Jodie Foster Exposed

by Kate Muir
Elle (April 1993)

The idea of Jodie Foster and Richard Gere making love in an American historical costume drama, Sommersby, has had all Hollywood raising its eyebrows. A couple of years ago there was an attempt to 'out' Jodie as a supposed lesbian, with posters all over New York. Her response was that people's sexuality was their business — Jodie, quite rightly, refuses to talk about her relationships offscreen. Still, the combination of Jodie Foster and Hollywood heart-throb Richard Gere has set Tinseltown abuzz.

In Sommersby, the love scenes between the leading couple are raunchy. The film's director, Jon Amiel of The Singing Detective fame, says that to begin with he had doubts about how the relationship would work onscreen, 'but that was also what made it so exciting. People's anxieties were considerable; it was an unknown quantity. No one had ever seen Jodie play this sort of major love affair. She told me she felt scared and excited about the role, but she also said: "I feel ready to share with an audience parts of myself I only shared with friends before.".'

Share them she certainly does in the film, which tells the story of Jack Sommersby (Gere), a soldier returning to his wife and village after six years away fighting in the Civil War. It is similar in plot to the French film The Return of Martin Guerre. Sommersby seems both familiar and different, treating his wife, Laurel (Jodie) far more sympathetically than before. Soon after his return, the mystery of his past begins to grow, at the same time as the slow rekindling of the couple's passion.

'Bedroom scenes were always difficult for Jodie,' says Jon Amiel, ' but she threw herself in with complete abandon. Richard was unused to playing love scenes with aan actress like Jodie, so in that chemistry there was a tentativeness that worked. She has the tremendous sexiness of someone who appears not to know it.'

In person, Jodie, 30, is small, blonde and perfectly formed, her face enviably smooth. She is smart, answering questions almost before they are finished, sniffing out any nuances, and generally being as friendly and un-starlike as possible. She is wearing oval tortoiseshell glasses which, far from making her look un-prepossessing, give her the about-to-explode quality of Lois Lane in Superman. Her one concession to adulthood consists of a dark green double-breasted jacket, but beneath it she has the shortest of black minis and stompy boots.

She eschews the Hollywood bimbette look and its bimbette roles. 'That's not my experience with women — you don't want to follow someone who's completely weak. I can play a strong dumb blonde, or strong working-class mum. It's not the circumstances or the IQ, it's just that I have to be able to flesh out a character. If they're not human, they're just props for the male plot: their only function is too be tied up on the train track so the man can save them.'

Which explains why Jodie turns down numerous parts, only finding an acceptable one every year or so. She favours playing strong women — the rape victim who bounced back in The Accused, Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs and the working-class mother in Little Man Tate. It would be hard to imagine her coveting Julia Roberts' part opposite Gere in Pretty Woman.

On working with Richard Gere she says: 'I shouldn't say I was surprised he was a nice guy, because there was no reason why he wouldn't be, but I was surprised that our styles went so well together.' Between takes, Jodie sat and read her magazine and Richard listened to music. They were colleagues rather than friends, reading over the script occasionally and then getting straight up and acting. 'We're so used to it that we didn't need one of those torturous off-set relationships, so the most intimate moments are on screen, not in real life.'

Jodie used to be infamous for her steadfast avoidance of actors, and she decried the empty world of the Los Angeles glitterati. Being an actor almost since birth — her first appearance, aged three, was in a Coppertone advertisement, then she starred in Taxi Driver when she was 12 — made her covet the most ordinary life. After John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and announced he was trying to win Jodie's love and attention by his act, the then student was glad of her modest house in the suburban San Fernando Valley, well away from the Hollywood papparazzi. She bought her mother, with whom she is great friends, a house nearby.

Jodie was the youngest of four children; her parents divorced when she was a few months old and it was her mother who took her to auditions for commercials. At five, she was the major family earner. By the time she was 25, Jodie already had 26 films under her belt.

Despite her Hollywood status (she has two Oscars), most of Jodie's friends are not film stars, but film technicians and fellow students she met at Yale University, where she gained her degree. (She studied literature and also speaks several languages, French fluently.) Her preferred occupation is lying around the house in her pyjamas reading, working out a little at the gym, and inviting a few friends round for a barbecue.

'I never even used to know actors. I wouldn't be friends with them. I wouldn't talk to them,' she says, gesturing dismissively with an empty mineral water bottle. 'I thought they were something out there, beneath me, and that's not really fair or true. I guess it was a sort of defence mechanism: "I live in the Valley and I don't have anything to do with all that". But that's immature — it's like saying that by wearing a black trench coat, you suddenly become a serious person. As long as you have an inner life, there's nothing wrong with going to a cocktail party.' Jodie has realized that cocktail parties go with the system, and that the system works. 'You're better off being part of the machine and changing it than being a dead revolutionary,' she says, smiling.

Jodie carries serious political and moral baggage wherever she goes. Unlike actors who lend their names to cute causes, her politics often come out through her work. Putting a tough, confident female role model on the screen can influence millions of lives, far more so than in the theatre. 'I don't want to perform for one blue-haired lady in Manhattan with a lot of money,' she says. Jodie would like to take to the boards one day. She fancies a bit of Greek tragedy, but she is untrained for the stage and would make sure her first performance was 'not in public, but somewhere like Dallas'.

Having successfully made her directorial debut with Little Man Tate (in which she also starred), she has plans to pursue that career with her company Egg Pictures, a label under Polygram. Right now, however, she's enjoying the relatively simple act of being back in front of the camera and being told what to do. 'She may say that,' says Amiel, 'but she's an inveterate old bossy boots on the set.' He tempers this by admitting that Jodie's experience meant her interference was often useful. Richard Gere moans that during rehearsals he just wanted to schmooze around on the set, getting into the mood. 'But Jodie wanted action,' he says. 'She wanted to rehearse the dancing, to get it just right.'

When pressed, Jodie admits that she can 'spin out a little', becoming obsessed by a single aspect of the production and going on about it for 20 minutes. She just hates people who waste time. That said, everyone wants to work with Jodie because of her professionalism.

Off screen, Jodie is well known for her campaigning spirit. She rails strongly against the way the American right constantly droned about 'family values' during the last election, and the impact of watching close friends die of AIDS has also strengthened her resolve to stop government neglect. 'Our skin has really felt the impact of tyranny this time,' says Jodie, who donated money to the Clinton campaign. 'I really think the Bush government thought people bought bullshit, this ridiculous American dream that has nothing to do with our reality, this rightist web of the nuclear family that has nothing to do with real statistics in the US.

'I've found a way to bring all my stuff into something,' she says suddenly, by which she means that acting for her is no longer a thing to be ashamed of. Instead of bringing just emotions to her work, she feels she has started to bring her intellect as well.

The days when Jodie would have preferred to be a lawyer, an academic or a doctor are gone. She seems content, at ease with her life as it is this very moment. Acting, she has discovered, is something she cannot live without.

'I really need an outlet because I'm not one of those people who can put a lamp shade on her head and dance around. I'm not some uninhibited actor — it doesn't come naturally to me, so acting becomes a ritual in which I can experience ways of being that are beyond real life.'