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Even for Jodie, so spookily poised on- and offscreen, growing pains appeared inevitable. Everyone passes through an awkward stage, and for many child stars that stage is adulthood. They seem like less perfect versions of their lost miniature selves. Their cuteness is shed, and with it their earning power. At 16 they can be obsolete. Many aging child actors, once sprung from the pampered captivity of, say, sitcom stardom, are as unready for real life as zoo pets suddenly released in the wild. They try, too quickly, to catch up on the rambunctious youth they missed, and wind up in the police blotter or on the cover of supermarket tabloids. They can spend their 20s torpid, discarded, in rehab from their early fame.
If any child star could escape the Hollywood hothouse and blossom, it would be Jodie Foster. And indeed she considers when she was 18 to 24, "the years I went off to college and had a life." She armored herself in friends, cocooned herself in the anonymity of a newly plump figure, tangled with the deconstructionist teachers in her comp-lit classes at Yale.
But someone else was flipping through her movie family album. On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan and subsequently professed his love for Foster -- or, really, for Iris in Taxi Driver. (The film was based in part on the diary of Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of Governor George Wallace.) Hinckley won the prize any deranged, unrequited lover seeks: he would be forever linked with his unknowing inamorata.
Foster could speak eloquently of the rank underside of stargazing -- of fandom fanned into fanaticism. Understandably, she does not speak on the subject (just last week she canceled an appearance on the Today show because Hinckley was to be mentioned), or on other aspects of her personal life. She knows that Hollywood movies are all about the marketing of emotion, and that it is difficult for actors, the onscreen vessels of emotion, to keep their lives sensible and their sensations private. Nonetheless, Foster is determined to separate public persona from private person.
She hopes that moviegoers will do the same. "My work is my work," she says. "It has always been a way to express myself, and to be things I'm not. My character precedes my job. I was who I was before I became an actress. I became an actress because I like to act, not to get my picture in the paper and have people wonder what color socks I wear -- not to be able to get the best table at the Polo Lounge or to be good friends with Barry Diller."
Foster graduated (cum laude) from Yale in 1985. But at that time Diller, chairman of 20th Century Fox, was probably not much interested in being good friends with her, or casting her in a movie. She wasn't box-office poison; she was box-office invisible. Another actress's hope was her fear: that she might end up as a regular on The Bold Ones. "My career was at a low point when I graduated," she notes, "but I couldn't let it go without a real push. Then it struck me that I wasn't going to do dreck," and she took roles in some eccentric good films (Siesta, Five Corners) and at least one ordinary bad one (Stealing Home). Then The Accused came along. Or rather, she stormed after it. The part got her the Oscar and a place on the actresses' A list. Only fitting: A is the grade she has earned all her life, in class and onscreen.