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Current Biography Yearbook 1992

Foster, Jodie

Nov. 19, 1962- Actress; filmmaker. Address: c/o PMK Public Relations, 955 Carrillo Dr., Suite 200, Los Angeles,
Calif. 90048

NOTE: This biography supersedes the article that appeared in Current Biography in 1981.

Perhaps no other actress's face has so dominated the print media recently as that of Jodie Foster, who can claim that
distinction by virtue of neither a supermarket tabloid scandal nor sheer sex appeal. Instead, she has been recognized solely
because of her considerable talent, both as an actress and as a director. Her face became something of a household image in
the 1970s, when Foster was a staple of that era's television shows as well as of such movies as Freaky Friday and The Little
Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. She made a marked impression on film audiences in 1975, when she portrayed -with
uncanny believability- an adolescent prostitute in Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's classic portrait of inner-city psychopathic
isolation. In the following years, Foster managed to avoid becoming fodder for fan magazines, especially because, at the age of
seventeen, she opted to enroll at Yale University, where, by all accounts, she adapted to an Ivy League lifestyle. She returned
to the spotlight - unwillingly - in 1981, when she became the unfortunate icon of a crazed would-be killer who was bent on
assassinating President Ronald Reagan in the belief that doing so would impress her.

For some years Jodie Foster's post-academic acting career was characterized by her choice of increasingly eclectic roles in
mostly small, well-intentioned films that, while producing no flurries at the box office, won her consistently good reviews. That
changed in 1988, when she appeared in The Accused, a sleeper whose treatment of rape made it one of the year's most
talked-about films and brought her an Academy Award for best actress for her convincing portrayal of the victim. Three years
later, Foster emerged from what appeared to be another period of semiretirement to win another best-actress Oscar, this time
for her characterization of an FBI novice in Jonathan Demme's big-budget film The Silence of the Lambs. In the same year,
Foster directed Little Man Tate, the story of a child prodigy.

The youngest of four children, Jodie Foster was born Alicia Christian Foster in Los Angeles, California on November 19,
1962. Since her parents, Evelyn (Almond) Foster and Lucian Foster, were divorced before she was born, Jodie grew up in a
one-parent household, with her mother working for a film producer to make ends meet. Foster has recalled growing up in a
culturally, if not monetarily, rich environment. "I come from a really cool family ....," she told James Kaplan for Entertainment
Weekly (March 1, 1991). "We had ... really good Tuscan bread. And Portuguese food. And the Peugeot car." According to
Gerri Hirshey, whose profile of Foster appeared in Rolling Stone (March 21, 1991), Foster's mother, nicknamed Brandy,
"stocked the refrigerator with borscht and Korean kimchi, hauled the kids to Thai, Vietnamese, and Philippine restaurants."
"Wonder Bread was unknown," Hirshey added. Brandy Foster instilled in her daughter a love for the exotic in international
cinema as well. As Jodie Foster explained to James Kaplan, "I spent my whole life going to see very dark European films ...
That's what my mom liked."

Jodie Foster's brother, Buddy, began appearing on television commercials when he was about eight, and Brandy Foster often
took Jodie along, a practice that led to her first big break in show business. One day Coppertone suntan lotion executives
happened to notice three-year-old Jodie and chose her to be the bare-bottomed Coppertone child in the then-ubiquitous
advertisement. Managed by her mother, for the next two years Jodie appeared in scores of television commercials, and she
made her sitcom debut in 1969 on an episode of Mayberry RFD. (She could read film scripts by the age of five.) After
appearing in a string of television shows, she was cast in a Disney piece of family fluff called Napoleon and Samantha (1972).
Her first film was perhaps most noteworthy for the identity of one of its stars, a rather somnolent lion named Major, in the role
of a veteran circus performer whom Foster and her costar conspire to keep from mandatory retirement at a zoo. She followed
her debut with a series of mostly lackluster films, including Kansas City Bomber (1972) and the Disney production One Little
Indian (1973).

Meanwhile, Jodie Foster could be seen on such 1970s television staples as The Courtship of Eddie's Father, Gunsmoke,
The Partridge Family, Medical Center, and Bonanza. By 1973, when she played the role of Becky Thatcher in a musical
film adaptation of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, she was already impressing critics with the aplomb and levelheadedness that
would become her trademarks. (One reviewer pointed out that her "charming" mannerisms were more appropriate to
"someone two or three times her actual age.") The roles she was assigned during that period reflected that grown-up quality, or
at least unconventionality. In the 1973 Emmy Award-winning ABC Afterschool Special Rookie of the Year, for example,
Foster played a girl who breaks into that bastion of all-male territory, Little League baseball. And in The Secret Life of T.K.
Dearing (1972), a film that debunked stereotypes about the elderly, she was the eponymous character, a tomboy who
develops a meaningful relationship with her widowed grandfather. Perhaps sensing Foster's aptitude for projecting a
precociously jaded persona, casting agents teamed her with Chris Connelly for the short-lived television series Paper Moon
(1974), based on the hugely popular film with that title starring Ryan O'Neal and his daughter, Tatum. The show's demise
could be attributed party to its coming on the heels of what many people considered to be a hard act to follow and party to the
dubious ("smarmy," according to one reviewer) relationship between its two principals.

The first of Jodie Foster's pictures to win critical acclaim was Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). In
it, Foster played a street urchin who tries to propel Alice's son into juvenile delinquency by teaching him how to drink Ripple.
Although her acting was eclipsed by the performances of the main stars of the movie -Kris Kristofferson and Ellen Burstyn
(who won an Academy Award for her portrayal)- the young actress managed to make an impression on Scorsese, who
remembered her when he was casting his next film, Taxi Driver. The role that Scorsese was seeking to fill -that of a
twelve-year-old prostitute named Iris- was understandably controversial (Foster was even obliged to undergo psychiatric
evaluation by the California Labor Board to prove that she could emotionally handle the potential trauma of tackling the
assignment). Robert De Niro played the title role, a deranged would-be hero who pushes his reformist tendencies past the
limit, with cataclysmic results. Foster, whose Iris is befriended (and ultimately avenged) by De Niro's Travis Bickle, found the
experience of portraying Iris a turning point in her approach to her art. "The film completely changed my life," she recalled to
Jonathan Van Meter for a New York Times Magazine (January 6, 1991) profile. "It was the first time anyone asked me to
create a character that wasn't myself. It was the first time I realized that acting wasn't this hobby you just sort of did, but that
there was actually some craft." Foster's Oscar-nominated performance was described by critics as "unusually self-possessed
and mature" and as "superbly played."

Taxi Driver represented an apogee of sorts for Jodie Foster, because during the remainder of the decade she appeared in a
string of unimpressive, by comparison, movies. She followed her understated portrait of Iris with that of another tough
character, a speakeasy queen, in Bugsy Malone (1976), Alan Parker's musical spoof of the American gangster-film genre.
Although the point of the all-juvenile film was lost on most reviewers, the prescient Gary Arnold remarked in his Washington
Post (November 19, 1976) appraisal of the film that Foster's "precociousness is truly extraordinary, and American filmmakers
ought to guard and nurture it with the proper respect, because this may be a prodigious talent in the making."

Gary Arnold's exhortation apparently fell on deaf ears, to judge from Foster's subsequent screen credits. In Echoes of a
Summer (1976), she played a terminally ill girl whose neurotic parents struggle to cope with the tragedy. Although the film was
roundly panned (one critic remarked that the scriptwriter "deserve[d] to be hoist with his own petard"), Foster's work was
singled out as the film's one redeeming feature. Slightly better was Freaky Friday (1976), another entry in the catalogue of
role-switching genre films, in which Foster's character trades identities with her mother for one day. In his review for the
London Observer (June 5, 1977), Russell Davies pointed out that Foster "is too intelligent to play completely normal little
girls." In 1977 she appeared in Candleshoe, as a juvenile delinquent fobbed off as the missing heiress to an estate, and in The
Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, as an orphan who methodically poisons adults she happens not to care for. While
Foster won consistently good reviews, many critics increasingly deplored the fact that, in those undistinguished films, her talent
was being squandered.

Jodie Foster entered the 1980s by working with the British director Adrian Lyne in Foxes (1980), his first feature film. In her
first non-juvenile role, she played a levelheaded member of a gang of female teenagers in southern California who are beset by
the problems of their era: the war between the sexes, dysfunctional families, and drug abuse. Writing in the Village Voice
(March 10, 1980), Andrew Sarris was unreserved in his praise for Foster, who, in his opinion, held "the picture together with
her heavy-lidded, hoarse-voiced authority." In another offbeat role, she took on the part of Donna, a tough teenage runaway,
in Carny (1980). The eccentric, somewhat gloomy film -produced by ex-Band member Robbie Robertson, who also played
the lead role- captured perfectly the seamy world of itinerant carnival workers as well as the camaraderie that develops among
its inhabitants. Although Foster's role was secondary to those of the two male characters (Gary Busy played Robertson's pal),
most critics agreed that she excelled within the limitations of the part.

Also in 1980 Foster graduated from the prestigious Lycee Francais in Los Angeles, where she delivered the valedictory
address in French. The next few years saw little of her on the film screen, since she had enrolled at Yale University. During her
freshman year there, however, she failed to stay out of the headlines. In March 1981 an unbalanced fan, John Hinckley Jr.,
tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, motivated by a desire to impress Foster. She received such a volume of
unwelcome attention from the media that she published a first-person essay, entitled "Why Me?" in Esquire magazine the next
year. (To this date, Foster has refused to discuss the incident with the press.)

Jodie Foster's first voluntary sabbatical from her academic career came in 1983, when she appeared in the made-for-television
movie Svengali. The film, which updated the 1931 John Barrymore potboiler by featuring her as an aspiring pop singer and
Peter O'Toole as a vocal coach who lapses into a hammy Hungarian accent at will, was mercilessly drubbed. (Foster did her
own "unimpressive" singing in the film.) She next appeared s the Frenchwoman Helene in a multinational film adaptation of a
Simone de Beauvoir novel, Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others, 1984), directed by Claude Chabrol. A story about
two wartime lovers, the film appeared in theatres in France and Canada and on the HBO cable-television network in the
United States, where it attracted scant critical notice.

For Foster's first American theatrical release in more than four years, the film version of John Irving's quirky bestseller The
Hotel New Hampshire must have seemed a fail-safe proposition. Directed by Tony Richardson, the film featured a bizarre
cast of characters, including Natassja Kinski as a beautiful but insecure woman who wears a bear suit; a dog named Sorrow
who is put to sleep because of his incurable flatulence; and Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster as incestuous siblings. Even the
formidable combined talents of the film's collaborators failed to raise it above what Vincent Canby, in his review for the New
York Times (March 9, 1984), described as "a series of whoopee-cushion gags." Even worse was Mesmerized (1986), "an
embarrassing hash of horror and period incongruities," in the opinion of one review. (In that fiasco, Foster costarred with John
Lithgow, who played her malefic husband.)

Meanwhile, in 1985 Foster has received a B.A. degree in literature, magna cum laude, from Yale. For her first post-collegiate
film, she chose a typical ambitious project. Perhaps most notable for the utter confusion it evoked in its viewers, Siesta
featured Foster in a somewhat comic supporting role, as a jaded British woman. Despite the film's impressive cast (among the
actors were Isabella Rossellini, Ellen Barkin, Martin Sheen, and Julian Sands) and its Miles Davis score, the turgid and
self-consciously arty Siesta was panned in all quarters.

Jodie Foster fared slightly better in Five Corners (1987), which had to its credit a screenplay by John Patrick Shanley (who
wrote Moonstruck). An evocation of the working-class East Bronx of circa 1964, Five Corners featured Foster as a
pet-shop employee who is menaced by a deranged neighborhood thug (John Turturro). Although most critics found Foster's
"paper-thin" role the least substantial of the film's characters, more than one remarked on the irony of her choosing to portray
someone stalked by a psychopath. Stealing Home (1988) offered Foster an even thinner role, since it is her character's
suicide that sets the plot in motion.

One consistent thread running through Jodie Foster's roles is her characters' status as victim, either of society (as in Taxi
Driver) or of particular circumstances (Stealing Home, Five Corners). Throughout her career the actress has deliberately
chosen to portray characters who, in one way or another, are outsides. "I play disenfranchised people that are in most cases
pushed out of the way or pushed aside," she explained to Gerri Hirshey for the Rolling Stone interview. "Part of my agenda
with that is out of some kind of need to save them." Foster elaborated on her affinity for that type of role to Fred Schruers for
Premiere (March 1991): "My immature bent might be that I always identify with the underdog, not the overlord. So I either
want to play them or play in films that support them or have something to say about them. There are certain sorts of
unconscious paths you choose."

In keeping with her identification with the underdog, Foster next elected to appear in The Accused (1988). Partly based on an
actual incident, the film is about the gang rape of Sarah Tobias (Foster's character) and the legal case resulting from the
prosecution of the crime. The picture's title refers to the onlookers who cheered on the perpetrators; in the end, they are
convicted of criminal solicitation for not having interceded on the victim's behalf. Also examined were the relationship between
the lower-middle-class Sarah and her yuppie lawyer, Katheryn Murphy (played by Kelly McGillis), and the traditional
assumptions society makes about rape victims. The film's ultimate effectiveness lay in its presentation of Sarah not as a
traditional heroine but as a slightly tawdry, sexy woman.

As Sarah Tobias, Jodie Foster collected some of the most encouraging notices of her career. In her "first full-scale, grown-up
performance," in the words of David Denby of New York magazine (October 31, 1988), she exhibited "range and heart."
According to Vince Canby, reviewing the film for the New York Times (October 14, 1988), Foster is "an exceptionally fine,
intelligent, vivid actress .... Here she has the benefit of a very well-written role. One day she will get a great one." For her work
in The Accused, Foster received an Academy Award for best actress.

That "great" role appeared finally to have materialized for Foster with Silence of the Lambs (1991), a screen adaptation of
Thomas Harris's best-selling novel about serial killers. In taking on the project, the director Jonathan Demme, whose previous
films (Married to the Mob, Something Wild) blended the screwball comedy genre of the 1930s with the edgy urban
sensibility of the 1980s, charted new terrain. The darkly Hitchcockian psychological thriller featured Jodie Foster -speaking
with a flat Appalachian twang- as Clarice Starling, an ambitious FBI agent trying to transcend her less than patrician
background. That opportunity comes in the ghoulish guise of Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant psychologist who
has been imprisoned for life for his penchant for cannibalism. Starling is delegated by the FBI to interview Lecter in order to
gain information about another serial killer, dubbed "Buffalo Bill" by the tabloids, who has committed a series of grisly murders.

The somewhat murky plot of The Silence of the Lambs impressed viewers less than the evolving mentor-student relationship
between Lecter and Starling, who has to summon up pieces of the puzzle that make up her past (in the form of short,
sometimes painfully recalled reminiscences) in exchange for Lecter's often cryptically code fragments of information. Although
the role of Lecter was by far the film's most compelling -especially as portrayed by Hopkins, who created a psychopath so
fascinating that, by the end of the picture, the audience cheers him on as he stalks his next prey- Foster came in for her share of
the praise as well. In the New Yorker (February 25, 1991), Terrence Rafferty reported that "Foster, with amazing delicacy,
shows us the constant tension between the character's emotions and her actions - the omnipresent self-consciousness of
inexperience." And Kathleen Carroll found her performance "totally riveting" when she evaluated the movie for the New York
Daily News (February 17, 1991). For her performance, Foster won her second best-actress Oscar; the film also won awards
for best picture, best director, and best actor (Hopkins).

The year 1991, aside from offering Foster her most challenging part to date, saw her occupy a new chair, as the director of
Little Man Tate. The story of child prodigy torn between his working-class mother (Foster) and a gifted psycologist (Dianne
Wiest) who wants to cultivate his talents, the project dovetailed with several of Foster's overriding thematic obsessions. First,
there was the aspect of the fatherless family, a subject close to Foster's own experiance, as she explained to Gerri Hirshey for
Rolling Stone: "The single-parent family obsesses me in some ways, because it's all I've ever known. Everyone I grew up with
was a single-parent kid. All my mom's friends were divorced women." Having been something of a child prodigy herself, she
felt an affinity for "little man Tate," who, because he is so different, is alienated from his peers. Finally, she was drawn to the
role of Dede, who, because she was a single mother, has to overcome daunting challenges that are all to often belittled in the
United States. As she explained to Brian D. Johnson for Maclean's (September 16, 1991), "A real hero to me is a women
who has five kids and no money and takes care of them and survives. That's heroic feat."

Little Man Tate received respectable reviews, though some critics felt that Foster the director had given Foster the actress
short shrift, creating in a Dede a character that Failed to do justice to her dramatic range. Some reviewers, among them Julie
Salamon of Wall Street Jurnal (October 17, 1991), thought Foster's directiorial technique was too understated. "Foster has
approached the material too hesitantly, too earnestly," Salamon wrote, "without the touch of noughtiness it needs to touch off a
spark." The general consensus was that jodie Foster's Little Man Tate was a promising, if modest, directorial debut.

Foster's next film appearence came in a Dennis Hopper vehicle called Back Track (1991), which also featured Dean
Stockwell, Joe Pesci, and John Turturro. The film, which never saw theatrical realise, appeared on the Showtime
cable-televison network in December 1991 and showed up on the shelves in video stores a mere three months later. A mob
story punctuated by typical Hopper black humor and populated by marginal characters, Back Track was described as "the
year's most off-the-wall TV movie" by a reviewer for People magazine (December 26, 1991). In Woody Allen's film
Shadows and Fog (1992), Jodie Foster appeared in a small role as a "ferociously pert neophyte" prostitute, to quote J.
Hoberman, who reviewed the movie for the Village Voice (April 7, 1992). Jodie Foster now heads her own production
company, whose name -Egg Pictures- reflects her characteristic modesty. She makes her home in southern California's San
Fernando Valley. In explaining to Jonathan Van Meter in her New York Time Magazine interview her preference for the Los
Angeles area over New York City. Foster remarked: "I can wear the same jogging pants four days in a row. I see my
nephews. I pick them up from the school. I go to the mall." When she does visit New York, she usually sleeps at friends'
apartments and rides the city's subway. Foster is adamant in proclaiming her normalcy. "The thing that everybody finds out
about me once they really get to know me," she admitted to one interviewer, "is just how terrificaly boring I am, and how I
aspire to be boring." Foster counts among her favorite directors Martin Scorsese, Louis Malle, Francois Truffaut, and Woody
Allen.

References: Chicago Tribune XIII p18 O 6 '91 pors; Esquire 98:101+ D '82; Interview p79+ O '91 pors; Time
138:68+ O 14 '91 pors; Toronto Globe and Mail A p10 S 11 '91 por; USA Today D p1+ F 12 '91 por