From child star to icon: Jodie Foster honored with George Eastman Award

Jodie Foster started out in show business at the age of 3, when she appeared in a commercial for Coppertone suntan lotion.

Roles on such 1970s-era TV shows as “Nanny & the Professor,” “Adam-12,” “Dragnet,” “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” and “Bonanza” followed, as did parts in a number of Disney movies.

But Foster’s mother didn’t see acting as a realistic long-term career choice for her daughter.

“My mom was very busy when I was young saying, ‘What are you going to do when you grow up? Are you going to be a doctor? A lawyer?' She never said the word actor. She wanted to make sure that I didn’t have the delusion that I would ever be able to be an actor when I grew up because most child actors disappear and that’s that. But she wanted me to live the dream and be a professional and be respected.”

Foster didn’t think she’d continue acting into adulthood either. “I thought it was a thing I was going to do as a child and then transition into something else.”

You know what happened next. She went on to deliver some of the most iconic performances in movie history.

The 60-year-old is in Rochester to accept the George Eastman Award, the highest honor in motion pictures presented by George Eastman Museum, which she described at a Thursday morning press conference in the Dryden Theatre as being like “Disneyland for film nerds.”

The notion she might be on the right path, she said, came during the filming of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1974), in which she played Iris “Easy” Steensma, a 12-year-old prostitute that lead character Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) becomes obsessed with saving.

There was some uneasiness between the two performers at first, she recalled.

“You know, I was 12, and he was silent and very much into his character as Travis Bickle. He didn’t talk very much. He was awkward.”

De Niro would pick up Foster at the New York City hotel where she was staying for the shoot and take her to different coffee shops around town. “We would run the lines over and over and over again,” she said.

At that point, she had made more films than De Niro or Scorsese, so initially she found the process exasperating. But having those lines down pat opened the door to improvisation, which made her realize, “Oh, being an actor isn’t just learning lines and saying them to be as natural as possible, which I’d been told,” she said. “It actually required more thought and more depth and that I, as a 12-year-old, had not given enough of myself. So, I was like, oh, maybe acting is not such a dumb job. So, it was a big revelation for me working with De Niro. I hadn’t really understood what acting was until then.”

The performance also earned Foster her first Oscar nomination.

After deciding to pursue acting as a career, her focus turned to choosing roles that felt right to her “and that I could live with, and there were certain things I couldn’t live with.”

Like, for instance, “playing the girlfriend or the wife of the character that had all the stuff to do.”

Or being part of some Brat Pack-esque ensemble piece.

She got about as far from that as possible with 1988’s “The Accused,” in which she played the victim of a brutal gang rape.

That gutsy portrayal brought her first Oscar win.

But the performance that resulted in her second — as FBI trainee Clarice Starling in 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs” — is arguably Foster’s most indelible.

She spoke about the film in some depth before a sold-out screening Wednesday night at the Dryden.

Long before being cast as Starling, she wanted to buy the rights to Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel on which the movie is based but was beaten to the punch by Gene Hackman, who planned to direct and star as Hannibal Lecter. He later dropped out of the project, at which point the rights were acquired by Orion Pictures.

Jonathan Demme was then hired to direct, and his first choice to play Starling was Michelle Pfeiffer, the star of Demme’s 1988 picture, “Married to the Mob.” Pfeiffer turned down "Silence" because of what Demme described in a 2006 interview as “the darkness of piece.” Next, the Starling part was offered to Meg Ryan, but she was “horrified by the subject matter,” Demme said. He subsequently became sold on the idea of casting Laura Dern, he said in an interview in 2015 (two years before his death), but Orion was not because at the time Dern was still a relative unknown.

Meanwhile, Foster had been lobbying hard for the role, ultimately won it, “And look what happened,” Demme said in 2015. “I just, I fell madly in love with her. And she did what she did, and she embodied all that fierce — I named our production company Strong Heart Productions after Jodie’s sense of character.”

At Wednesday’s screening, Foster described “Silence” as one of those rare moviemaking experiences where everyone involved realized they were part of something special, even before the film was finished.

However, they weren’t necessarily expecting it to become one of just three movies in history to win Oscars in five major categories: for best picture, directing, acting (Foster and Anthony Hopkins) and screenwriting.

She talked about being with the production’s contingent at the 1992 ceremony. “And we said, ‘If we win an Oscar, we’ll buy everybody drinks.’ We got so drunk.”

Foster also has directed numerous movies, including “Little Man Tate” (1991), “Home for the Holidays” (1995) and “Money Monster” (2016) and on Thursday morning cited Scorsese as a major influence.

Going back to the “Taxi Driver” experience, she said, “He talks a million miles a minute, and he’s super-excited about everything, and he was always laughing like a cartoon character. I just completely fell in love with him as a director and was like, that’s how I want to be when I’m a director.”

Past recipients of the George Eastman Award, established in 1955, include Scorsese, Charlie Chaplin, Joan Crawford, Audrey Hepburn, James Stewart, Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas, Michael Keaton and Julia Roberts.

Reporter Marcia Greenwood covers general assignments. Send story tips to mgreenwo@rocheste.gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @MarciaGreenwood.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Jodie Foster honored with George Eastman Award