "I couldn't believe that 1 was somehow in this institution that I had been watching for years. My family always sat around the black and white TV set in my mom's bedroom and bet on who was going to win what category. To be a part of it...it was surreal." Her next several projects were not nearly as successful: She made the family flicks Freaky Friday and Candleshoe in the late·'70s while critics complained that her talent was being wasted. In 1980, she turned to darker roles: a troubled teen in Foxes and a run- away in Carny. It was the same year she graduated the prestigious Lycee Francais in LA and delivered the valedictory speech in fluent French. "At that point, I decided to devote myself to my education," she says. She enrolled in Yale and put her acting career on·the back burner. She thought seclusion in academia would take her out of the spotlight for at least a few years.

But instead, she found herself the subject of even more headlines. In March 1981, a delusional fan, John Hinckley Jr., attempted to assassinate President Reagan to impress her. The Yale campus was bombarded with media, and Foster struggled to fathom why she had been the subject of Hinckley' s demented devotion. She refused to grant any interviews about the incident--and still does-- but wrote a poignant essay in Esquire magazine a year later entitled "Why Me?" Perhaps to escape the negativity surrounding her name, she returned to acting in 1983, appearing in the made-for-TV movie Svengali. The following year, she starred in The Hotel New Hampshire, in which she and Rob Lowe played incestuous siblings. After graduating magna cum laude in 1985 with a degree in literature, she debated returning to acting full time. "Really, up until my mid 20s, my mom was trying to convince me to become a professor," she says. "I had this idea that being an actor was a stupid thing to do. It wasn't a grown-up profession. If I was going to be a person satisfied and stimulated with my work, then I had to be something else. I guess the good news was that I was ready for any disappointment, for being unsuccessful. The bad news is, it took me many years to get over it and realize that my chosen profession was admirable."

Luckily, Foster followed her heart. "The plain fact is that I love movies, and it wouldn't matter to me what I did in them as long as I did something," she says. Once she was on her career path, she calculated her moves very carefully. "In my 20s, people were still thinking of me as a child star," she says. "And I made a conscious decision not to make movies that lumped me into the Brat Pack [a group of twenty something actors who made popular lightweight films, such as St. Elmo's Fire, in the 1980s]. Instead, she chose the artsy (and little- seen) Siesta and Five Corners, in which she played the victim of a psychopathic stalker (the irony did not go unnoticed by critics). She even co-produced one of her starring projects. 1986's Mesmerized, and directed an episode of Tales from the Darkside trying her hand behind·the camera for first time. But it wasn't until 1988's The Accused that Foster again earned critical praise. She received her first Best Actress Oscar for playing gang-rape victim Sarah Tobias.

She won again in 1991 for the role of FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. Suddenly, Jodie Foster, Kid Actor, was one of Hollywood's most sought after and "serious" stars. "People ask me, 'How did you do it? How did you make that leap from child to adult actor without any major problems!'" she says. "I haven't robbed any banks...yet. I think it's a question of who you are and how you're raised and how you process the information. It's like being an astronaut: There are some people who can't take the thinness of the air and the loneliness and beak out the second you put them in the suit. And there are some people who just Love it, who can't wait to get in the capsule. Some people are built for it, and some aren't. If you're not, it can be enormously destructive."

Which isn't to say the journey was always easy "I have a few regrets--any actor who says they don't have them is lying," she says. "There were movies that I turned down that I probably shouldn't have; there were movies that I wanted to do that they turned me down for--so I never feel too bad about those. But I think those movies would have really changed my life. Agnes of God is one I really, really wanted, and I was dying to do Runaway Train. But now that I think about it, I would have been terrible in them. So maybe fate knows better than I do."

Yet most of her films share a common denominator, "If I have a style, it's serious, dramatic movies that are about something," she says. "I gravitate toward stories that are morally centered and have a symbolic play quality to them. They're more theater pieces than movies. And there has to be something in the character that I can relate to, grab on to." When she made her motion-picture directing debut in 1991 with Little Man Tate. Foster felt a kinship to the lead character, a child prodigy growing up without a father. She enjoyed being able to call the shots and directed a second film, Home for the Holidays, in 1995. The 90's also saw her share the screen with some of Hollywood's hottest leading men-Richard Gere in Sommersby, Mel Gibson in Maverick, Liam Neeson in Nell, and Matthew McConaughey in Contact..

"I take a lot of time between pictures," she says. "I have no desire to do one after the other, never have. I find that it's once every year and a half or so that I can get obsessed with something or care about something enough to really do a good job. Besides, there are other things--producing, directing, developing [the ability to] direct. And then there's Life, I do find that you limit yourself if you just go from movie to movie. You lead this very rarefied existence, and I don't think it helps your work at all. Plus, it's damn depressing, don't you think?"

These days, Foster has a lot more on her mind than just making movies. "I'm a mother," she says proudly.'It was something that I was suddenly ready for in my life." She gave birth to son Charles on July 20, 1998, but has refused to disclose the child's father, insisting that single motherhood is how she was raised and what she knows best In the meantime, tabloids continue to speculate about Foster's sexuality (she is rumored to have a close female companion) while she keeps mum.

Family is very important to Foster. Even though she is presently estranged from her father and her brother, Buddy (he wrote a controversial tell-all biography of Jodie, Foster Child, in 1997), she remains close to her mother, sisters, and nieces and nephews. "I think becoming a mother is the most significant thing I've done," she says. "It changes you a great deal. Just logistically, it makes you more efficient because you don't have the time. You stop running around in circles, and you become much more meticulous and precise about what you want to say and do. Also,when my son is with me, I just don't get riled up about anything. Everything takes its correct form; it doesn't get amplified"

Baby Charles accompanied Foster when she was shooting her current film, Anna and the King, on location in Malaysia. "It was so great for him," she says. "He was so easy and so versatile.You realize that not only do kids enjoy travel, but they really soak it up. Foster also found herself falling in love with her new surroundings--even if the 100-plus degree heat was sweltering. 'I'd been to that part of the world before and I really wanted to go back and make a movie there about Asia," she says. "And lo and behold, here it was." What also drew her to the role of Anna Leonowens, the headstrong English governess made famous in the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The King and I, was the opportunity to make a film that talks about East and West and gives them equal footing. She comes in with these blind prejudices-'These natives need to be more. civilized--while the king has his prejudices as well about the English, who he believes want to squash his country's independence. So these two people, these two forces, come together and fall in love."

Any- one who's seen the musical-or the 1946 nonmusical version starring Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison--knows how the story ends. But Foster prefers to explain it her way: 'In the end, they realize that in order to be true to who they are, theirs is a love that can never happen." Audiences hoping to hear Foster croon "Shall We Dance?" may be disappointed. "No, I don't sing," she says, laughing. "And everyone should be very grateful for that. This version is very different from any other. There are shades of the same story, but it has a much more adult sense of pageantry It's glorious, huge, and epic while being historically accurate. And most all it's incredibly inspiring. The project has inspired Foster to follow in Anna's footsteps She goes in thinking that she has so much to teach these people, but she reaily has so much to learn," she says. "I love learning. I love exploring new things, people and places. My greatest fear is that I will he too busy working to travel and experience everything I want to." She has several projects in the works: Her company, Egg Pictures, is producing the mystery romance Waking the Dead, which will be out next spring; she's set to direct Claire Danes in Flora Plum - next year; and she is toying with the idea of making a sequel to The Silence of the Lambs based on Thomas Harris's book Hannibal. "I don't think it's a secret that all of us - Anthony Hopkins , Jonathan [Demme],and myself--have been dying to do it for 10 years" she admits. We believed in these characters So when I the screenplay comes in, if it continues in that tradition, then great, I'm on. it, If it doesn't, then I'm not.

Meanwhile, she will continue acting, directing, and producing, "just not all the time-. The greatest thing about where I am now is that I can have my career on my own terms. That's something you work a lifetime to get, the ability to say, 'I only want to make them when I make them.' "Who knows, three or four years from now, I may not be this lucky" she says, But you know what? I'm looking forward to seeing what changes the future might ring. I don't worry about turning 40. I should, huh? I don't feel like one of those people who says, 'I never did anything in my 30's or my 20's.' I think I accomplished a lot, so my ambitions are no longer career ambitions, they're only personal ones.

Postscript (by Agent Starling): Jodie Foster ultimately decided to pass on the role of Clarice Starling in "Hannibal," a move that many considered a bad choice, after the fact that the movie became the record-setting blockbuster its makers had hoped for it to be. Foster is not about to disappoint her fans, though. Shooting has wrapped for "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys," a film she co-produces and where she plays a half-legged nun. She is also currently shooting the action-thriller "Panic Room," helmed by David Fincher, the director responsible for such unforgettable films as "Se7en" and "The Fight Club." And in what is certainly the actress' most cherished project these days, Ms. Foster is expecting her second child in November 2001.