Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster started working at three, in a Coppertone commercial, which is early even by the standards of American child performers. By the time Martin Scorsese cast her as Iris in Taxi Driver she had close to a decade of television behind her and was thirteen. The film opened in 1976 and brought a nomination for Best Supporting Actress; the same year she appeared in Bugsy Malone, and BAFTA gave her two awards at once. It is an opening that leaves nowhere obvious to go next.

What she did next was leave. Foster enrolled at Yale and graduated in 1985, working through a period in which her private life was not remotely private: in 1981 a man who had become fixated on her after Taxi Driver attempted to assassinate the American president, and she spent her undergraduate years being doorstepped about it. The films she made around her studies were mostly forgettable. The industry had more or less decided she was a former child actress.

The correction took two films. The Accused in 1988 gave her Sarah Tobias, a woman whose account of her own gang rape is doubted by everyone around her, and it won Best Actress at the ceremony in March 1989 along with the Golden Globe. Three years later came Clarice Starling. The Silence of the Lambs won her a second Best Actress award in 1992, plus the BAFTA, and took the Big Five categories - picture, director, both leads, screenplay - which only two films had managed before.

Foster's then-and-now is unusual because she arranged it herself. She directed her first feature, Little Man Tate, in 1991, and took long absences from acting that nobody was allowed to describe as a decline because the work kept being good when she returned. Cannes gave her an honorary Palme d'Or in 2021. She won an Emmy in 2024 for True Detective: Night Country and a fifth Oscar nomination for Nyad. The photographs from 1976 and from now are of a person who was never performing for the camera off-duty.