Jodie Foster
    Born: 19 November 1962
    Height: 5' 3½" (1.61 m)
    Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
    Best Known As: The star of The Silence of the Lambs
    Name at birth: Alicia Christian Foster

Biography: The youngest of four children born to Evelyn "Brandy" Foster, Jodie Foster entered the world on November 19, 1962, under the name Alicia, but earned her "proper" name when her siblings insisted upon Jodie. A stage-mother supreme, Brandy Foster dragged her kids from one audition to another, securing work for son Buddy in the role of Ken Berry's son on the popular sitcom Mayberry RFD. It was on Mayberry that Foster, already a professional thanks to her stint as the Coppertone girl (the little kid whose swimsuit was being pulled down by a dog on the ads for the suntan lotion), made her TV debut in a succession of minor roles. Buddy would become disenchanted with acting, but Jodie stayed at it, taking a mature, businesslike approach to the disciplines of line memorization and following directions that belied her years. Janet Waldo, a voice actress who worked on the 1970s cartoon series The Addams Family, would recall in later years that Foster, cast due to her raspy voice in the male role of Puggsley Addams, took her job more seriously and with more dedication than many adult actors.


Filmography: A Very Long Engagement, Panic Room, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, The Directors: Martin Scorsese, The Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Anna and the King, NOVA: Everest - The Death Zone, Contact,
Brainy and beautiful, Jodie Foster is a four-time Oscar nominee; she has won twice, for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991, with Anthony Hopkins). Foster got a start in movies in 1973 as a winsome Becky Thatcher in the Disney movie Tom Sawyer. She really made her mark as the vulnerable teen prostitute "saved" by Robert DeNiro in the gritty 1976 film Taxi Driver. In the early 1980s she was famous for being the object of obsession of John Hinckley, Jr.; Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in a crazed attempt to win Foster's favor. (The shooting echoed events in Taxi Driver.) Foster took time off from acting to attend Yale, and she graduated in 1985 with a degree in English Literature. As an adult she has developed into a thoughtful, handsome film actor who mixes thrillers with boutique dramas. Her many films include Bugsy Malone (1976), Sommersby (1993, with Richard Gere), the sci-fi film Contact (1997, with Matthew McConaughey), Anna and the King (1999, with Chow Yun-Fat), the gripping The Panic Room (2002), Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006, with Clive Owen) and Nim's Island (2008, with child star Abigail Breslin). Foster has also dabbled in directing: Little Man Tate (1991) was her feature debut.


"I was thrust into a world where emotionally I had to know more than my age. It's a lonely life. So think that's where my fascination with that came from. I think those things find their way into my movies, certainly the movies I direct."Foster says,"I think what I was attracted to, which was obvious to me on the page but I don't think was obvious to everybody else, was what an incredibly deep drama this was and what an incredibly accurate, detailed tapestry of the American family this was.""The list is the 100 best unproduced screenplays, unproduced because they're crazy and nobody in their right mind wants to make them,"she adds."There are two culprits in the dance," she observes. "It's not just him that's the problem. It's her, too.""This is a huge challenge for marketing," she says. "I never believed this was the kind of movie that should go out on 3,000 screens. I never believed this was going to be a commercial, mainstream film.""I was a public figure, going on shows and talking about how normal I was and how I was just like everybody else and longing to be just like everybody else and kind of pushing the image of being the girl next door, the girl next door in a way that everybody could relate to,"she says.