Jodie Foster has nightmares. "Disquieting dreams," she calls them. While she sleeps, Foster finds herself starring in a movie, acting out a vampiric existence, engaging in roaming primal feasts where blood flows in rivers of Bordeaux and guilt is not on the menu. "Sort of like The Lost Boys," she says. "All these people that I'm with perpetrate really bad, horrible, violent crimes...but we don't feel anything. And we just continue on and, like, have lunch! Basically like vampires. That same idea — you go out in groups and you do horrible, violent things. And I'm one of them."

She arrives in a black luxury station wagon with dark tinted windows. A pair of Everlast boxing gloves dangle from the rearview mirror. Fold down the backseat and it could sleep a five-foot-four-inch vampire, with room to spare. The drape of her hair is pulled back ina ponytail, revealing the finely featured, ageless face. Around her slender neck rests a single strand of tiny garnets, which fall into a narrow stream between her tight-shirted breasts. A pale length of unshaven leg is exposed through the opening of her long sarong skirt ("I get waxed every three weeks," she reveals later. "There's part of it that I really like — the little bit of pain. It feels good.") Here toenails are blood red.

"I have a lot of dreams where I'm in a movie," Foster says, maneuvering through L.A. traffic. "I'm sure it's my way of allowing myself to do something and say, "Well, I didn't totally have to feel that. It's just a movie.' Same way with my work," she says. "I get to take on things and experience this life, feel that remotely." The dreams always have happy endings: "I wake up incredibly lighthearted. Completely cheery."

Foster pulls up to one of her old haunts, Campanile. The deco-style restaurant was once Charlie Chaplin's office space, and a place where Foster has spent countless nights eating alone at the bar. "Maybe I can cheat and find a parking spot, and then I don't have to pay valet." She surveys the area. "There's one! Yeah! All right! Things are going good." Happily, she parks, and pumps the meter full of quarters.

Foster has waking nightmares too. The kind that plague an actress who does not consider herself a star but someone who could have been. "I sometimes get this sickening feeling that I'm going to wake up twenty years from now and that I'm going to say, 'Fuck, man, I why didn't I take Door Number Three? You know? 'What was I, crazy? Everybody else took Door Number Three!'"

In a town where many stars will play if The Price Is Right, there are some better know for their going rate than for their performances. who doesn't know Demi Moore got paid $12.5 million for Striptease? "People make different choices for different reasons," Foster says diplomatically. Still. "The Demi thing is, like, hard not to notice. Like the Planet Hollywood thing. I could have made a tremendous amount of money in an incredibly short time, making movies I didn't care about. And I probably would have a short-lived career, but I'd be really, really rich. Think about how many movies these types of people have made in the last few years."

Foster — actor, director, producer — limits her screen-trade adventures to one a year, so she has time to "get my shit together in my house. Clean out my closet. Go to the post office. Or go to FedEx and fill out the form...

"What do they do? Do they live their life on planes? Do they ever go home? Do they have friends? Because you can't have friends when you're working — you work incredibly long hours. Do you just import people? I don't know." You definitely valet park.

She does have on question universal to both stars and actors alike: "The gnocchi, is that made with cream?" she asks the waiter. No cream. "I'm going to have that."

Foster surrenders the menu and shrugs. "I just hope twenty years from now I don't feel like I had some kind of highfalutin idea...and then end up not being able to work at all. That's my fear."

This from the $9.5 million star of Contact. It's a big-budget movie, based on the best-selling book by astronomer Carl Sagan, with an Oscar-winning director (Forrest Gump's Robert Zemeckis), a hunky leading man (Matthew McConaughey), and a ton of special effects. Never work again? Earth to Foster!

Zemeckis tries to think of anyone else who could play the role of Ellie Arroway, a loner scientist who discovers a message from the distant star Vega, signaling that there truly is life Out There. "If you were to look at all actresses living or dead, the young Katharine Hepburn is probably the closest," the director says. "Jodie's always brought that same combination of beauty, grace, and strength without ever sacrificing femininity. And intellect without sacrificing humanity."

It is that kind of delicate balance that brings all smart scripts her way without a single coffee ring on the title page. Think about it — how many actresses, or stars, can make us really believe they're FBI agents or astronomers and still make men want to rip their credentials off at night? In fact, Foster had first dibs on the role of a government attorney in Conspiracy Theory. "I would give Jodie anything," admits director Richard Donner, who cast Julia Roberts when Foster had to decline. "The only criticism I have is that she doesn't wear her glasses enough — she looks darling. You want to walk over to her, take her glasses off, and let her hair down. I'm madly in love with her." See?

Foster, 34, hasn't acted for three years. She made Contact because it gave her a chance to play "a hero — as opposed to heroine," she says. "And to have her journey be the human journey in the film." It's one not entirely alien to the actress who plays her. "When somebody says, 'What is it that draws her to looking out there as opposed to looking in here? Why does she not connect with people? Is it a fear of intimacy?' It's not that. It's, 'Why would I settle for messy, chaotic human beings that abandon you and are fucked up and don't understand you?'" In the end, Ellie knows she must go off into the Unknown — an act that takes more than a little courage. "I tend to play characters that come up against adversity and figure out a way, through their wits and tenacity and skill, to say, 'Well, I'll live through that.' A lot of my questins are about my fears in life. And I'm not sure I'm an incredibly brave person. I just don't now what I'd live through." Foster shakes her head. "I keep being in the same movie over and over again. Nobody realizes it but me."

With the face of a cherub and the husky tenor of a Bacall, Foster spoke her first professional line — "I'm the good fairy" — in a school play, on Mayberry R.F.D. (big brother Buddy was a regular on the series). "Here was this darling little kid with a tiara on and this very low voice," recalls her sister Connie, repeating the line again, laughing at the memory. "Jodie had that deep voice since she was born. She was just always herself and stole the show."

Foster was the baby of the family, born in 1962, five years after her three siblings. Her sister recalls her talking at one, reading at two, and singing "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am" on key — and with an English accent — by three. "Completely spoiled," Jodie admits. "But at the same time, mom learned not to dote on me, and she gae my brother and sisters tasks: tie the baby's shoes, change the baby's diapers, baby-sit the baby...." Foster had three pacificiers tied to her person from the moment she woke. "In case I lost one," she explains. "If I didn't have one in my mouth at all times, I had a little fit."

All happy families are alike, every broken family is unhappy in its own way. While Jodie was still floating in amniotic fluid, her father, a real estate agent, left the family. "He wasn't around, and that was his choice," says Connie. "There were times when we would be waiting to be picked up and he wouldn't show." In the years soon after Jodie was born, they moved five times. Their mother, Brandy, had a talent for fixing up houses, reselling at a profit, and moving on. She also had a talent for managing her children's careers. "I used to have a real fear of being poor again," says Foster. "Not that we were destitute. But for some reason, I took it really personally. And I had a lot of anxiety about just not being able to make a living."

Every piece of luck, Foster says, "begets another piece of luck." And her career stock rose with each turn. Buddy, meanwhile, faded from view after his second series was canceled. As a teenager, Buddy left home, and since then has had only sporadic contact with his family. Imagine, then, Foster's surprise when she learned her brother was writing a tell-all account of his upbringing with his famous sister. "I don't know what to say about it except that I just feel sad for him," she says. Though Buddy's Foster Child has made headlines with its open speculation about Jodie's sexual orientation, the book is thin on specifics. After all, the siblings have rarely seen each other since childhood. "He hasn't been a part of the family for many, many years," she says. "He's been off doing whatever he does." She gives a weary little laugh. "I stay as far away from him as I possibly can."

"Jodie's been through a lot since she was a kid, which most of us haven't," says her Sommersby costar Richard Gere. "Somehow, most of us believe in the outside world. Then when we're in our twenties we disbelieve in it. And I think her disbelief came earlier. She understood about jobs, about media, about madness. When we were playing in the backyard, she was making movies playing a prostitute. I think that's with her, there's a kind of prescience about her."

Director Jonathan Kaplan befriended Foster in the late '70s, when they nearly worked together on Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, and then cast her a decade later in The Accused. "She still puts too much pressure on herself," he says. "That goes hand in hand with being a kid who's making the money for the family. It's never enough. It's never enough success. And it's not about power or acclaim. It's just the feeling that, Am I doing everything thatt I'm supposed to be doing? It's a syndrome."

Foster went from playing a platform-heeled hooker in Taxi Driver to a spit-curled gangster's moll in a musical send-up with an all-kid cast. Bugsy Malone director Alan Parker can still see his young star "tearing around Pinewood Studios with the others, determined to be a kid." He chuckles. "She was very good at looking at her watch, knowing the child-labor laws so they could get off set and go have fun." And then, like an exasperated father: "God knows what was going on."

Lots. Foster would swim and play Ping-Pong with costar Scott Baio. "He was really a good-looking kid. And he knew it," she says. Every girl on that movie loved him, and they made my life miserable because I got to say in the same hotel as he did." Every time Foster walked down the studio hallway, her rivals would be armed and waiting. "They had these fire extinguishers and they'd say, 'Okay, what's the password?' And they's spray me if I didn't say the right thing!" Foster howls. "They were the Heathers!"

On the set, says Parker, "she knew more about what we were doing than we did. She had a directorial brain even then. I kept saying to her, 'What shot do you want now?'" When Foster ultimately did call the shots — on Little Man Tate and Home for the Holidays — she chose projects that examine complex family ties. Observing her relationship with Brandy, Parker says, "At times it was difficult to differentiate which one was the mother. She looked after her a lot."

The dark, rouge-colored liquid swirls in lazy circles within the goblet. "I do love having a glass of red wine at lunch," says Foster, looking relaxed. "I'm not interested in going outside today. It's so damn hot out there.

"My mother never let me in the sun. My brother and sisters have big freckles all over their bodies. Melanoma city." A quick spot check of the limbs. Under close observation, Foster's face is line-free, aside from the faint thread around her eyes from smiling. There are no grooves of concern marking her countenance. "I was always really kind of worried," she says of her childhood. "So even though I have great memories of going places and doing things, a lot of feelings about my childhood are a little serious."

But Foster says her worriment was wholly self-inflicted. "My mom is an amazing woman. And it doesn't mean she's perfect. But whatever it was vicariously that she needed to pass down to me because of her own life, it was the right thing. Whatever neurosis it was, it worked for me." She fixes you with a stare. "And it was appropriate."

Can she recall one especially happy moment? Foster sits and thinks. And thinks. Just one? She looks off in the distance. Rubs her chin. "No, not really." She laughs. "Goddammit! You made me go there! Wait, let me think....Going to live in France at fourteen was a big moment. Bought a great apartment, made a really bad French movie. Nobody wanted me to ride a moped. My friend said, 'We're going out and getting mopeds,' and we had one of those amazing days. We went all over Paris — the Eiffel Tower, the Trocadero...And I was free. I had my own damn vehicle. First time."

Back in Los Angeles, Foster returned to the private school Le Lycee Francais. Her French lessons came in handy while she was shooting Adrian Lyne's Foxes, a dark little film about teenagers growing up in southern California, which reunited her with Scott Baio. One night the two were filming a scene in a pickup truck. "There was this assistant director we all hatd," recounts Baio. "She was a real bitch. I said to Jodie, 'I can't stand her!' And Jodie said, 'Me either!'" And with that, Foster picked up a walkie-talkie, called the woman, rattled away in perfect Francais, and bid adieu. "Jodie hangs up, and I said, 'What did you say to her?' And she said, 'I called her "You this, you that..."' Every four-letter word in the French book. And we're laughing," Baio says. "Now the woman walks up to the truck, goes right up to Jodie's window, and says, 'Hey, Jodie...' And she started speaking in fluent french! Jodie got busted by this woman. Jodie was stunned. It was hilarious."

After wrapping the film, Foster sent Lyne a poignant letter telling him he was "the first director that got me to cry." She was referring to a scene in which her character has a fight with her mother (Sally Kellerman). "Jodie has to cry afterwards when she screams back at [Kellerman]," says Lyne. "And she couldn't do it. She had a kind of self-contained quality that kept the hurt out. She said, 'Oh, use Vaseline.' I remember waiting it out for four hours and gradually breakng her down. And finally, out of sheer fatigue, she did cry when she was screaming at her mother. It was like a real cri de couer."

Foster was living a rarefied existence, but it didn't protect her from typical teenage angst. She just had to live through it on a 40-foot screen. "I was a little chubby and had zits," she says. On Foxes, they asked me to lose as much weight as I possibly could. And I just kept going." At the time she started shooting Carny, in 1979, she was down to 85 pounds. When Connie came to visit her little sister on the Savannah set, she was "alarmed," she says. "Jodie was way too thin." Did she have an eating disorder? "Yeah, I think I did," Foster says. "I got really obsessie. I played tennis every day."

"She looked fantastic," says singer Robbie Robertson, who produced and costarred in the film. "She looked tougher, older, sexier. It was her first sexy role. I remember a lot of people on this project had the hots for her, men and women."

Foster describes the making of the movie as one big "famous Hollywood moment." It was, by all accounts, a wild ride. "There were lots of drugs. It was the period too," explains Robertson. "I mean, the crew...everywhere you went, there were drugs." The shoot was also complicated by the cast of characters. You had Robertson, a former member of the Band, who had never acted in a film, and costar Gary Busey (self-explanatory). And the real-life carnival workers playing themselves onscreen, while offscreen trying to take the film crew for everything they were worth.

And yet the film is most remarkable for Foster's powers of seduction. Without any real nudity, she implies the kind of carnal knowledge actresses twice her age can't convey buck naked. It is exciting, unsettling. And completely an act. Says Robertson, "I had this sexy scene with her and she said, 'I have no idea what I'm doing. Just pretend we're dancing, and I'll follow you.'"

"It was me kind of sitting on him and him making out with me," recalls Foster. "We had to reshoot it three times because Robbie was shaking. He was shaking so hard, God knows from what." She giggles. "I have to say, he was a doll. And frankly, he handled his drugs really well."

Robertson calls the production "an experiment in terror. I've never had the chance to tell Jodie this, but she was a saving grace to me. Because she was so solid in her thinking and such a little pro already. And I was surrounded by maniacs." He sighs. "I really cared a lot about her. It's one of those things that just went inside me and lives there."

At 6 o'clock Jodie Foster came to 860. She looked beautiful. Witth her mother. She and her mother are a team. It's like a marriage — Jodie's the father. She's very intelligent and she's gotten into all the colleges she's applied to...In case she goes to Harvard we were telling her about John Samuels and how cute he is, but I don't know what type she'd like because she dresses really like a boy — all in Brooks Brothers.
                 — The Andy Warhol Diaries,
                    Thursday, April 10, 1980

"Andy Warhol was like an aunt," says Foster. "He kept trying to introduce me to all sorts of rich boys. 'You know, you should really know the marquis of...you should really know the baroness' sons...' Remember when he was in that whole royalty phase?" She grins, rolls her eyes. "Andy was really very cute."

At Yale she majored in literature and minored in fun. "That, to me, was my childhood," she says. "I did everything that I just never dreamed I would ever be able to do. To live 3,000 miles from home and to not have to answer to anybody."

Foster recalls one night that could well serve as a plot for a John Hughes film. "This friend of mine, Henrietta, was obsessed with a soap star, Dack Rambo," she says gleefully. "She loved him. We read in the paper that he was speaking at a mall in Bridgeport. I don't know if you've ever been to Bridgeport, but it's pretty much the armpit of Connecticut. But we sent him little notes saying, 'We're four Yale girls and meet us at the Holiday Inn for a drink.' So on her birthday, we blindfolded her and took her on this trip to meet Dack.

"And so we went to some Holiday Inn bar and got completely smashed, knowing that he would never come — and they he showed up! And it was just one of those hysterically fun nights. And I have this memory of three girls in the backseat — me driving — so out of their minds. Listening to Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing.' Just laughing so hysterically." She is laughing hard now. Her face completely open. Those were the days.

"Obviously, drugs and alcohol were very much involved in everything I did," she says. Is she being facetious? "No!" she exclaims. "But I can't talk about that, that would bad." A small smirk. "I'm supposed to be a role model for young women."

Like everyone else, Foster gained the freshman ten and then some. "I was really fat," she says. "I also had my little Hinckley drama, which didn't help. It's the last moment in your life where you want people to turn their cameras on wherever you go." The mention of John Hinckley, Jr. — whose obsession with the actress culminated in his 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan — is startling. Interviewers are routinely warned that Foster will walk out if they bring up the name. "It was humiliating having bodyguards and being in college, where I was supposed to be anonymous, and walking into a class and having, like, the Guys," recalls Foster. Nevertheless, "people go through worse shit. So I've always hated that 'poor me' idea. But it was a hard time. It took many, many, many years to kind of figure all that out. And now, I guess, finally it's so much in the past I can stand to talk about it."

Like a drop of dye in a clear pool of water, the incident shaded her life. "Those kinds of objects of desire, if you will, once manifested by one crazy person, are latched on to by other crazy people," says director Tony Bill, who hired a guard for Foster during the making of Five Corners, after receiving "something we took seriously." Bill says he never told Foster about the extra security. But she no doubt picked up on it; she is at all times spatially aware, even as she jokes that she'd rather sit with her back to the restaurant because "I don't want to see it coming."

Foster loves the scene in The Piano in which an impassive Holly Hunter is pulled into the ocean toward her death and then suddenly fights to survive. "Fearless has that moment too, that gasping for breath," she says. "A passive person forced into a situation where suddenly they have to say, 'No, no, no, I want to live!' And what living means is being an authentic person at that point. Saying 'I don't want to die — I want to be who I am.'" The Hinckley incident and surrounding attention left Foster gasping for breath, and then she had her moment: "I made a decision that life was worth living."

Hours have passed. The sun has burned off all the clouds and refuses to set. The valet waves good-bye in sleepy slow motion. Foster's car sits across the street, plastered with parking tickets. Ninety dollars worth. An offer to expense them on the magazine is refused: "Forget it — I'm rich!"

Foster pulls a U-turn, hangs a left down Sunset Boulevard, and goes. Right now she's free, and she's got her own damn vehicle.

The actress refuses to valet-park, but doesn't mind the tickets. Two Oscars, and she still second-guesses her career choices. Foster is found in her ironies.

In Five Corners, the woman who had been the obscure object of Hinckley's desire plays a woman stalked by an obsessive neighborhood thug. Tony Bill remembers being met "with more resistance to casting Jodie than to two unknowns" — Joh Turturro and Tim Robbins. "The people financing the movie were dead set against it," he says. "Frankly, their comment was, 'She's overweight and washed up.' " Disproving their theory with recent photographs, Bill faced another fight. "There was a company negotiating for the video rights. And a young woman executive actually called and said I had to shoot Jodie nude." (With Bill's support, Foster got the part, and kept her clothes on.)

But the actress soon became disillusioned with her limited options. "I couldn't see spending my life working with bad material," she says. "Sometimes, as an actor you just wear the grape suit and be the bestt grape you can possibly be." But not Foster. "My ego is too huge to not do something that has some impact on our culture. I don't think I would have stuck it out much longer. Thank God The Accused came along."

Jonathan Kaplan had been wanting to work with Foster since their close call on The Fabulous Stains. He asked Foster to meet with producer Stanley Jaffe about playing the part of Sarah Tobias, a working-class woman who is gang-raped in a bar. Foster's reply: "He wants to see if I'm fat, right?" Says Kaplan, "That was exactly what it was, because there was this period of time where the take on Jodie was that she'd just completely chubbed out."

But again, Foster tipped the scales in her favor. She screen-tested with four scenes, one of which — the courtroom testimony — proved problematic. "She was going to have to demonstrate vulnerability," says Kaplan. "But it didn't feel truthful to her. It was about not being a victim. I said, 'Jodie, you've just gotta cry.' "

The same scene was a sticking point during the filming as well. "It was the last week of shooting," says Foster, "and I couldn't give him what he wanted. I thought I was doing what was right for the part, and he came up to me at the end and I said, 'How was it?' And he was just so mean to me. So at this, I burst into tears and I went into makeup. I would try to think really happy thoughts, but I couldn't stop crying. Then the AD goes to Jonathan — and by the way, Jonathan and I are really, really, really good friends — so then they go, 'Jodie's crying.' And everyone tells me he goes, 'Yeah, well, too bad she has no emotion when she's onscreen, but she can do it in her trailer!' "

Kaplan remembers it differently: "What I said was, "Get her back here! She's emotional, bring her back and let's shoot.' That's what I really said."

Somewhere in her film education, Foster forgot to take Glam Crying 101. A must for most stars. But Kaplan, a former child actor himself, understand Foster's resistance to the act. "When you're charged with having to do the work of an adult and you're a child, and it's your responsibility to put bread on the table, crying is out of the question. No one says that to you, but you just know."

But Kaplan had found her breaking point. "I was in such a tizzy at the time," Foster continues, "the focus-puller guy came to me with this little T.S. Eliot book. And I cannot tell yuo, I will just never forget it." She found inspiration in The Waste Land. "And I was able to get through the scene."

"I put the camera two inches from her face," says Kaplan of the moment when Foster's character realizes her rapists are going to go free. (They don't.) "And this one tear she's fighting rolls out of her eye. It's great." That year, Foster won her first Oscar.

Richard Donner calls again. He's worried. "You know when you asked me about, 'Did we ask Jodie [to star in Conspiracy Theory]? Yeah, Mel and I did ask her. Because we'd done Maverick and we loved her. But I do want to say that when we hired Julia, she did a magnificent job. And she's a great kid and I just don't want to offend her that she wasn't our first thought, but obviously the relationship that Mel and Jodie and I have..."

Just before the Oscars, Gibson went to Armani for a tuxedo fitting. "I tried on the jacket and I reached into the pockets and there were Polaroids of a tongue, a left nostril, a foot...I was all this 'Guess who?' stuff," says the actor. "I was, like, What the hell?" Foster had gotten there first. "Jodie had done all sorts of horrors. She also put them up to giving me trousers that were way too small. I slid them on really fast and rrrrrrrip."

Gibson is high on the pal list. Foster's friendships "are my life. I don't think there's anything else." She has a small orbit of close confidantes, but none of the casual relationships that fill the empty space when she's not with the chosen few. She would rather be alone. The extremes suit Foster, and yet, she believes, "my life weighs too much on these really fragile moments I've had with these five or six people."

While so many in Hollywood are happy to entertain the public with their mating habits, Foster has kept hers to herself. When much of your life has been "documented and prodded and psychoanalyzed," says Foster, "you [need to] know the veracity and importance of the shit that's yours." Her own mother isn't privy to her affairs of the heart. "When I was twelve, I went on my first date," Foster says, "and my mom said I wasn't allowed to go on dates. So I snuck out and I went to see Funny Lady. And I don't think I've ever told her that. I'm just not that kind of person.

"Remaining aloof in areas is healthy," Foster continues. "I think it's common to well-adjusted actors. It's the un-well-adjusted actors that just vomit everything onto you every second of the day. They're, like, cruising for psychotherapy."

Foster is no stranger to the couch, but even her experience of therapy sounds slightly removed. "For me, it's a luxury," she says, "to talk about yourself in a way that's like literary criticism, like the way you'd talk about a Henry James novel." Or a Jodie Foster movie. Asked if she feels she could mate for life, the actress replies, "I have to tell you, I really don't. I'm pretty old now — I'm 34! I don't necessarily think that's my personality. In the same way I've had so many homes, I'm not the kind of person who says, 'I need to live in this house for the rest of my life.' It's like the characters I've played. They're all different people in my life and they were different interests at different times. And I don't think I could go back and play Sara Tobias again in The Accused." A thoughtful pause. "I'm trying not to be personal here!"

Which is why it is such a shock when Foster, for the first time, does answer an intimate question above her love life, "Yeah," she admits. "I made out with Scott Baio."

"The good news about this parking lot is that it's free," Foster says, genuinely excited to pull into the Four Seasons Hotel's gloomy underground garage. She fills a vacancy and kills her lights. She is on the second verse, which is the same as the first. "Will I wake up in ten years and say, 'I could have been a contender,' or do I stay true to who I am?....Like every actor, you have this nagging feeling where you think, I didn't make the ten top-grossing movies of the year! I read them all! I could have been in them! But I have to have some personal thing that I'm working through. Because when it gets to that scene where I fall into the arms of the guy and I say, 'Don't leave me, you're the only person that I've ever dreamed of in my whole life.' Well, how the fuck do I do that in a movie that means nothing to me? I can't!"

"That's the charm of Jodie," says her Contact costar Rob Lowe, laughing. "Here is arguably one of the smartest women you'll ever meet — talented, double Oscar winner, director — who has the sort of humanity and self-examination mechanism to say, 'This is all fine and good, but could I have done it any better?' Thatt so speaks to who she is."

The elevator arrives. Foster's on a roll. "...Is everybody going to say, 'What did she do with her life?'" Maybe they'll say Jodie Foster made important movies. "Or," she says, quite seriously, "I made one important movie every two years that nobody wanted to see." This kind of talk confounds the experts.

"If I heard Jodie say that, I'd say, 'You're full of shit,' " says Donner. "Because there isn't a person in the world who isn't going to wake up twenty years from now and know that Jodie Foster was one of the greats that were out there. Twenty years from now she'll still be knocking us dead."

And not just for our entertainment. Foster needs to act in order to experience the simple things the rest of the world takes for granted. The things that make waking up worthwhile. "I can't really go to Disneyland without having a really specialized, weird experience with VIP passes and people treating me differently," she says. "But I can play someone who goes to Disneyland. Onscreen, I can live a life that I've never been able to have." Offscreen, she insists on a life stars don't have — one that takes time and effort.

A week later, a FedEx package arrives, the airbill written in Foster's own hand. Inside is a copy of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Earmarked is a page with the passage that saw her through the courtroom scene on The Accused. The one she still carries in her Filofax.