Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster (born November 19, 1962) is a two-time
Academy Award,
BAFTA, and
Golden Globe-award winning
American actress,
director and
producer.
Although Foster's first acting appearance was at three years old, her first significant role came in 1976 as an
underage prostitute in
Taxi Driver, for which she received an Oscar nomination for
Best Supporting Actress. She won an Oscar for
Best Actress in 1988 for playing a
rape survivor in
The Accused. In 1991, she starred in
The Silence of the Lambs as
Clarice Starling, a gifted
FBI trainee, assisting in a hunt for a
serial killer. This performance received international acclaim and her second Oscar for Best Actress. Her films and roles have spanned a wide variety of genres, including
thrillers,
crime,
romance,
comedy, children's films and
science fiction. Popular later films include the
box office successes
Contact (1997),
Panic Room (2002),
Flightplan (2005),
Inside Man (2006) and
The Brave One (2007).
