Nell's cabin is hard to find. When night falls and the North Carolina air is thick with the smells of summer, the cast and crew of Nell climb into motorboats and rides them across Fontana Lake, surrounded by the thick forests of the Great Smoky Mountain, to a hidden cove. There, lanterns mark a path that follows the water's edge, ending at a deserted-looking hovel. A dozen dried gourds dangle noisily from a tree out front, creating a kind of impressionistic scarecrow. The cabin looks more like a ruin, a place left to be forgotten. Yet the interior -- which has been re-created on a soundstage in a nearby town -- is a nest, every surface fastidiously and lovingly fingered by its inhabitants. A fireplace for cooking, the vestige of a more primitive life, exists alongside cartons of milk and Quaker Oats. Nell has meticulously stuck dried yellow flowers into a collage on the wall, and carved moon-and-stars designs into the stone wall and floor. Nell is the modern-day fable of a woman discovered living beyond the edge of civilization, in the backwoods of Appalachia. She has grown up with no language other than an incomprehensible babble learned from her now-dead mother, whose speech was garbled by a series of strokes. Nell becomes an object of both fascination and contention for a doctor (Liam Neeson) and a psychologist (Natasha Richardson) who arrive to study her. A creature ruled by instinct and spontaneity, unschooled in deception, she's far from what Foster normally plays: "Eastern, layered, contemporary characters who are hiding things."

Foster lost a good thirteen pounds to play Nell, eating only what Nell would eat -- which turns out to be mostly a macrobiotic diet. She doesn't seem to be fragile or gaunt but rather spare and athletic. Her face is slightly more pointed; her hair is reddish-brown and hangs lankly down her back. She wears thick, no-nonsense, steel-rim glasses, and a blue flannel shirt over her threadbare dress. The hair on her legs has grown long. As she stands still for the makeup people swirling around, a light from behind her delineates her newly sinewy figure, revealing an unexpected nakedness and sexuality. Foster is either oblivious to this, or, more likely, doesn't care.

The director, Michael Apted, tall and dry and British, asks her where she wants to start.

"It makes no difference to me," says Foster. "I see an orange mark ad I stand on it. A Pavlovian reaction." Foster's behavior, like Nell's, has been heavily influenced by the wild environment in which she grew up -- in her case, on a series of movie and television sets.

As the cameras are adjusted, Foster talks about the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl; in her downtime in her trailer, she's been watching a documentary on the woman who made Triumph of the Will and Olympia. She does an uncanny riff on Riefenstahl's justification for being a Nazi -- capturing the nuances of the filmmaker's notorious moral ambiguity.

"Every day of my life, I wish I hadn't made Triumph of the Will." Foster is going through the German director's spiel. "I wish I hadn't met Goebbels. But I lived in the time in which I lived."

Riefenstahl could have gone to Hollywood, but she stayed in Germany because, "well, I had a boyfriend. Ten inches can change your fate...."

The actress is interrupted by the AD, who asks her to take her place.

Her preparation takes all of 30 seconds. She stands off to the side, feet planted determinedly. She clasps her hands together and swings her torso forward, her arms stretched overhead, and then pulls back, repeating the motion. She is unexpectedly graceful and elemental, like a Martha Graham dancer. This is the gesture Foster will use over and oer and over to bring her mind into Nell's solitary universe.

Not only does Nell not speak any recognizable language; she lacks the facial codes by which we communicate. Foster's face goes slack, losing its archness and what she describes as its "defendedness." She would look dumb, except for the feral intensity in her eyes, She stands, rigid, then hurls herself into the scene, circling the table in rage, frustration, confusion, and panic. This is the scene in which Neeson, who plays Dr. Jerome Lovell, suddenly drops his professional veneer. His vulnerability revealed. Nell recognizes him finally as her ga'inja -- Nellish for "guardian angel." It's the first moment of connection in the movie, and in a series of takes, Foster runs through all the different gradations of connectedness that could exist between a man of science and a primal creature like Nell. In one take she dances as if in a bacchanalia. In another she jerks to a halt midway, forgetting where she is in her lines, although to the ear she's just speaking gibberish. Her voice is high and breathy, younger and less assured than usual. In another take she really seems to be talking to Neeson, zeroing in on him, taking his hand in hers and caressing her face with it, another characteristic Nell gesture.

"Perhaps with less connection," suggests Apted.

Foster responds by becoming more fervent, although less focused on Neeson. She holds on to him in a solipsistic haze, swinging her body forward and back in an echo of Nell's familiar motion, and babbling unintelligibly. She seems to have lost control of the muscles in her face, which flickers with fear and incomprehension. When Neeson finally speaks, joy emanates from her delicate features. She folds her slight figure into his giant embrace. The performance is out there, potentially self-indulgent. But Foster pulls it off. At the end, she is crying.

Apted cuts the action and she blows her nose. The script supervisor comes over and says that she thinks Foster turned her head the wrong way during the last scene.

"No. I know I didn't," the actress says, convinced to the contrary. The supervisor still disagrees. Foster replays it in her mind, turning her head. "No, I have a sixth sense about this," she insists. "I would never turn my head away from the camera."

When she's not shooting, Foster spends a lot of time here on location hunkered down at her PowerBook, writing business memos and e-mailing and faxing her friends. She wears her lucky red shirt with its cowboy motif and her FBI sweats -- part of her film wardrobe that she only wears on sets and packs up between gigs. People often expect her to be more intimidating, as if a pair of Oscars and a Yale diploma were some sort of tiara.

"I think Mel was afraid to make jokes the first weeek of Maverick," says Foster with a laugh. Gibson now has ttaken to faxing her regularly from the Braveheart set in Scotland. Foster, who was so worried about the part of Nell that she told her friends to not even think of calling her here in North Carolina, instead seems loose and happy. That's mostly because she discovered that she could throw all the research and preparation out the window.

History is littered with cases of "wild" children, and Nell is not the first movie to explore society's fascination with them. Of all these cases, two are perhaps best known. Francois Truffaut's The Wild Child depicts one -- that of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, found living in the forests of revolutionary France. A sensation in Paris, Victor seemed the ideal tabula rasa on which to scrawl on eof the big questions of the Enlightenment -- namely, Is language what distinguishes man from beast? If Victor could learn to speak, he'd be proved human.

The other, more infamous case occurred about 200 years later. In a house in suburban Los Angeles, authorities discovered a thirteen-year-old girl whom they later named Genie, who for the first decade of her life had been consigned by her father to a dark room, harnessed to an infant's potty seat. By the late 20th century, scientists had figured out the differences between man and beast. Now they wanted to know exactly how children went about acquiring language. Both cases ended badly for the children, who, once the flurry of public attention died, were each relegated to institutions.

Like Little Man Tate, Nell echoes a theme from Foster's well-chronicled life: the predicament of an innocent with exceptional gifts who faces a kind of insidious corruption by well-meaning individuals. Nell succeeds at making the world accept her on her own terms. She doesn't learn English, but the doctors and the audience learn Nellish.

"I think it's an incredibly moving, hopeful story that in the midst of everything points to what is important in the world," says Jon Hutman, Nell's gifted production designer and one of Foster's best friends. "It's not about the movie business and filmmaking or movie stars or power or corporations. It's about coming into your own as a person."

Producer Renee Missel discovered Mark Handley's play Idioglossia, on which Nell is based, at an L.A. theater and brought it to Foster right after The Silence of the Lambs. Both Missel and Foster put a lot of work into the project -- which is the first film for Egg Pictures, Foster's company -- eventually bringing on Shadowlands writer William Nicholson to rework Handley's screen adaptation. They had the script vetted by psychologists and even consulted with a linguist who had studied Genie. But there's an implication in the dictionary definition of idioglossia -- a condition in which the affected person pronounces words so badly as to seem to speak a language all his own -- that is key in setting Nell's fate apart from that of Genie and Victor. Nell's language, like her life, is not inferior to ours. It's merely different.

The classically trained Neeson and Richardson (who plays Paula Olsen) came to rehearsals expecting to explore and experiment, and they were surprised to discover that Foster had actually already figured out most of what she wanted to do.

"It was extraordinary once I realized that I wasn't going to get any of the anwers from the books that I was going to read -- that I just had to have the experience," Foster says. "This has been really different for me. I've had to look at the [methods] that other people use to become actors. They go to acting class and learn to melt like an ice cream cone. They act like a tree. It's just not what I do. That kind of stuff makes me roll my eyes, but there isn't any other way around [the part of Nell]."

She laughs self-deprecatingly. "I mean, I have to be able to melt like an ice cream cone."

Mostly, she tried to tap into Nell's physicality. Foster worked with a movement teacher for the first time in her life, and devised Nell's curious gesture. It looks like a dance, one meant to be done with another person. But Nell does it alone, breathtakingly, in a kind of poem of loss.

"I said, 'What if another person were there? What would the gesture become?'" She demonstrates. "'Please come towards me' -- bringing them into you." She's pulling the invisible partner forward. "And them saying, 'Please come back to me,' and them pulling you to them. And every time I would do this, I would start to cry."

Foster suddenly seems filled with melancholy. "I couldn't explain it. There was just something about that gesture that was so moving that I went, 'If this person is not there, then I'm going to create them. I'm just going to make them up because it's the only thing that's allowing me to cope.' The thing Nell is most informed by is that she has loved somebody, without barriers and without hesitation."

Nell's purity transforms Lovell and Olsen; what the doctors bring to her is more problematic. Despite their good intentions, they force her to recognize that her family is gone forever, and that ultimately, she is alone. They introduce her to the "human world that's filled with disappointment that people go away and that love in adults is conditional," explains Foster. "That's a big, nasty disappointment for somebody who believes in utopia and unconditional love."

"My mom used to say things like this and it drove me insane: 'You're really a classy person, and someday you'll realize that your style is just a pair of jeans and an Armani jacket.'"

It's several months since Nell has wrapped and several days after a vacation in France for Foster, and the actress is curled up in a big, comfortable chair in her unpretentious -- but classy -- offices at Egg Pictures. Designed by her sister Connie, the place has large white couches with kilim throw pillows, elegant black-and-white photographs on the walls, and tons of dog-eared books. Foster, who often tells stories in little playlets (in which she plays all the parts), is doing new-wave-period Jodie.

"'Shut up! What do you know about my style!' I had, like, blue hair. I was, like, "Just because you think I should be Grace Kelly doesn't mean I'm Grace Kelly.'

"She should have never said that to me. She should've just thought it. You should be searching in your twenties. And you should be coming to a lot of dead ends, whether they be 'What I really am is a political activist' or 'What I really am is a rock musician.' You should experience all that because you never know what you'll try. She drove me crazy. If she said it once, she said it 500 times, and I could've killed her. And, of course, who am I?"

She's a woman wearing a cream-colored Armani suit.

After the intimacy and rawness of her scenes on the Nell set, it's odd to see Foster like this, in Hollywood armor: the suit, hair cropped to chin-length, elegant horn-rimmed glasses. She's gracious but wired, suffering from nights of bad dreams and sleeplessness because, she says, she doesn't live anywhere anymore. Foster bought a house a couple of years ago when she was in an "L.A. is a scuzzy Hollywood town" mood, and it's too far away from everything. She's having trouble finding a new place; she's so picky that she can't bear what an ugly doorknob or an ugly light switch might imply about her. Unlike Nell, Foster has no refuge; she's moving into a hotel on Friday. It's a depressing thought.

"The problem is, I can't really go out all the time and feel okay about what might happen to me," says the actress. Out in the hallway, a security guard stands by the elevator, not far from the bolted waiting-room door -- a consequence of Foster's long-ago brush with an obsessed John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin. "I don't get to go out like other people do. I can't go to McDonald's or a coffee shop."

Movies, for Foster, area safe arena in which to work out the detritus of her life. She seems to believe in anger and pain, though not in self-pity. "I am who I am," she says flatly. "If I had lived in Iowa and had no shit, who would I be? What would I have to say? Working it all out has been the fodder of my craft. Understanding it is what I've been doing for the last fifteen years."

As a child, Foster didn't play innocents but children who knew too much and who had lost their childhoods. She herself was precocious, surprising her family at the age of three by reading billboards out loud. It was not long after that she secured her first acting job, following her brother, Buddy, into a Coppertone audition and leaving with a part. Foster is the by-many-years youngest of four children born to Lucius and Brandy Foster. They split up -- not amicably -- when she was pregnant with Jodie; for a while the indefatigable Brandy supported her four kids by doing public relations work.

Soon, Foster began winning parts in television series (including a season as Addie Pray on the spinoff of Paper Moon) and later in features. She used to be terrified by the trips to court to get her work permit renewed. "They'd look at your fingernails, and if you bit your nails, chances were that you were a really nervous person, and that was one of the signs of somebody who might be having trouble with the business," says Foster. "I was literally petrified. I'd go in and I'd be like this" -- she clenches her fists. "You know, 'cause I didn;t want them to see that I bit my nails. I didn't want them to think that I was bad or a psycho or something." By the time she was in double digits, her paycheck had become the predominant one in the clan.

"The whole house worked," Foster hastens to point out. "For the family. For survival. My sister would baby-sit me when my brother went to work, and my other sister would drive me when I went to work. They worked as hard as I did. They just didn't do the famous stuff."

Brandy's love of culture and aesthetics thrived regardless of the family's financial state, and "we would go on these drives, these little home tours of L.A.," Foster recalls. "My mom would say, 'This is the Mediterranean style and this particular molding shouldn't be here; that's an interior mold, it's not an exterior mold.' We'd have these visual-training sessions where she'd say, 'Oh, God, why'd they put French windows in that house? Isn't that disgusting?'"

The Fosters would go on other drives through Hollywood, some of which inadvertently prepared Jodie for Taxi Driver.

"We'd ride up and down Hollywood Boulevard -- to see what movies were playing, who was lining up for what -- and we'd also go down Selma. This was where the young kids were, and where the drug houses and stuff were. There were the male prostitutes. There were the female prostitutes. You know, we'd lock our doors as we were going by."

Foster had to spend four hours with a psychiatrist to prove that she was grounded enough to play Taxi Driver's twelve-year-old streetwalker. She had to spend many more hours with Robert De Niro.

"I remember him being kind of directive," she says. He'd pick her up every day and take her to various funky diners, where "he would run the lines ad nauseam with me. It was so boring, it was just like, 'Oh God. Do I have to?' And he wouldn't talk to me. In his Method-y way, he'd just kind of sit there and go, 'Yeah.' By the time I got to the actual shooting of the scene, I knew the dialogue so well that when he went off into a surprise area, it never threw me because I could always go back to the text. But I would see the text in a new way. Before, it had always been me up there. Somebody would say, 'Just be more like yourself,' or 'Could you do that more natural?'" Taxi Driver was the first time she realized that "this acting thing was not just a hobby, that it was actually a real thing you could do. A real, fulfilling craft."

She says she didn't really rebel during her teenage years. She became a solitary, straight-A student at a French lycee in L.A. But she played a lot of tough girls, girls who knew how to work the corners, in Carny, Foxes, and Bugsy Malone. She's gang-raped and then sleeps with her screen brother in The Hotel New Hampshire, which was directed by Natasha Richardson's father, the late Tony Richardson.

"I was just completly, literally inspired by this young woman who was so smart and so talented and so completely down-to-earth at the same time," recalls Natasha, who met Foster around the time of The Hotel New Hampshire. "And at the time she was very disillusioned with acting. I think she found it too easy for too long. I thin when something comes naturally to someone, it's very easy to denigrate it. She had this talent and facility and she wanted to just kick it away.

"I have a feeling there's a loneliness in Jodie,' adds Richardson, "and a loneliness in Nell that she connects to."

By the time Foster got to Yale, the parts were dwindling. She'd gone from being a nymphette to a chubby college freshman to a young actress who was gradually falling off Hollywood's screen. She was worried that she would become just 'a body and a face and gestures for advertising. See, The Accused was my last try."

Jonathan Kaplan, the movie's director, "begged and borrowed and stole to get me the audition," Foster recalls. "He wasn't in any position to be championing me at all. But he wanted me to be included in the audition process, and they -- these were the producers, a big deal -- said no. And I wasn't allowed to get the script.

"Of course, I already had the script. Nobody was allowed to tell me what the audition scene would be, because I wasn't allowed to be auditioned. So basically I had to fly into New York the day before and meet [producer] Stanley Jaffe. So that he could look me over and make the decision about whether or ot I was good-looking enough."

She also had to show him that she'd lost all the weight she'd gained as a teenager. He relented and allowed her to audition...leaving her less than 48 hours to learn the script.

"So I did the best I could. I thought she was a tough-broken girl. I had on, like, a little cut-off black T-shirt and a pair of jeans or something. I felt that was the character."

Kaplan thought she was great, but says that the word that came back from the studio was that Foster wasn't "'rapeable'" enough.

She mimics her critics: " 'I dont't know, she's too urban. And we think that's really bad, that she's urban. She's too tough.' So Jonathan called me back in panic and said, 'They're gonna go with somebody else, but I would like to bring you back in [for a final test].' I thought, Back in for what? He said, 'Look, just don't be urban at all. Just be as California as you are, Wear something really nice and come in and be soft.' I said, 'But, but, that's not, you know, that's not [the character].' And he said, 'We'll worry about that later'."

Foster settles back into her chair. "It was probably the worst performance I've given. And they hired me."

She would later learn that Kaplan, and probably more important, Kelly McGillis, at the time a major star, had threatened to quit unless she was given the role of Sarah Tobias. "Well, let me put it this way," says Foster, "they hired me based on that, but they took three and a half, four weeks to hire me. They waited until a week before I was supposed to go shoot. So they could have enough time to see if someone else better came along."

Again and again, Foster describes The Accused as a "real unconscious moment in my life. I have no idea why I was so obsessed with it. I feel like I jumped into that movie with that absolutely-not-knowing kind of thing. I did no research at all. I never read the script more than once. I would just think of these excuses not to read it. It really wasn't until I got there that I realized what I had gotten myself into."

Foster, it seems, often chooses movies as a sort of therapy. "What I've found is that the greatest terrain for me is to go find out what I am really afraid of, then go play itt. I wasn't going to have somebody tell me that I had to only play what was safe, because I wasn't going to get anywhere doing that." Given what had happened in Foster's life -- the horrifying Hinckley eposide and the attendant media blitz; the waning career; having to prove that she could be attractive enough to make a gang of men want to rape her -- it seems obvious, in retrospect, why Sarah's fear so quickly turned to anger at being victimized.

"From the screen test to the filming, the element that was added was the depth of her rage," recalls Kaplan. "She could access that depth from going through the rape. She wasn't penetrated, but the sequence was 90 percent real. She had to do it over and over again."

"I felt, at times, that [the crew] were so ready to leave that film, and that some of the reasons they stayed were that felt sorry for me," says Foster. She looks sad, a little distant. "They felt protective of me."

In fact the actors in the rape scene began to fall apart, even cried on the set. Kaplan recalls that Foster handled her fears by taking care of them. "That's what obsessed me, actually thinking, I don't want those guys to feel bad: I don't want them to feel guilty," Foster says. "And then a year later I said, 'Why did I care? What do I care what they think?' Why was I so worried that somehow they were gonna feel bad about themselves?

"It's a pretty strong feminine trait, which is, it's okay for you to feel pain, but God forbid a man should cry in the presence of you." She has an interesting tendency to use to world you instead of I when talking about deeply personal things. "It's interesting for the part because somewhere down the line you think you deserve it. Whatever pain you go through, you must deserve it. And that movie really made me examine that in myself. That I kept it so focused on everyone else. In my film, where I went through so much. But I didn't want to think about what I was going through."

After the film wrapped, she recovered by...going to nightclubs incessantly. For three months she danced as Sarah Tobias had danced. "I've never done this since. All I wanted to think about was what cool black dress I was gonna wear, and I wanted to go to cool clubs and hang out with cool people and drive around in cool cars. It was as if I were a model: 'I want to be as superficial as I can possibly be. I just want to not think about it. Not feel too much.' It's so not like me." She was depressed, and convinced she "stunk" in the movie.

"When I was a little kid, the director would say, 'I would like you to put your toe on this left corner and twirl your head at a certain angle and do this.' My whole point in life was to follow to the most minute detail absolutely everything they wanted me to be. And when I accomplished that, I got a lot of applause. One of the big revelations about The Accused was that I was not able to follow directions. I couldn't do it any other way. And I thought, Well this is it. It's the end of my career. I'll never work again, because I can't tailor my performance to be what they want me to be. I can't do it. I guess because I suck.

"And years later, finally, I think Jonathan said, 'You dummy. Don't you realize that you couldn't play what wasn't real? What wasn't true?'" Foster not only got a lot of applause for The Accused, she also got an Oscar.

She earned her second Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs; her part in that film, she says, is most parallel to who she is in real life. Clarice Starling is a woman with a mission to "save the women she's been taught to disrespect. She needed to love them in order to respect them, to not find repulsive their commonness, their fatness, their anonymity. It's by examining what she's so goddamned afraid of becoming that finally gives her the answer."

The first day of shooting on Nell, Foster had to lift her dress high abover her head and spin around naked in front of a pool hall full of teenagers. The scene echoes The Accused, the young men taunting her sexually, but Nell doesn't understand their innuendo, responding joyously, happy in her nakedness. The audience sees Nell as a beautiful, physical creature, though not as a sexual object. But in one of the climactic scenes, which takes place on a houseboat in the middle of a thunderstorm, Olsen taunts Lovell about his interest in Nell.

"Not exactly a grown woman, is she?" Olsen asks, jealous of his obsession with the wild child, who is so desirable to Lovell precisely because of her unawareness of her sexuality. And because, as Olsen recognizes, she offers that up to Lovell without condition. Of course, the flip side is that Nell doesn't need him at all -- she's entirely self-sufficient, reconciled to a life alone. Foster's body is literally slicked down for this scene and others. Several times she swims nude, the moonlight shimmering on her luminescent form. Yet these scenes are not designed for the audience's prurient delectation; they're meant to be emblematic of Nell's freedom.

"Ten or fifteen years ago, the idea of showing this much of my chest made me so insane that I could not possibly do it," Foster says. "But Nell wasn't looking at somebody and taking a shirt off, which is really uncomfortable."

When the actress was fourteen, she refused to disrobe for The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. And so Connie Foster indeed supported her sister's career; she body-doubled for her.

"I didn't know who was going to take advantage of it," says Jodie. "There was a certain amount of control that I couldn't give up. Now I'm a little bit ready for it."

Age and success have brought Foster confidence. "Nell was really, really freeing,' she says. "I thought I was going to come back and be tired and totally drained, and I wasn't tired at all. It taught me a lot about what will happen next, and not to worry so much. Maybe that's key. To just worry a little bit less about the things you can't control."