Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster (born November 19, 1962) is an American actress, film director, producer as well as a former child actress.Foster began acting in commercials at three years of age, and her first significant role came 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. Also that year, she starred in the cult film The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1989 for playing a rape survivor in The Accused.
In 1991, she starred in The Silence of the Lambs as Clarice Starling, a gifted FBI trainee, assisting in a hunt for a serial killer. This performance received international acclaim and her second Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her fourth Academy Award nomination for playing a hermit in Nell (1994). Other popular films include Bugsy Malone (1976), Freaky Friday (1976), Maverick (1994), Contact (1997), Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), Inside Man (2006), The Brave One (2007), and Nim's Island (2008).
Foster's films have spanned a wide variety of genres, from family films to horror. In addition to her two Academy Awards she has won two BAFTA Awards for three films, two Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a People's Choice Award, and has received two Emmy nominations.
Foster was born in Los Angeles, the daughter of Evelyn "Brandy" Ella (née Almond) and Lucius Fisher Foster III. Her father, a decorated Air Force lieutenant-colonel turned real estate broker, came from a wealthy background and left his wife before Jodie was born. Evelyn supported Jodie by working as a film producer. After appearing as a child in several commercials, Foster made her first credited TV appearance on The Doris Day Show. Her first film role was in the 1970 television movie Menace on the Mountain, which was followed by several Disney productions.
Foster attended a French-language prep school, the Lycée Français de Los Angeles, and graduated in 1980 as the valedictorian. She frequently stayed and worked in France as a teenager, and she still speaks the language fluently without an accent. She attended Yale University, and was a member of Calhoun College and Manuscript Society. She graduated magna cum laude, earning a bachelor's degree in literature in 1985. She was scheduled to graduate in 1984 but the shooting of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr., in which Hinckley's fascination with Foster created unwanted adverse publicity for her, caused her to take a semester's leave of absence from Yale.She later gave the Class Day speech at her alma mater in 1994 and received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the university in 1997.
Fluent in French, Foster has dubbed herself in French-language versions of most of her films. In 2004, she took a minor role in the French WW1 film, A Very Long Engagement. She also understands Germanand can converse in Italian.Foster has English and Irish roots, being the descendant of Mayflower passengers William Mullins and his wife Alice, and of Priscilla and John Alden. Another English ancestor is Samuel Eddy, born in 1608 in Kent, and one of her great-great-great grandmothers Eliza Platt was from Ireland.
