Jodie Foster was discovered by accident at a casting call meant for her brother
Her mother brought three-year-old Jodie Foster along only because her brother Buddy had an audition. Casting agents noticed her instead, and a sunscreen advert followed. She went on to win two Best Actress Oscars, graduate from Yale with honours, and direct four feature films of her own.
Alicia Christian Foster was born in Los Angeles on November 19, 1962, the youngest child of Evelyn "Brandy" Foster and the businessman Lucius Fisher Foster III. Her parents split before she arrived, and she never came to know her father. Brandy brought up the children alongside her female partner, and later gave up publicity work for the producer Arthur P. Jacobs to manage the acting careers of Buddy and Jodie. The nickname Jodie came from her siblings and outlasted her real first name.
That 1965 Coppertone commercial snowballed. By the late 1960s she had a small part in Mayberry R.F.D., where Buddy was a regular, and she eventually appeared in more than 50 television programmes. For a time the two children earned the family's living. She even voiced Pugsley in an animated Addams Family series.
Film brought wider fame. Disney titles such as Freaky Friday (1976) made her a teen idol, and Martin Scorsese cast her twice, the second time in Taxi Driver, which brought a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Away from the set she was precocious: reading at three, schooled at the French-language Lycée Français de Los Angeles, fluent enough to act in French films and to dub her own performances. At Yale she majored in African-American literature, wrote a thesis on Toni Morrison under the supervision of Henry Louis Gates Jr., and left in 1985 with magna cum laude honours.
Adult stardom followed. She won Best Actress for The Accused (1988) and again as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and was later nominated for Nell and Nyad. Behind the camera she directed Little Man Tate, The Beaver and two other features, founded Egg Pictures in 1992, and took on television episodes including one of Black Mirror. In 2024 True Detective: Night Country earned her an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
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