All Grown Up and Everywhere To Go

People Weekly Extra (Spring 1991)

In the hot, sticky nights of Cincinnati last summer, she stayed up late chainsmoking, rethinking the script. Often she dreamed about each day's work, second-guessing herself in her sleep. But directing her first picture, Little Man Tate, was a job right next to heaven for Jodie Foster. At 28, she has appeared in nearly 30 films, more than many stars manage in their careers. But directing, she says, "is where I feel sanest and healthiest. That doesn't mean I'm always Miss Cheerful. I just enjoy being the benevolent leader who is also one of the people."

Deja vu: In Little Man Tate, due later this year, Foster appears as the cocktail waitress-mother of a 7-year-old genius, played by 9-year-old newcomer Adam Hann-Byrd. Their director-actor relationship sparked memories for Foster, who was shooting commercials at age 3. "Watching him grow up and become an independent little human being made me remember what I loved about acting. It is horrible, painful and yet also intoxicating and emotionally liberating. I wanted to give Adam this same love of work."

She does it her way: "As an actress you have to give yourself up to the director's vision. But if you have the ego for it, you get frustrated being just one of 85 people working on a movie. As a director, you listen to people's creative input, but ultimately you have to say, 'This is the way it is because that's how I feel it in my heart.'"

That's no stick, that's a boom mike: Playing a rape victim in 1998's The Accused, Foster cried so much she broke blood vessels over her eyes during the filming of the gang-rape scene. Even the crew had trouble sleeping. "People don't hold a boom mike in their hand and think, 'What I've always wanted to do in life is hold a stick.' They want to feel that they've given a piece of themselves. People died for The Accused every lick of the way, whether it was a propman or an actor." Such devotion to craft is what makes Foster tick.

That's no mannequin, that's an Oscar: Of winning the Best Actress award for The Accused, the informal Foster jokes, "I felt as if I never had to get dressed up again."

No Rambo redux: In the thriller The Silence of the Lambs, Foster played an FBI trainee who must tell an imprisoned serial killer her childhood experiences to win his help in finding another killer on the loose. Her character, she says, "is not a male, Rambo-like superhero rewritten for a woman. She's not a victim or a crying mom, the usual stuff offered to actresses. She's a real developed person put in a situation where she has to use her mind to combat evil." Foster herself has had to combat adversity. Never married and very private about her love life, she has rebounded from publicity that might have crushed a lesser career when deranged fan John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan in an attempt to impress Foster, with whom he had become obsessed.

She's got the whole world in her hands: "Directing is basically creating life. Life in the big picture. And making sure the seams don't show."