At the end of the shoot, she admitted to Anthony Hopkins that she was scared of him. Foster had no qualms about psychos and flayed corpses.

Michelle Pfeiffer had turned down the part, finding the story too disturbing. Perhaps that’s her biggest fear.įoster’s other Oscar-winning character, Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, was a similar risk. “You have to take those risks or all you’re ever going to be is mediocre,” she said. Dozens of actors had turned the role down. In The Accused, she insisted on portraying her gang-rape survivor as a trashy good time girl rather than a model citizen, against the studio’s wishes. In her adult career, she has gone where other actors feared to tread, and yet the emotion we’re most accustomed to seeing on her face is fear.

After all that, you could understand if Foster never acted again, or even left the house.īut Foster has always had a head for life’s strangeness. The 18-year-old Foster organised her own press conference, and performed in her college play six days later, not knowing there was a second stalker in the audience who planned to kill her (but changed his mind after deciding she was too pretty). Hinckley said he did it in Foster’s name, having developed an obsession with her via Taxi Driver. Foster’s career-break student years at Yale weren’t exactly carefree either, thanks to her involuntary association with John Hinckley, the man who shot Ronald Reagan.

Jodi foster in the brave one