Jodie Foster: From Child Star to Oscar Winner and Director

Few actors have worked in front of a camera for as long as Jodie Foster. She was born in Los Angeles in 1962 and started acting as a toddler. Over the following decades she won two Best Actress Oscars, directed her own films and, in her sixties, won her first Emmy. Her career is unusual because it has lasted so long and she has kept control of it.

A child performer

Foster's first job came at about three years old, in a 1965 television advert for Coppertone sunscreen. A busy run of TV and commercial work followed. In 1972 she made her feature debut in Disney's Napoleon and Samantha. Four years later, aged 12 when it was filmed, she played a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a role that earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Yale and its shadow

Foster then went to Yale. In 1981, while she was a freshman, John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C., and said he had done it to win her attention. The media frenzy that followed affected her for years. She kept acting during her studies and graduated in literature in 1985.

Two Oscars and a debut behind the camera

Her adult career took off with The Accused, in which she played a rape survivor seeking justice. It won her the Best Actress Oscar in 1989. In 1991 she played FBI trainee Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, and that same year she made her directorial debut with Little Man Tate, in which she also acted. In 1992 The Silence of the Lambs brought her a second Best Actress Oscar, and it became only the third film to win all five major Academy Awards.

Recognition, in public and in private

In 2013, while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, Foster gave a widely discussed speech in which she publicly acknowledged she was gay and thanked her former partner Cydney Bernard. The following year she married the photographer Alexandra Hedison. Cannes gave her an honorary Palme d'Or in 2021.

New work, late in her career

Foster's recent work shows no sign of slowing down. In 2024 she won her first Primetime Emmy for playing police chief Liz Danvers in True Detective: Night Country, and she later won the Golden Globe for the same role. In 2025 she performed in French as a psychiatrist in Rebecca Zlotowski's Vie privée, which premiered at Cannes.