Jodie Foster by Zoey Grossman for ELLE USA December 2023 / January 2024

Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster (born November 19, 1962) is an American actress, director, and producer. She has received two Academy Awards, three British Academy Film Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award and the Cecil B DeMille Award. For her work as a director, Foster has been nominated for two Directors Guild of America Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. Foster began her professional career at the age of three as a child model in 1965, and two years later moved to acting in television series, with the sitcom Mayberry R.F.D. being her debut. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she worked in several primetime television series and starred in children's films. Foster's breakthrough came in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), in which she played a teenage prostitute; the role garnered her a nomination for an Academy Award. Her other critically acclaimed roles as a teenager were in the musical Bugsy Malone (1976) and the thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), and she became a popular teen idol by starring in Disney's Freaky Friday (1976), Candleshoe (1977) and Foxes (1980).

After attending college at Yale, Foster briefly struggled in her transition to adult roles until winning widespread critical acclaim for her performance of a rape survivor in legal drama The Accused (1988), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She won her second Academy Award three years later for her performance in the psychological horror film The Silence of the Lambs (1991), where she portrayed Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee investigating a serial murder. Foster made her debut as a film director the same year with the moderately successful family drama Little Man Tate, and founded her own production company, Egg Pictures, in 1992. The company's first production was Nell (1994), in which she also played the title role, garnering her fourth nomination for an Academy Award. Her other films in the 1990s included such successful films as romantic drama Sommersby, western comedy Maverick (1994), science fiction Contact (1997), and period drama Anna and the King (1999). Her second film as a director, the comedy-drama film Home for the Holidays (1995), was a critical and commercial disappointment.

Foster experienced minor career setbacks in the early 2000s that included the cancellation of a film project and the closing down of her production company. She then starred in four thrillers, Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), Inside Man (2006) and The Brave One (2007), which were commercially successful and well-received by critics. She has focused on directing in the 2010s, directing the films The Beaver (2011) and Money Monster (2016), as well as episodes for Netflix television series Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, and Black Mirror. She also starred in the films Carnage (2011), Elysium (2013) and Hotel Artemis (2018).