Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster is an American actress and filmmaker whose six-decade career has produced two Best Actress Academy Awards (1989 for The Accused; 1992 for The Silence of the Lambs) — making her one of the most-acclaimed American screen actors of the late 20th century. She was born Alicia Christian Foster on November 19, 1962, in Los Angeles, California. Her father Lucius Fisher Foster III was a U.S. Air Force officer who left the family before her birth, and her mother Evelyn Ella Foster was a film publicist.

Her breakthrough came at age three in a 1965 Coppertone sunscreen TV commercial. Her child-actress peak came in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) — in which she played 12-year-old child prostitute Iris Steensma opposite Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle. The performance earned her the 1977 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination at age 14. Her 1981 acceptance to Yale University (B.A. in Literature, 1985) was shaped by her March 30, 1981 attempted-assassination incident — when John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in an attempt to gain Foster's attention.

Her 1988 lead role as Sarah Tobias in Jonathan Kaplan's The Accused — the rape-trial courtroom drama opposite Kelly McGillis — won her the 1989 Best Actress Academy Award. Her 1991 lead role as FBI trainee Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs — the psychological-thriller opposite Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter — won her the 1992 Best Actress Academy Award. The film won all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay) — only the third film in Academy history to do so.

Her subsequent film career has produced Sommersby (1993), Nell (1994), Contact (1997), Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), The Mauritanian (2021), and Nyad (2023, for which she won her fifth Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination). Her four directed films include Little Man Tate (1991) and Money Monster (2016). She married actress Alexandra Hedison in 2014 and the couple has two sons from her previous partnership with Cydney Bernard.

Her name Jodie began as a diminutive form of Judith (from the Hebrew Yehudit meaning "woman of Judea"). Jodie was a popular American girls' name through the 1970s.