Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster (born November 19 1962) is a two-time Academy Award-winning American actress, director and producer. She has also won two Golden Globes, three BAFTA awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award, making her one of the few people to have won all four major motion picture acting awards.

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, receiving 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 movies, and science fiction. Popular later films include the box office successes Contact (1997), Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005) and Inside Man (2006).

Jodie Foster started her career at the age of two. For four years, she made commercials and finally gave her debut as an actress in the TV series "Mayberry R.F.D." (1968), on which her brother, Buddy Foster, was a regular. In 1975, Jodie was offered the role of the prostitute Iris in the movie Taxi Driver (1976). This role, for which she received an Academy Award nomination in the "Best Supporting Actress" category, marked a breakthrough in her career. In 1980, she graduated as the best of her class from the College Lycée Français and began to study English Literature at Yale University, from where she graduated magna cum laude in 1985. One tragic moment in her life was March 30th, 1981 when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan (I). Hinkley was obsessed with Jodie and the movie Taxi Driver (1976), in which Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, tried to shoot presidential candidate, Palantine. Despite the fact that Jodie never took acting lessons, she received two Oscars before she was thirty years of age. She received her first award for her part as Sarah Tobias in Accused, The (1988) and the second one for her performance as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, The (1991).