Jodie Foster Looks Back

Jodie Foster is back, but it's not about a new movie she's starring in. It's rather personal, which she rather keep to herself. At 51, the actress can look back at her career, her filmography being quite something. This is something that up-and-coming actresses can aspire for.

Foster is a two-time Academy Award winner, a child star as well. In fact, she was one of the few young performers who had a successful career during adulthood. Her early works could be considered as special, as she grew up during Hollywood's Golden Age.

"I think all of us when we look back on our childhood, we always think of it as somebody else. It's just a completely different place. But I was lucky to be around in the '70s and to really be making movies in the '70s with some great filmmakers - the most exciting time, for me, in American Cinema. I learned a lot from some very interesting artists - and I learned a lot about the business at a young age, because, for whatever reason, I was paying attention; so it was kind of invaluable in my career," she said.

One of those films was "Taxi Driver", Martin Scorsese's ambiguous feature on a young fellow struggling to survive in the Big Apple. Fans of Scorsese, considered as one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time, would praised the ambiguity, as New York City was like a celluloid version of Dante's Inferno. Robert De Niro, then Scorsese's muse, was Travis Bickle, lonely and depressed while driving the cab, looking for passengers, also searching for someone who might need him. He found one in Iris “Easy” Steensma, played by Foster, who was too young for streetwalking. What he did for Iris would end up in the news, the media calling him a hero. If they only knew what he have been through.

"Taxi Driver" was one of those pictures that defined 70s Cinema, far from the movies from the studio era. It was disturbing, like how Scorsese depicted Travis Bickle, but film enthusiasts find it exciting. After all, this was unchartered territory being explored by a group of young filmmakers who would end up in Hollywood's A List the following decade. (Francis Ford Coppola. Steven Spielberg. Woody Allen.)

As Easy, Foster looked smart for a young waif. The role could have damaged her career, being too young to play someone working in the oldest trade, but one person believed otherwise.

"My mom is a big film fan and we were always seeing European movies, whether it was Jean-Luc Godard or Fellini. She was a big fan of Martin Scorsese and she wanted me to be in films where I was taken seriously and that were about important topics. That was a great choice on her part," she said.

Then the 80s came, headlined by the Brat Pack. Again, her mother made another right move.

"She was careful - she wanted my career to stand apart so that when the whole trend of young child actresses was over, I would still be standing," she said.

She did.