She started working in front of the camera at just 3 years old and has since become something of a Hollywood legend. Over the course of her career, she has appeared in more than 50 television shows and countless movies, eventually becoming a two-time Oscar winner.
But behind the success, her life hasn’t always been easy.
Her estranged father went to jail, and a horrific childhood trauma still haunts her – an incident that happened just hours before one of the biggest moments of her young life.
Died penniless
When you think of child stars who actually went on to have incredible careers, there’s one actress whose story really stands out.
Her parents split up before she was born, and she was raised by her mother and her mother’s partner in Los Angeles alongside her siblings.
Her father was largely absent from her life and later ended up in prison after being convicted of fraud. Decades later, the estranged and penniless father reportedly died quietly from Alzheimer’s in 2019, just a few miles from the $15 million home where his famous daughter lived.
The future Hollywood star was described as a “gifted child” who learned to read by the age of 3. She and her brother also became child actors, and the two helped support the family financially from a young age.
Looking back on those early years, she has said that working in commercials was an invaluable part of her childhood.
While some young actors might dismiss commercials as unimportant, she felt the experience taught her valuable lessons and helped prepare her for the career that followed.
“Being a child prodigy is lonely”
Naturally, her mother became a hugely important figure in her life, guiding her through an industry that can be unforgiving even for adults.
By the time she was 7, the young actress was appearing on television.
And by 10, she had already experienced something terrifying on a movie set.
But being a gifted child actor came with its own challenges. She later opened up about how isolating it could feel to grow up different from other kids, telling Parade in 2008, “Being a child prodigy is lonely. I was one of them. You’re different from other kids. No one else can understand.”
While filming Napoleon and Samantha, she was involved in a frightening encounter with a lion. The animal grabbed her by the hip, picked her up and shook her around.
It was the kind of experience that could have made a child swear off acting forever.
But she kept going.
Then, at just 12 years old, she landed the role that would change everything.
One of the most traumatic moments
She was cast as Iris in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, opposite Robert De Niro. The role was controversial because of her young age, but her performance immediately attracted attention.
And then came one of the most traumatic moments of her childhood.
In May 1976, just hours before she was due to travel to France for the premiere of Taxi Driver at the Cannes Film Festival, tragedy struck at home.
Her beloved puppy, still only a little dog, went running down a set of slippery stairs. He hit a wall, and the young actress witnessed the horrifying aftermath.
Years later, she recalled the moment in shocking detail, saying her puppy’s skull “exploded into blood” right in front of her.
She was only 13.
Locked herself in a bathroom
The memory never truly left her. In 2025, the actress told AARP that the traumatic event and its aftermath had a lifelong impact on her.
As she later explained, the timing of the tragedy affected the way she viewed her sudden success. Taxi Driver was being celebrated, critics were praising her performance and she was entering a world of fame she could barely have imagined.
But inside, she was terrified.
She developed what she later described as a kind of “magical thinking,” convincing herself that perhaps she had somehow made a terrible bargain for her success.
She even feared she had “given up” the thing she loved most in exchange for becoming successful.
“I had a whole internal thing that I had to give up the thing I loved most to get [this success],” Foster said.
“It was like ‘Amélie,’ total magical thinking about how powerful I was. What a sad, sad moment. I didn’t talk to my mother about it, or anyone.”
She locked herself in a bathroom and tried to deal with the fear alone.
It was an early glimpse of something that would become important throughout her life: learning how to separate her emotions from her work.
Taught her to protect certain parts
Her mother had already taught her to protect certain parts of herself. As a child who had been in the public eye almost her entire life, she learned that not everything about her had to belong to the audience.
She once explained that acting required her to give an enormous amount of herself — and that if she wanted to survive, there had to be parts of her that remained private.
Despite everything, her career continued to soar.
Her performance in Taxi Driver earned her an Oscar nomination, and she quickly became one of the most recognizable young stars in Hollywood.
The 63-year-old actress recently spoke with NPR as part of the 50th anniversary coverage of the iconic movie. Reflecting on the movie, which was released when she was just 13, she looked back on what it was like growing up and working in Hollywood from such a young age.
Over the years, many former child actors and other people in the entertainment industry have spoken openly about traumatic experiences and abuse. The actress said hearing those stories has made her reflect on her own childhood and wonder why she was spared some of the worst experiences.
“I’ve really had to examine that, like, how did I get saved? There were microaggressions, of course. Anybody who’s in the workplace has had misogynist microaggressions. That’s just a part of being a woman, right? But what kept me from having those bad experiences, those terrible experiences?” she said.
Regardless, she didn’t simply remain a child star.
She attended Yale University, graduating in 1985, while continuing to work in the entertainment industry. At one point, she even considered walking away from acting because of self-doubt and the difficulty of figuring out who she was beyond the career she had started as a toddler.
Instead, she returned to Hollywood and reinvented herself as an adult actress.
In 1989, she won her first Academy Award for The Accused.
Then came another unforgettable role.
In 1991, she played FBI trainee Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, opposite Anthony Hopkins. The film became a classic, and her performance earned her a second Oscar.
The little girl who had grown up in front of the cameras had become one of Hollywood’s most respected stars.
And there was another side to her career, too.
She became a director and producer, working behind the camera as well as in front of it. Over the decades, she built a career that went far beyond the child-star label that had followed her for years.
Today, she is a two-time Oscar winner, acclaimed filmmaker and one of the most enduring actresses of her generation.
Her name is Jodie Foster.
More than five decades after she first appeared on television as a little girl, she has achieved the kind of success most actors can only dream of.
But despite all the awards, fame and fortune, some of the memories from those early years have never completely disappeared.
And perhaps that is what makes her story so remarkable: she didn’t simply survive a difficult childhood in the spotlight — she built an extraordinary life from it.
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