Jodie Foster



Jodie Foster (born Alicia Christian Foster; November 19, 1962) is an American actress, film director, and producer.

Foster began acting in commercials at the age of three, and rose to prominence at the age of 13 in the 1976 film Taxi Driver as the preteen prostitute Iris, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1989, for playing a rape victim in The Accused. In 1991, she starred in The Silence of the Lambs, receiving international acclaim and her second Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her fourth Academy Award nomination for playing a hermit in Nell (1994). Her other best-known work includes Contact (1997), The Brave One (2007), and Carnage (2011). Foster made her directorial debut in 1991 with Little Man Tate; she also directed the films Home for the Holidays (1995) and The Beaver (2011).

In addition to her two Academy Awards, she has won three BAFTA Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, including the Cecil B DeMille Award for "outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment", and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Target of fan obsession
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hinckley,_Jr. John Hinckley, Jr.], became obsessed with Foster after watching Taxi Driver a number of times, and stalked her while she attended Yale, sending her love letters to her campus mail box and even talking to her on the phone. On March 30, 1981, he attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan (shooting and wounding Reagan and three others) and claimed his motive was to impress Foster, then a Yale freshman. The media stormed the Yale campus in April "like a cavalry invasion," and followed Foster relentlessly.

The incident caused Foster intense discomfort and reporters have been warned in advance not to bring up the subject in front of her; she has been known to walk out of interviews at the mention of Hinckley's name. In 1991, Foster canceled an interview with NBC's Today Show when she discovered Hinckley would be mentioned in the introduction. Foster's only public reactions to this were a press conference afterwards and an article titled "Why Me?" that she wrote for Esquire in December 1982. In that article she wrote that returning to work on the film Svengali with Peter O'Toole "made me fall in love with acting again" after the assassination attempt had shaken her confidence. In 1999, she discussed the experience with Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes II.

Another man, Edward Richardson, followed Foster around Yale and planned to shoot her, but decided against it because she "was too pretty."

[edit] Personal life
Foster has two sons: Charles "Charlie" Foster (b. July 20, 1998) and Christopher "Kit" Foster (b. September 29, 2001).

Foster broke up with her long-time girlfriend, Cydney Bernard, in 2008. They had been together since 1993. In her acceptance speech upon receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards, she commented about her sexual orientation: "I already did my coming out about 1,000 years ago back in the stone age, those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers, and then gradually and proudly to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met." She thanked Bernard, calling her "my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life". Foster also thanked Mel Gibson as one of the people who "saved" her.

Foster is an atheist. Foster has stated she has "great respect for all religions" and spends "a lot of time studying divine texts, whether it's Eastern religion or Western religion." She and her children celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah.