An interview with... Jodie Foster
A one-time child prodigy, double Oscar winner and Ivy League graduate, Jodie Foster is notoriously private. Here she opens up to GABRIELLE DONNELLY about the joys of parenting and why not all child stars are corrupted by fame...
Today is a brisk Spring
afternoon in New York City and Jodie Foster, taking a break from
the wind in aposh hotel near Central Park, clad simply and
elegantly in jeans and a linen-silk blend jacket the same colour as
her wheaten hair, is mulling over the secret of how she manages to
stay sane in a profession which is, let us say, not necessarily
known for its sanity.
"It's partly the people you surround yourself with," she says. "I've worked with the same people all my life since I was 12 years old: same agent, same publicist, same lawyer. Almost everybody who works with me is someone I've grown up with, and with people like that you kind of get into a system of knowing what you want and what you don't want and going from there. It's honestly not very complicated. People talk about actors and their lists of wanting this and not wanting that - that's not me. I already know what I need and what I don't need. And you won't find me out making headlines like Lindsay Lohan because I'm 48 years old and making headlines is for young people who are actually awake at 10 o'clock at night, which I myself am not!"
Jodie Foster first appeared on screen when she was three years old. The youngest of four children to Evelyn 'Brandy' Foster and her husband Lucius, a real estate broker who left the family before Jodie was born, she spent her childhood years as the family breadwinner, working throughout her first decade with children's films and guest appearances on various American television shows, before hitting the big time at the ripe age of 13 starring opposite Robert De Niro as a teenage prostitute in Martin Scorsese's acclaimed movie, Taxi Driver. Not by any stretch of the imagination the sort of childhood most of us would consider the norm, but ask Jodie about it now and she says, quickly, that she feels it was none the worse for that.
"No, it wasn't your normal childhood, but I think it was very healthy and very productive in a lot of ways. It forced me very early on to be aware of something that I think most children should be made to be aware of, which are the consequences of things. Most people at 15 think, 'Oh, if I chop down a tree or whatever it doesn't matter'. I always knew that it did matter. Also, I had a great education - I travelled the world, I got to talk to grown-ups who would listen to what I said, I got to explore parts of my personality at a very young age, which I don't think many kids get to do. The Hollywood thing? You know, it didn't really affect me much. I was raised in Los Angeles but my family was not in show business so I grew up thinking the Hollywood aspect of my life was just this little party that you went to and thought was hysterically funny, and then you went home to your family and your nieces and nephews and your school friends and had barbecues on a Sunday afternoon, because that was what really mattered."
For many child stars, the transition from adorable little tousle-head to grown-up actress is a difficult one. Jodie on the other hand moved seamlessly (via a stint at Yale University) from Disney adventures like Candleshoe and coming-of-age dramas like Foxes to playing - and winning Oscars for - an uptight FBI agent in Silence Of The Lambs and a rape victim in The Accused. That, she says gratefully, is largely thanks to her beloved mother.
"I have to credit her for being very careful about the choices she made for me when I was a child. I never played those roles of the young moppet or the 12 year old. Even when I was very young my characters were fairly complex and human. So when the time came for me to play adult roles I was accepted by people more easily, because in a sense I'd been playing adult roles all along. That was very smart of my mother."
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