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Jodie Foster is a Actor, Director and Producer American born on 19 november 1962 at Los Angeles (USA)

Jodie Foster

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Birth name Alicia Christian Foster
Nationality USA
Birth 19 november 1962 (61 years) at Los Angeles (USA)
Awards Academy Award for Best Actress

Alicia "Jodie" Christian Foster (born November 19, 1962), is an American actor, director and producer who has worked in films and on television. She has often been cited as one of the best actresses of her generation.
Foster began her career aged three years old as a child model in 1965, and two years later moved to acting in television series with an appearance in the sitcom Mayberry R.F.D.. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she worked in several primetime television series and starred in children's films. Foster's breakthrough came in Martin Scorsese's controversial Taxi Driver (1976), in which she played a teenage prostitute; the role garnered her a nomination for an Academy Award. Her other critically acclaimed roles as a teenager were in the musical Bugsy Malone (1976) and the thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), and she became a popular teen idol by starring in Disney's Freaky Friday (1976) and Candleshoe (1977).

After attending college at Yale, Foster struggled to transition to adult roles until winning widespread critical acclaim for her portrayal of a rape survivor in The Accused (1988), for which she won several awards, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. She won her second Academy Award two years later, when she starred in the sleeper hit The Silence of the Lambs as Clarice Starling, a FBI trainee investigating a serial murder case. Foster made her debut as a film director the same year with the moderately successful Little Man Tate (1991), and founded her own production company, Egg Pictures, in 1992. The company's first production was Nell (1994), in which she also played the title role, gaining another nomination for an Academy Award. Her other films in the 1990s included period drama Sommersby, Western comedy Maverick (1994), science fiction film Contact (1997), and period drama Anna and the King (1999). Her second film direction, Home for the Holidays (1995), was not well-received critically or commercially.

After career setbacks in the early 2000s, which included the cancellation of a film project and the closing down of her production company, Foster starred in four thrillers, Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), Inside Man (2006), and The Brave One (2007). She has focused on directing in the 2010s, directing the films The Beaver (2011) and Money Monster (2016) as well as episodes for Netflix television series Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. She also starred in the box office hit Elysium (2013). In addition to her two Academy Awards, Foster has won three BAFTA Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award and the Cecil B DeMille Award.

Biography

Foster rarely talks of her private life in interviews, and has explained that she "values privacy against all else" due to having spent most of her life in the public eye. She lives in Los Angeles, and has two sons, Charles "Charlie" Foster (b. 1998) and Christopher "Kit" Foster (b. 2001), with her ex-partner Cydney Bernard. She met Bernard on the set of Sommersby (1993) and was in a relationship with her from 1993 to 2008. In April 2014, Foster married actress and photographer Alexandra Hedison. She stated in 2011 that having children has made her take on fewer projects: "It is a big sacrifice to leave home. I want to make sure that I feel passionate about the movies I do because it is a big sacrifice. I don't know how actors do film after film. I don't know how and I don't know why. Even if you take the average movie shoot of four months – you have three weeks' prep, press duties here and abroad, dubbing and looping, magazine covers, events and premieres – that's eight months out of a year. That's a long time. If you do two movies back-to-back, you're never going to see your children."

Foster's sexual orientation became subject to public discussion in 1991, when activists protesting the alleged homophobia in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) claimed that she was a closeted lesbian in articles published for example in OutWeek and The Village Voice. While she had been in a relationship with Bernard for a long time, Foster first publicly acknowledged it in a speech at the Hollywood Reporter's "Women in Entertainment" breakfast honoring her in 2007. In 2013, she addressed coming out in a speech after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 70th Golden Globe Awards, which led many news outlets to afterwards describe her as lesbian or gay, although some sources noted that she did not use the words gay or lesbian in her speech.

Foster is an atheist, but believes it is important to teach children about different religions, stating that "in my home, we ritualize all of them. We do Christmas. We do Shabbat on Fridays. We love Kwanzaa. I take pains to give my family a real religious basis, a knowledge, because it's being well educated. You need to know why all those wars were fought." She also supports gun control.

Victim of stalking

During her freshman year at Yale in 1980–1981, Foster was stalked by John W. Hinckley, Jr., a mentally disturbed man who had developed an obsession with her after watching Taxi Driver. He moved to New Haven, and tried to contact her through letters and by phone; it has sometimes been erroneously claimed that he also enrolled in a writing course at the university. On March 30, 1981, he attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in the process also wounding three other people, and claimed that his motive was to impress Foster. The incident made her subject to intense media attention, and she had to be accompanied by bodyguards on campus. Although Judge Barrington D. Parker confirmed that Foster was completely innocent in the case and had been "unwittingly ensnared in a third party's alleged attempt to assassinate an American President", she was required to give a videotaped testimony, which was played at the trial. During her time at Yale, Foster also had other stalkers, including Edward Richardson, who initially planned on murdering her but changed his mind after watching her perform in a college play.

The experience was very difficult for Foster, and she has rarely commented on it publicly. In the aftermath of the events, she wrote an essay titled Why Me?, which was published by Esquire in 1982 on the condition that "there be no cover lines, no publicity and no photos." In 1991, she canceled an interview with NBC's Today Show when she discovered Hinckley would be mentioned in the introduction, and the producers were unwilling to change it. She discussed Hinckley with Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes II in 1999, explaining that she does not "like to dwell on it too much [...] I never wanted to be the actress who was remembered for that event. Because it didn't have anything to do with me. I was kind of a hapless bystander. But... what a scarring, strange moment in history for me, to be 17 years old, 18 years old, and to be caught up in a drama like that." She stated that the incident had a major impact on the career choices she later made, but also acknowledged that "whatever bad moments that I had certainly could never compare to [those of the] family [of James Brady]", who was permanently disabled and died in 2014 as a result of his injuries.