Jodie Foster became a true star when she met Martin Scorsese

Jodie Foster's most important break came when she met director MARTIN SCORSESE, who first cast her in a small part in his film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1973). Impressed with the precocious actress, he cast her three years later in the pivotal role of the child prostitute in Taxi Driver (1976), the film that vaulted her to national prominence. The controversy surrounding her portrayal of the teenage streetwalker who befriends a potential assassin (ROBERT DE NIRO) tended to overshadow her utterly convincing performance. But in that same year, her tongue-in-cheek playing of a MAE WEST–like character in the bizarrely amusing Bugsy Malone opened a lot of eyes to her talent.

Jodie Foster seemed on the verge of a major career, but there were relatively few roles for 13-year-old girls in Hollywood. She ended up in another Disney movie, Freaky Friday (1977), and then a dark murder thriller, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1977), in which she played the ever-so-cute but deadly murderer. Having studied at the bilingual Lycée Française in Los Angeles, Jodie Foster easily made the transition to international films, making movies in France and Italy during the late 1970s. These did not find audiences in America nor did Foxes, released in the United States in 1980. She registered a rich and intriguing supporting performance in an underrated movie about carnival life, Carny (1980), but Jodie Foster could not escape her difficulty in finding the right roles in the right movies; she seemed all at once to be too smart and too young and was a challenge to cast.

The actress solved her problem by taking a hiatus from her career to go to Yale University. While she was at Yale, her past came back to haunt her when a deranged young man named John Hinckley attempted to reenact a scene from Taxi Driver to win Jodie Foster's affection. Hinckley wounded then-president RONALD REAGAN in an unsuccessful assassination attempt.

Jodie Foster stayed out of the public eye during much of the early 1980s. She pursued her studies and wasn't seen again on the big screen until she joined the ensemble cast of Hotel New Hampshire (1984). The film was roundly panned and quickly disappeared. A number of other films followed during the next several years, none of them successful. The Blood of Others (1984), Mesmerized (1986), and Siesta (1988) were all rather poor, and some of them were never even theatrically released in America.

It appeared as if Jodie Foster was going to be yet another child actress who could not make the transition to adult roles. But then came three films in a row, all of which garnered her excellent reviews. The first two, Five Corners (1988) and Stealing Home (1988), were not commercial hits but critics raved about her performances. The third, The Accused (1988), not only won critical raves, but also brought Jodie Foster her first Best Actress Oscar. Her most famous role, directed by Jonathan Demme in 1991, costarred ANTHONY HOPKINS as her nemesis Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.

Her performance combined naive innocence with a grim, gritty determination. This determination carried over to Little Man Tate (1991), in which she played the mother of a child genius in her first effort as film director. She starred with RICHARD GERE in Sommersby (1993), an American remake of The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), and with MEL GIBSON and James Garner in the sequel to the TV western Maverick (1994), moving to parody and comedy from sentimentality. Her range was extended in Nell (1994), an adult version of the wild-child story. Although the script was not outstanding, her performance won her an Oscar nomination.

In 1995 she directed (but did not appear in) Home for the Holidays, about a dysfunctional family at Thanksgiving. She returned to acting in 1997 with Contact, directed by the ever-popular ROBERT ZEMECKIS, a thought-provoking drama about the attempt of an idealistic astronomer to make contact with intelligent life on a distant star. She received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in this film. In Anna and the King (2000), a nonmusical remake of The King and I, she played the intrepid Western governess who improbably saves the kingdom of Siam. The film was insipid in its treatment of stereotyped "Orientals." Jodie Foster returned to the thriller genre in Panic Room (2002), playing another brave heroine.

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Jodie Foster became a true star when she met Martin Scorsese

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