I have a longing to connect

‘Being a child prodigy is inherently lonely,” Jodie Foster says. “I was one of them. You’re different from other kids. No one else can understand. There’s a longing to connect, a craving to say, ‘Here is the deepest part of me, the part that people don’t see.’”
Sitting in an elegant suite in a Beverly Hills hotel a short drive from her home, Jodie leans forward, her elbows on her knees, and speaks softly in her deep, boyish voice.
“When I look back at my life,” she tells me, “I think it has been about the search for meaning and connection.”

Jodie seems weary. Her lovely face is drawn, her blue eyes tired behind her glasses. Small (5 feet 3), thin and with very little makeup, she has none of the glamour expected of an A-list movie star. She’s dressed simply in tight jeans, ankle boots and a blue cardigan sweater pulled over a white blouse.

“I’ve been working for 42 years,” says Jodie, who’s now 45. “Sometimes I think, ‘What the hell are you doing? What’s the value of all this?’I have fantasies about the things I might have done. I wish I’d been a ski bum or maybe had a job at a Starbucks in a ski place.” She chuckles to herself. “Now I’ve got responsibilities, cars, kids…”

Jodie, who never married, has two sons: Charles Bernard Foster, 9, and Kit Bernard Foster, 6. She worries about them and the effect her life will have on them.

“I do what I can,” she says. “We try not to go out at night or go places where there’ll be 20 photographers. I try to minimize their exposure to assaults.”

The same goes for herself. She will not address long-standing rumors about her sexual orientation or name her sons’ father. When asked about her personal life, she fidgets and turns wary.

“I don’t think there is any good thing about fame,” she asserts. “In this business, in order to care for yourself and the people you love, you have to separate your professional life from your personal life. I have a work life that is at times fulfilling, at times mind-numbingly boring and totally trivial, with the hair, makeup, red carpet—but when it is 7 o’clock and I come home, that’s my life.”

Jodie first tasted celebrity as a kid in commercials, TV shows and Disney teen pictures. World stardom followed when director Martin Scorsese cast her as a teen prostitute opposite Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. She was 13 and earned an Oscar nomination. In the following decades, she won Academy Awards as Best Actress for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs. Her new movie, Nim’s Island, a delightful family comedy-adventure, opens on April 4. It is Jodie’s 43rd film and her first adult role in a picture made for children.

“Today I see kids at 10 who have this kind of internal light in them about acting,” she observes. “They want to put a lampshade on their heads. I was never like that. I grew up here in L.A. I sort of fell into acting.”

The dominant influence on Jodie was her mother, Evelyn “Brandy” Foster, now 79. “My parents divorced before I was born,” she says. “I’ve never really known my father. He lives somewhere in L.A. I’ve only met him a couple of times.”

When Jodie was 3, she landed her first job—a Coppertone commercial. From that point on, her mom became her manager.

“A parent’s love for her children is unconditional,” she says. “I don’t think the reverse is true. In some ways, my mother’s life was given meaning through me. She didn’t have my opportunities. I had to take care of her, and that pretty much meant I had to wake up and go to work.

“People ask me if I missed anything by not having a normal childhood.” She shrugs. “The truth is, if I’d been an ambassador’s daughter or grown up on a farm in Missouri, I wouldn’t have had a normal childhood either. I had the only childhood I knew.”

Jodie attended Yale. While she was there, John Hinckley Jr., an obsessed fan, shot President Reagan in a bid to impress her. Despite the resulting media frenzy, she graduated magna cum laude, with a B.A. in literature, in 1985. She was 23.

Following graduation, Jodie returned to California. “I got really depressed. I’d watch old movies until 2 a.m., wake up at noon. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I couldn’t decide if I’d be OK being an actor anymore.”

Jodie considered changing occupations, but first she decided she would go after the leading role in The Accused—a gang-rape victim who seeks justice. “I thought the movie was a chance for me to figure out what I should do with my life. I’m drawn to films about people who live these lonely, heroic journeys. When I saw the first cut of the movie, I was like, ‘Oh, my God! I am so bad!’” she says. “I went straight out and took my GREs [graduate school entrance exams]. I was definitely going to grad school.”

Winning the Oscar as Best Actress for The Accused changed her mind.

Jodie has never admitted to any romantic involvements. When I ask why she has not yet fallen in love, she gets irritated and explains, perhaps disingenuously, “Oh, my life is basically from the head up. I’m definitely not proud of that. I’m very analytical.”

This past December, she opened the window slightly on her emotional commitments by publicly acknowledging her longtime friend, Cydney Bernard, at a Women in Entertainment breakfast in Los Angeles. Speaking about her, Jodie said: “My beautiful Cydney sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss.” The middle name of both of Jodie’s sons is Bernard.

“I’m still not sure where I’m going in my life,” Jodie tells me. “There are times when I don’t really know what I am here for. When I had my kids, I was burnt out on the film business again and wondering if this new identity as a parent was going to be fulfilling enough. I was forced to ask these really hard questions about myself: Is being a mother everything? Are you supposed to lose yourself in the process of being a mother?

“I wanted to have children,” she continues, speaking intently. “I’ve always had a special connection with my boys. They are the center of my world. I wanted to love someone more than myself. What I realize now is the joy I feel in watching my boys become somebody—and also knowing that in time they will walk away. They will leave you, and when they do, you will tell yourself you’ve succeeded because they can fly away. They don’t need you anymore.”

She pauses, glancing out the hotel window as if looking for her sons.

“Now, of course, I am starting to see and understand how valuable it is for me to have an adult life apart from them,” she says quietly, as if to herself. “That’s important for kids to know. Otherwise you’re a burden.

“Most of all,” she adds, “I want my children to find connection and meaning, like I’ve found connection through them. I’ve found my own nuggets of meaning too. That’s what I am most proud of—that I’ve known those transcendent moments. I’ve had those quick realizations of connection that are impossible to explain. They fly away so fast! But isn’t it the hope of finding them again that keeps us moving?”

Updated:
via The celebrity facts
Her mother Evelyn Ella “Brandy” Almond and her father Lucius Fisher Foster III divorced three years before Jodie’s birth. Foster was a real estate broker and came from a wealthy background. He left his wife with three children – Cindy, Connie and Buddy. Jodie’s mother worked as a film producer in order to support her family. In 1962 Evelyn visited Lucius in order to ask him for child support and they ended up conceiving Jodie. The baby was born under the name Alicia Christian Foster but her siblings nicknamed her Jodie and later she started using the nickname officially.

Sources:

JODIE FOSTER

Jodie Foster