It is about 12.10 p.m. -- not early for lunch in America -- and I am sitting obediently at a table in the empty, over-airconditioned dining room of the luxurious Bel Air Hotel in LA (as Miss Foster has specifically requested), feeling ridiculous. Though technically spring, today the skies are a beautiful azure blue, the temperature is a balmy 75 degrees and everyone -- including a very laid-back Harrison Ford -- is lunching outside.

At about 12.15 p.m. a short figure dressed somewhat like a waitress in a crisp white shirt, black trousers, little wire-rimmed spectacles, long straight dark hair and no bag strides purposefully towards me. Funny, I could have sworn Jodie Foster was dirty blonde.

'Are you, uh...?' Jodie foster starts in that famous self-possessed gravelly drawl, surprised that I have been stuck inside all this time. 'See, I've been outside, I didn't realise that they'd put you in here,' she says and promptly scoops up my bag for me and marches outside, across to a prime table under the dazzling white canopy amidst the stars and would-be stars, most of whom, including Harrison Ford, discreetly stop mid-stare. Her agent, it eventually transpires, had booked the table: Jodie Foster would never have picked the Bel-Air.

Seconds after we have sat down, five or so waiters appear out of nowhere, empty our clean ashtrays, top up Ms Foster's full glass of mineral water andd hand us two huge menus. Copying Jodie, I scour mine intently and, to break the ice, jauntily ask her if the Stripped Bass (sic) would be a good choice.

'I bet that's great,' she murmurs, detachedly.

Oh dear, obviously this isn't going to be the cosiest of lunches; on the other hand, what Foster chooses for lunch does require a bit of concentration. Straight after this meeting she's in for a session at the gym, and she can't order anything too heavy. Furthermore, because of the latest project she is working on -- a film called Nell, which she will both star in and produce, and will start shooting in the Rocky Mountains of North Carolina in a couple of days -- she cannot eat meat. Neither can she drink alcohol. 'The character doesn't so I can't,' explains Foster matter-of-factly. She orders grilled salmon and, once it has been confirmed by our waiter that it is not cream-based, potato and leek soup.

'Actually, I don't miss the meat, but I miss the red wine,' she says, twirling a lock of lank hair around a finger and looking at it disinterestedly. 'I don't particularly drink to excess but occasionally I really like wine in the afternoon: I'm sort of more European in that way. I love good red wine, I love foie gras, I love really good pancetta. People say, "Pork? How could you eat pork?" I say, "Why don't you go eat green beans?" You know what gets me? The way the culture over her is so Twelve Steps.'

Fluent in French, Foster loves Europe and still maintains an apartment in Paris: 'That's a city where I've really had wonderful adolescent decadencies; really had a blast without any apologies or shame.' Foster also loves England. Introduced to London society 'in a kind of ancillary way' through her Yale friend Henrietta Conrad, her eyes light up when we touch upon the difference between London and LA nightlife. Taki, for example, is a great admirer of hers. 'Hey, I bet you know some of the people I know,' she says, reeling off a list of names including Cosmo Fry, whose first wedding she was invited to, though she has never actually met him. 'I find that whole group of people very entertaining,' she says.

Luckily for all around, Foster has a clear, easily distinguishable voice that carries. Completely oblivious to her audience, Foster often slams her fist down on the table, shakes a finger skyward to make a point, and when the conversation really gets going, raises her voice a couple of octaves almost as though she is about to burst into tears. In fact it is almost impossible to disassociate Foster with how she is up on the screen. This is the way Jodie Foster has always been. It is almost as though she came out of the womb this way: blasè, very slightly baity and tough as nails. Those wry, harrowing and unjokey roles -- Iris in Taxi Driver; Sarah Tobias in The Accused; Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs -- must have been a breeze to play.

Poor Foster, this must be her upteenth interview this month. About to start filming Nell, deeply involved in another project in which she will play 'truly a serious bimbo' and soon to appear in yet another blockbuster movie, Maverick, a comedy Western in which she stars opposite Mel Gibson and James Garner, Foster's life recently has been one long round of lunches, breakfasts and mineral waters in hotel lounges with journalists who are dying to know about her private life and not so much about her quite formidable professional one.

Much has been made about Foster's so-called private life: she has the unfortunable ability to draw out the most prurient in all of us for some reason, and there are constant rumours swirling around town calling Ms Foster's sexuality into question. The trouble is, Foster's personal life is probably far more prosaic than any of us could possibly imagine, largely because she doesn't have the time to have one. A complete workaholic and obsessed with honing her craft -- 'If I stop charging around I'll die. In fact I would bite off my own arm if someone told me I had to stop learning' -- Foster cannot imagine anything being more important than work and baulks at the idea of a love affair getting in the way of one's job. 'Nothing,' she declares firmly, 'ever has the right to get in the way of work.'

Order, discipline, routine: These are the things that guide Foster's life now; they keep her sane. No wonder it's so important that what happens outside of her professional life has to run like clockwork or she stars feeling like she might fall apart. And it's not exactly as though things have been running smoothly these past few days. Not only did her black stationwagon break down, but she is in the middle of moving from her house in the San Fernando Valley, cannot hire a removal firm as her whereabouts must remain secret, and has suffered an entire morning at the beauty parlour getting her hair, eyelashes and eyebrows dyed for her upcoming role as the teetotal, vegetarian Nell.

'I mean it's just one thing after another,' she says, rolling those slanty, icy and, at the moment, supremely irritated light-blue eyes skyward. 'I just sat on my bed and said, "I can't take this any more." I had allotted that one half day in order to do all that stuff. One half day,' she reiterates, stabbing a forefinger in the air. "It's like, I don't know how much more of this I can take.'

It's odd. These sound like the complaints of a suburban LA housewife straight out of McArthur Park, not one of the most successful, sophisticated actresses in the world. But then, as Jodie says, her life in LA is 'totally suburban'. A devotee of the gym, she loves padding around the house in a pair of jogging pants, watching rented videos, preparing the same thing for dinner night after night, and clearly hates schmoozing in trendy LA restaurants with vapid Hollywood types. Suburban life obviously allows her some degree of privacy.

'You don't feel any sense of community here at all,' she explains without a trace of regret. 'If you grew up and lived here you don't know anyone: the only people I know are the people I went to high school with. If you want to meet interesting people, go to a bar with your ten friends, go to art openings and be stimulated, this is not the place to be -- but I don't care about all that stuff. Why would I? If you're grown up and you want to go home, rent a video and get in your house and have a Jacuzzi, it's great...as long as you can make peace with all the vapidness around you.'

Thrust into the business 27 years ago, and now with two Oscars under her belt, 32 films to her name and her very own production company entitled Egg, all at the tender age of 31, Foster hasn't really known a life outside the movies. Her four years at Yale, where she graduated with a degree in English Literature in 1984, and where she went 'hoping it would lead me to think that acting was dumb', were only a brief respite. Movies -- perhaps not entirely out of choice -- are in Foster's blood, and as she sits opposite me (more than happy to talk because she is a professional, but always waiting for me to initiate the conversation) I understand that it's not that Jodie Foster is cold or unfriendly or even bored, it's just that she really is rather different from the rest of us, a little isolated from the real world, largely because she has spent almost her entire life playng it rather than actually living it.

And then there are those extraordinary looks. At first glance Foster may look like a waitress but on closer inspection it is obvious that the crisp white shirt (later to be splattered with grilled salmon) has a beautiful shawl collar and that the trousers fit Ms Foster's trim, compact body exquisitely. A classic, understated dresser who would probably die rather than wear anything too girly, Foster is doubtlessly wearing Armani, and his elegant, somewhat androgynous lines suit her.

It is not exactly that Foster is beautiful (she has too caustic an aura about her for that): it is just that she is so unnervingly sexy with those strange, feline, slightly washed-out features, those brittle blue eyes, intense and jaded at the same time, and the perfect rosebud mouth, stained today, perhaps for my benefit, in Rimmelish-pink lipstick. John Hinckley once told Time magazine, 'From head to toe, every square inch of Jodie is what attracts me,' and I know what he meant. If Jodie Foster had been a couple of forms ahead of me att school I would probably have had a crush on her too.

Born on 19 November 1962, Jodie (christened Alicia) never knew her father, Lucius Foster III, an airline officer, as he bolted before she was born. Brought up with her elder brother Buddy and sisters Connie and Lucinda in a higgledy-piggledy cottage by her mother Evelyn, aka Brandy, who has been her manager since she was three, Jodie was first catapulted into the limelight as a toddler when she became the famous bare-bottomed Coppertone kid. Determined not to have her children grow up as philistine Hollywood brats, Brandy took her brood on endless trips to museums, galleries and exhibitions and sent Jodie not to Beverly Hills High but the prestigious Lycèe Francais in LA. Though by her energetic admission not a child prodigy, Jodie was always different from the other children.

'I was a little strange,' recalls Foster, who could read before she was three: 'all I ever did was read. I think it was a form of escape from the world, not having to talk to people. When I was about five or six I learnt a book off by heart that my mom had given to me by John F. Kennedy. I was obsessed with his death. Every day I would go to the bathroom and recite it to the mirror.

By the age of seven - having appeared in Gunsmoke, Bonanza and The Patridge Family -- Jodie was the family's breadwinner. By the age of 14 she had won her first Oscar nomination for her portrayal of the 12-year-old prostitute Iris in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Financially, it was quite traumatic for the Foster family when Jodie was accepted to Yale. 'We sold the house and everybody got ready for the fact that I'd never work again.'

Jodie, who had been school valedictorian at the Lycèe, loved Yale where she majored in Afro-American literature (she wrote her thesis on the black female writer Toni Morrison), and coincidentally was a classmate of Naomi Wolf, the Erica Jong of the Nineties. The anonymity of college life suited her perfectly: she loved the bookish, intellectually high-pitched atmosphere; the opportunity to slouch around in painters' pants and no make-up; the opportunity, perhaps for once in her life, to blend in.

That all fell apart on 30 March 1981 when John Hinckley was arrested for shooting Ronald Reagan and his press secretary James Brady. His motive, he claimed, was that he had been trying to impress Jodie whom he had watched in Taxi Driver more than 100 times. It was an appalling time for Foster, for whom anonymity became once again so elusive. A few days later another man was arrested in New York carrying a gun. He confessed that he too had been obsessed by Foster, had been in the audience of a college play in which she had been performing and had planned to shoot her but had changed his mind because 'she was too pretty to die'.

Sinking into depression, Jodie became a virtual recluse, finding solace in food and alcohol. Nonetheless she managed to graduate with honors from Yale in 1984. Foster once said that she loved Yale so much that she never wanted to leave and, in truth, I can quite easily imagine Foster as an academic. As one Hollywood producer helpfully put it to me, 'The root of Jodie Foster's sexuality lies in her intelligence.'

He was right: it is impossible to forget that Jodie Foster is an intellectual. Her nickname on one film set was B.L.T., short for Bossy Little Thing, but it is not so much that she is bossy as didactic. She enunciates her words like a teacher and her conversation is laced with words that are used only on American college campuses: 'reductive', 'valorise' and 'synergise' for example. And in a way it is a miracle Jodie Foster is in Hollywood, not in the Semiotics department of some Ivy League college teaching some obscure but highly popular course on literary criticism as it applies to contemporary film, with students both male and female falling in love with her left, right and centre.

As it was, Foster found herself inextricably drawn back to her childhood profession. 'After I graduated I was very depressed. I spent six months in bed. Yeah, I went to the gym and I went to barbecues, but I also used to drink a lot, watch TV till two in the morning and sleep about thirteen hours a day. Ultimately I couldn't accept walking away from my acting career. I had to give it one last try.'

Getting back into the swing of things wasn't as seamless an experience as it should have been. 'I had to sell my soul,' Foster says of her foray back into the Hollywood mainstream. 'I had to look the part, I had to be able to wear the tight clothes. I had to say no mister, no really, I can do it. But I didn't want to walk away and say I've failed, having not tried. That would have been a cop out.'

In Jodie's words she 'finagled' herself into the audition for The Accused. 'They didn't like my performance because it was too unsympathetic and harsh. I had to go back and do it real sweet and sappy like a cheerleader. So I did that, for the audition. I figured, once I get the part, fuck 'em.' Although Jodie still believes it is one of her worst performances of all time ('Towards the end of the movie I realised I was a truly bad actress, I thought I should really pack up my clothes right now and get a Dodge and go and do something else. I stank.'), she nonetheless won an Oscar for her role as gang-rape victim Sarah Tobias. Three years later in 1991 Foster won an Oscar for her role as Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs.

Foster's role in Maverick is a complete departure from the norm in that it is a comedy, and rather a screwballish one at that. She plays a poker-playing trickster who 'passes herself off as a southern belle and gets incredibly offended if anyone insults her virtue; meanwhile she's picking their pockets. I've been looking for a comedy for about ten years and I couldn't find one that was any good,' explains Foster. 'I don't think you can fix comedies -- either they are funny or they are not. I think that rotten comedy is more embarrassing than virtually anything: there's nothing worse than a really unfunny film.'

In fact Maverick doesn't seem like Foster's thing at all. Her rationale for doing it was partly because the screenwriter, William Goldman, 'is one of the best scriptwriters that ever existed', and parly because slapstick comedy is such a challenge. For although Blazing Saddles is one of her favourite films, as is Spinal Tap, and she has seen Wayne's World about five times ('Every time I go to one of those Cineplex things and see a bad film, I just sneak out and see Wayne's World; it's the best antidote'), Foster has never played funny and usually hates 'physical' humour, which there's a lot of in Maverick. 'I like complicated emotions,' explains Foster, 'I don't like people who think one thing is really funny and fall into a heap on the floor, because of that one thing. I find it reductive, trivial...I don't respect that.'

Predictably, just as there is a lull in the conversation, a middle-aged man lumbers confidently up to the table, 'I don't want to bother you, butt are you Jodie Foster?' he asks, staring with unabashed curiosity at his heroine in the flesh.

'Uh-uh, I am.'

'I told my wife that's Jodie Foster with dark hair,' he begins, unbudgingly.

'There you have it,' interrupts Jodie, who must have said this so many times, willing him to walk away with a raised palm that spells 'back off' and a well-practised but polite, 'Take care, it's nice meeting you.'

By now Foster must be sick and tired of the public's fascination. 'Ah, you get used to it,' she shrugs, vigorously buttering a piece of floury brown bread. 'You develop a coping technique. I've been doing it for so many years that it's nothing new. It's a handicap in some ways but it's a passport in others. Being famous allows you to ask people questions that are none of your business. It allows you to get close to the sort of people who ultimately know you're not going to sell their story. It allows you to touch people's lives and walk away...' adding carefully '...and not be held responsible for the fact that you walked away.'

But is Jodie Foster such a tough nut? Or is it that her ability to analyse the cruel world of showbiz has made her more honest than most people? 'I used to want to be able to fit in,' explains Foster, downing a handful of multivitamins with a cappuccino. 'As I've gotten older, I think I was kidding myself. I was doing some kind of charity thing with some big movie-stars; really nice solid people, as a matter of fact. But I just didn't want to be one of them, not that they were a bad thing to be. I can appear solid and sensible and community-spirited and responsible. Twenty seconds later I'm not.

'These people said if I just go to this event and get photographed they'll give twenty thousand dollars to charity,' Foster goes on, her voice rising a couple of octaves. 'I said no. They say, "Why? It's no big deal," I say, "No, actually, it is a big deal. I don't want to be sold." I have a morality that is my own, but it's not because so and so said to. If I had a will I wouldn't just want to leave it to my family, for example. Because they are related to me doesn't mean they should have this weird piece of silver that somebody gave to me when I was eighteen and which changed my life. If you make a decision to take a personal code, one you've taken years to figure out in the process, you hurt, neglect and possibly ruin other people. Occassionally I feel that one by one there are only so many people that can take that. All of this means I have to be prepared to sit on a rock sending out invitations and having nobody come to the party.

'A long time ago I had a friend who was in really bad shape. He said to me, "I really need to borrow some money." I said, "OK, but if I lend you the money I can't be your friend any more." He said, "That's totally ridiculous! What do you care, it's only five hundred thousand dollars." I said, "You don't understand. Every time you say: 'Here, let me buy it,' I'm going to be sitting there going, "That's my five hundred thousand dollars." Every time you go to Disneyland and have a good time I'm going to sit there thinking, "Why the fuck is he going to Disneyland? Why isn't he giving me the money he owes me?" I told him, "I'll give you the money, that's fine, just know you don't have my friendship." That's my own morality which has to do with my neuroses. I can't live with disrespecting someone that way...' and then, suddenly, 'God, this has been a philosophical conversation.'