She has never known anything but fame, first as a child prodigy, then as a double Oscar winner. But this scarily intelligent actor has always stayed in control. Donald Clarke does his best to snuggle up with Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster is waiting in a suite on the top floor of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. She is dressed mostly in white. Through the vast window the Hollywood Hills shimmer in brain-atrophying heat that the air conditioning has, for those of us indoors, rendered as irrelevant as faraway blizzards. Foster is prettier than she appears on screen. Her features are as sharp and well defined, but her eyes seem a little bluer and her skin a little pinker. Listening to her easy, round vowels and soft consonants in such a soothingly tranquil environment, I feel tempted to lay my head in her lap and have a little doze. But I am pretty sure that's not allowed.
Nothing I say seems capable of disturbing Foster's amiable calm. Then again, I can't quite bring myself to ask outright how she managed to give birth to two children with no man about the place. Nor do I feel able to mention Cydney Bernard, the female production manager who, the Internet Movie Database confidently claims, "has been in a serious relationship with Jodie Foster since they met in 1993". It would be equally rude to bring up the book that Buddy Foster, her elder brother, wrote in which he portrayed their mother as the stage parent from Hades.
But we have to at least mention John Hinckley. In 1981, while Foster was studying at Yale University, Hinckley, eager to impress the young actor, fired a bullet into President Reagan's shoulder. A note was found in his Washington DC apartment. "Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a secon [ sic] if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you."
Does she have anything to add to the story? "You know I don't really talk about that," she says, almost cheerily. "I think my mother handled it very well at the time. I really want to be remembered for my work. I don't want to be remembered as an aberration in history. That is the reason why I have always tried to veer away from that issue." Cool. Detached. In control.
Might she get fidgety if I talk about her mother? It is well reported that Brandy Foster was the driving force behind her early career. Jodie, who was raised somewhere among the sweltering suburbs I can see just over her right shoulder, first attracted attention at the age of three, when she appeared in a commercial for Coppertone sun cream. Even before Buddy's book came out, journalists had jumped to the conclusion that Brandy must have been a sinister influence. All stage mothers are just living vicariously through their offspring. Right?
"She was actually quite different to most on-set parents," Foster says. "I got into this by accident. My brother was begging her to take him to auditions, because the kid across the street was doing it. And then I got into it, because I followed him into an audition one day. It wasn't like she had a burning desire for us to be actors. But my mom was an amazing manager. There was a vicarious thrill for her, yes. But that was to do with wanting me to have a serious career, to not just be the cute one. They were good vicarious motives, I think."
Forty years later, she sits atop the Four Seasons, promoting Flightplan, a thriller in which she plays a mother whose daughter vanishes during a transatlantic flight. Actors who have been in the business for four decades usually tend to wear dressing gowns and ruminate grumpily on how ghastly modern manners are. Foster still looks like a kid. Can she remember not being famous? Appearing to take the question seriously, she ponders for a while."No. Well, I have a few memories, I guess. I was on that houseboat doing that commercial when I was three. I remember wearing that bathing suit. But by the time I was six I was on a TV show that was really popular. And before six you don't remember much."
Foster and I are about the same age. We were six when Apollo 11 blasted off, in 1969, which I can, just about, remember. "I was doing that TV show when the guys landed on the moon. I was shooting The Courtship of Eddie's Father - very big show. Everybody stopped work, and we all went to a storeroom to watch it on this little black-and-white television." So even her memories of great public events are tied up with show business.
The Cruises, Robertses and Pitts surely savour their fame, but they must also appreciate having had those early decades of anonymity. The limousine that ferries you round the corner to buy a packet of fags must seem all the more luxurious when you once had to drive a cab to pay the rent. For Foster, as for members of royal families and other dynasties, fame is her default setting. She must occasionally regret not having had the chance to be normal.
"There's normal and there's healthy," she says. "I didn't have a normal life, but I had a healthy one. I was raised on sets. I was prodigious at something. I wasn't a math prodigy or a singing prodigy, but I was prodigious at something - acting - and that does bring a differentness. Whether you like it or not, you will be alienated from other people your age."
The first film she directed, 1991's Little Man Tate, concerned a mother bringing up a gifted child. "A lot of those feelings are what that film is about. There are these children who are prodigious emotionally - intellectually too, but that's less interesting. They understand things that are beyond their years." This is worthy of note. Foster's jarringly confident performance as a teenage prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver marked the point at which observers began to suspect she might have enough talent to propel her into an adult career.
It has been suggested that Scorsese and Paul Schrader, his screenwriter, were aware of a scientific study in which sex offenders mentioned Foster's Coppertone commercial as a source of incitement. This is heavy stuff. When they put young actors in such distressing situations, directors often suggest that the performers don't really understand the material (William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, has put forward this line when discussing what Linda Blair got up to with crucifixes). But Foster, frighteningly intelligent then and now, seems to be suggesting that, at 12, she would have been more than capable of understanding what was happening around her.
"Oh sure, I understood everything that was going on," she says. "I was already a big Scorsese fan. My mom took me to all these European and American films. I had seen Mean Streets and The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris. She really had a sense of who I was. It wasn't like I didn't have a sweet, naive centre, but I had a mind that could understand these more complex things."
Foster continued to deliver impressive performances throughout the 1970s. As Disney's moppet of choice, she enlivened Freaky Friday and Candleshoe. She seemed about five years older than her contemporaries in Bugsy Malone. In 1980's wonderfully trashy Foxes - four girls in the Valley go wild - she looked like a proper grown-up. But by then she had already decided to go to university. Younger actors such as Claire Danes and Julia Stiles have suggested that Foster's experience was a great influence on their own decisions to attend college. Halting the momentum of a career in this fashion does constitute something of a gamble.
"I talked to Claire about this and I said: Yes, there may be that slowdown and, yes, you may not work in those years when you look great and your body is beautiful. But if you are talented there will be a place for you. You need the chance to dance around in a fountain in New York and discover who you are. That's useful."
So she didn't think that going to college might end her career? "Oh, I just assumed my career was over then anyway," she says. "That's what child stars were told. I reckoned I would just go on to grad school, and that would be it. But I wanted to give actingone last try. I did feel unsettled. There were things I wanted to say as an actor. I wasn't quite sure what they were, but I knew I wanted to say something. There was still something gnawing at me to be an actor."
She didn't exactly come racing out of the traps on graduation. After such uninspiring pictures as Mesmerized, Five Corners and Siesta, it looked as if grad school might have been the best option after all. Then, in 1988, she made The Accused. Foster's performance as a rape victim won her an Oscar and announced her as a senior talent. Three years later she received a second Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs.
"After The Accused I still felt that I had to prove myself," she says. "I was worried that it might be a fluke. I really felt that I had done a very bad job in that film. When I first saw it I thought: I suck, and now I really am going to have to find something else to do. Going from that to winning the Oscar was a really interesting journey."
She fought hard to win the role of Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, securing it only when Michelle Pfeiffer, the producer's first choice, proved unavailable. After the film's commercial and critical success she became one of the world's most powerful actors.
But exactly what sort of star is she? There's a gravity about Foster that, in the unlikely event she were interested, may dissuade directors from casting her in sexpot roles. But she's not a character actor, either. Bette Davis was said to have recognised a kindred spirit in Foster's early performances. Fair enough, but how many Bette Davis roles - assertive, dominant - are there in today's Hollywood? "There is a time in the business where, if you are lucky, everything is put in front of you," she says. "If you win an Oscar you can, for example, do what you want. You are flavour of the month. I realised that the sexpot thing wasn't what I wanted. That was a choice I made, but after a while it stops being your choice. I mean, who is going to cast me as the sexpot? The girlfriend role? I wouldn't be right for that. I am just better at other things."
Can Jodie Foster be as in control of her life as she appears to be? Could anybody? Her first son, Charles, was born in 1998. The second, Kit, came along in 2001. Look on the internet and you will find various rumours as to where the sperm came from, but Foster has - always calmly and politely - deflected all questions on the subject.
In the two decades since her mother ceased to be her manager, she has brought a similar level of order to her professional life. She makes fewer films than she could. Before Flightplan her last leading role - again, fretting over a child - was three years ago, in David Fincher's Panic Room. The gap between films is so long that every now and then somebody suggests she may have retired. "I think about that all the time," she says, laughing. "But it is true that I am going through a phase where I work less, because I have small children. And there are some sacrifices I am not prepared to make. Plus I am over 40, and people say as a woman actor your career is over at 40. But then they told me I would never work again after I was 16."
Having spent time in the calm, controlled presence of Jodie Foster, it is all the more strange to watch her panicking so effectively in Flightplan. A good half of Robert Schwentke's film - a blend of Panic Room and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes - is taken up with Foster running nervously up and down the aisle, looking for her daughter. "I really connected with this movie in a very primal way," she says. "I guess that everybody has a fear of being in a crowd and losing your child. Your heart starts pounding, and you think your life is over, and it keeps going on and on."
While raving about the young German director she says something rather sweet. "The first week that we met him we had the requisite rewrite meetings and so forth. I took him to my car and said: 'I am here to serve you and help you. You are not here to tell my story; you are here to tell yours. I have been here for 35 years, and I can help you with the business.' I told him that it was very important that he didn't tell the studio if he was going to show me a rough cut. 'Then they will just want to know what I think, and it all becomes about me. If you want to show me it, I will look at it, tell you what I think and not tell them I've seen it.' "
It really is pleasant to have Foster about the place. It seems somewhat unfair that she rations her screen appearances so stingily. Not everybody can make it to this white room, with its view of the Hollywood sign. "This way - working once every few years - I get to be creatively excited and not feel like my life is ruined by running after the success machine. However, I can see myself at 60 or 70 doing three films a year. I am looking forward to a time where I am not headlining the film and I am not having to be on the cover of the magazine." I hope she will excuse us slapping her on the front page one more time.
WHAT SHE HAS BEEN IN
1970 Menace on the Mountain (TV) 1972 The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan (voice, TV series), Napoleon and Samantha, Kansas City Bomber Tom Sawyer, One Little Indian, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (TV series) 1973-75 The Addams Family (voice, TV series) Smile, Jenny, You're Dead (TV), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore 1974-75 Paper Moon (TV series)
1976 Taxi Driver, Echoes of a Summer/The Last Castle, Bugsy Malone (UK), Freaky Friday, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane 1977 Moi, Fleur Bleue/Stop Calling Me Baby! (France), Casotto/In the Beach House (Italy), Candleshoe (UK) Foxes, Carny 1982 O'Hara's Wife 1983 Svengali (TV) The Hotel New Hampshire, Le Sang des Autres/The Blood of Others (TV, France), Mesmerized/Shocked (UK, co-producer) 1987 Siesta, Five Corners 1988 Stealing Home, The Accused 1990 Backtrack/ Catchfire 1991 The Silence of the Lambs, Little Man Tate (star and director) 1992 Shadows and Fog 1993 Sommersby
1994 Maverick, Nell (star and co-producer) 1995 Home for the Holidays (director and co-producer) 1997 Contact 1998 The Baby Dance (co-executive producer; TV) 1999 Anna and the King
2000 Waking the Dead (executive producer) 2002 Panic Room, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (star and co-producer)
2003 Abby Singer (cameo) 2004 Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (France) 2005 Flightplan
WHAT SHE HAS WON
Two Oscars, for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs (plus nominations for Taxi Driver and Nell).
Three Baftas, for Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone and The Silence of the Lambs (plus a nomination for The Accused).
Two Golden Globes, for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs (plus three nominations, for Freaky Friday, Nell and Contact).
Flightplan is released on Friday