Growing pains

Jodie Foster on films, family and working out how to be famous on her own terms after 58 years in the spotlight

- EMMA BROCKES

IT IS ROUGHLY 58 YEARS since Jodie Foster's first acting role and there are things she won't put up with on set. She won't be told how to get into character. She won't tolerate what she calls "voodoo" directing, that is am-dram, shake-your-body-out nonsense. She won't respond to certain types of "alpha" interference from people up the industry chain. (The only time Foster submits to bossy producers, she says, is when they are "super passive-aggressive British people" - a type she just can't resist.) In work mode, and outside interactions with the press, she is conscientious, matter-of-fact, with almost no performance anxiety or self-consciousness. "I approach a story or character in the same way I do a book report," she says. "I like to make it pragmatic."

We are in a hotel suite in West Hollywood where the 61-year-old is charming and pleasant, with gel-spiked hair, black trousers and a crisp white shirt. The familiarity of her face and manner is startling. The voice and smile, the teasing laugh and intensity, evoke decades of iconic roles, from Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs and Sarah Tobias in The Accused, back to her childhood roles in Taxi Driver and Bugsy Malone.

There is another side to Foster; one that, over the years, has made much of the coverage of her painful to read. She can be intensely self-conscious, a state if not wholly created then certainly intensified by the experience of having journalists test every conceivable angle to get the subject of her sexuality on the table. For a long time, Foster was the only visible gay woman in Hollywood and these days her ability to talk publicly about her life is mired in something that, to me, looks a lot like PTSD.