Jodie Foster Biography

Actor / Filmmaker

Name at birth: Alicia Christian Foster

Brainy and beautiful, Jodie Foster is a four-time Oscar nominee; she has won twice, for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991, with Anthony Hopkins). In the early 1980s she was famous for being the object of obsession of John Hinckley, Jr. In 1981 Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan with a .22 caliber pistol, in an attempt to win Foster's favor. (The shooting echoed events in Foster's 1976 movie Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese.) Having been on TV and in films since she was a toddler, Foster took time off from acting to enroll in Yale, and she graduated in 1985 with a degree in English Literature. She also has appeared in Bugsy Malone (1976), Little Man Tate (1991, her directorial debut), Sommersby (1993, with Richard Gere), Contact (1997, with Matthew McConaughey), Anna and the King (1999, with Chow Yun-Fat), The Panic Room (2002) and Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006, with Clive Owen).

Foster joins fellow stars Bo Derek and Melanie Griffith in our loop Mauled By Lions... She appears with Reagan and Hinckley in the loop The Taxi Driver Connection.