People

Jodie Foster

Acting · follow into films and chains

Biography

Alicia Christian 'Jodie' Foster (born November 19, 1962) is an American actress and filmmaker. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. For her work as a producer and director, she has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. She has also earned numerous honors such as the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2013, was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2016 and received the Cannes Film Festival's Honorary Palme d'Or in 2021. Foster began her professional career as a child model and later as a teen idol in various Disney films including Napoleon and Samantha (1972), Freaky Friday (1976) and Candleshoe (1977). She acted in Martin Scorsese's comedy-drama Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) and reunited with him in Taxi Driver (1976) in a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination. Other early films include Tom Sawyer (1973), Bugsy Malone (1976), The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), Carny (1980) and Foxes (1980). After attending Yale University, Foster transitioned into mature leading roles earning two Academy Awards for playing a rape victim in The Accused (1988), and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). She also received a nomination for Nell (1994). Her other notable films include Sommersby (1993), Maverick (1994), Contact (1997), Anna and the King (1999), Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), Inside Man (2006), The Brave One (2007), Nim's Island (2008), Carnage (2011), Elysium (2013), Hotel Artemis (2018), and The Mauritanian (2021). She made her directorial film debut with Little Man Tate (1991) and has since directed films such as Home for the Holidays (1995), The Beaver (2011) and Money Monster (2016). She founded her own production company, Egg Pictures, in 1992. She earned two Primetime Emmy Awards for producing The Baby Dance (1999), and directing the Orange Is the New Black episode "Lesbian Request Denied" in 2014. She has also directed episodes for Tales from the Darkside, House of Cards, Black Mirror, and Tales from the Loop. Foster's sexual orientation became the subject of public discussion in 1991 when publications such as OutWeek and The Village Voice, protesting against the alleged homophobia and transphobia in The Silence of the Lambs, claimed she was a lesbian. She publicly acknowledged her 14-year relationship with Cydney Bernard in 2007 in a speech at The Hollywood Reporter's "Women in Entertainment" breakfast honoring her. In 2013, she addressed her decision to come out in a speech after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 70th Golden Globe Awards, which led many news outlets to describe her as gay. Some sources noted that she did not use the words "gay" or "lesbian" in her speech.

Notable films

Where to start

Highlights from credits and KinoChain journeys.

Taxi Driver

Appears in a KinoChain journey

The Silence of the Lambs

Appears in a KinoChain journey

Nell

Appears in a KinoChain journey

Contact

As Ellie Arroway

Inside Man

As Madeleine White

Panic Room

As Meg Altman

Flightplan

As Kyle

Maverick

As Annabelle Bransford

Chains

KinoChain journeys

Public chains that pass through their films — or name them as a bridge.

Browse all chains

When Studios Marry: Films Born of Corporate Chaos

From the ashes of mergers and acquisitions come some of cinema's most fascinating experiments. This chain traces how boardroom decisions shaped the art on scree...

8 films

Wild Hearts: Feral Children and the Call of the Wild

From the forests of 18th-century France to the animated jungles of Mowgli, a journey through cinema's feral children and their quest for belonging.

7 films

From Oscar Glory to Genre Gold: A Career Reinvention Chain

Trace the arc of performers who swapped prestige for pulp, and found a different kind of immortality in genre cinema.

4 films

The Mind's Eye: Crime Films of Obsession and Interiority

From a detective's haunted pursuit to a killer's fractured psyche, this chain traces cinema's most intimate crime stories, where the real action happens inside...

8 films

The Architecture of Obsession: Cinema of the Fixated Mind

Eight films in which a character's consuming fixation drives the narrative, examined through the directorial techniques that externalise interiority: subjective...

8 films

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