Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster (born November 19, 1962) is an American actress, director, and producer. She has received two Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award and the Cecil B DeMille Award. For her work as a director, Foster has been nominated for two Directors Guild of America Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. Foster began her professional career as a child model when she was three years old in 1965, and two years later she moved to acting in television series, when she debuted on the sitcom Mayberry R.F.D. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she worked in several primetime television series and made her feature film debut with Disney's Napoleon and Samantha (1972). Foster's breakthrough came with Martin Scorsese's psychological thriller Taxi Driver (1976), in which she played a teenage prostitute and at the age of 14, received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her other critically acclaimed roles as a teenager were in the musical Bugsy Malone (1976), the thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), and she became a popular teen idol by starring in Disney's Freaky Friday (1976) and Candleshoe (1977), Carny (1980) and Foxes (1980).

After attending college at Yale, Foster briefly struggled in her transition to adult roles until winning widespread critical acclaim for her portrayal of a rape survivor in courtroom drama The Accused (1988), for which she won several accolades, including an Academy Award for Best Actress. She won her second Academy Award three years later for her performance in the psychological horror The Silence of the Lambs, where she played Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee investigating a serial murder. Foster made her debut as a film director the same year with the moderately successful family drama Little Man Tate (1991), and founded her own production company, Egg Pictures, in 1992. The company's first production was Nell (1994), in which she also played the title role, garnering her fourth nomination for an Academy Award. Her other films in the 1990s included such successful films as romantic drama Sommersby, western comedy Maverick (1994), science fiction Contact (1997), and period drama Anna and the King (1999). Her second film direction, comedy-drama Home for the Holidays (1995), was not well-received commercially, while critical reviews were mixed.

Foster experienced minor career setbacks in the early 2000s that included the cancellation of a film project and the closing down of her production company. She then starred in four thrillers, Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), Inside Man (2006) and The Brave One (2007), which were commercially successful and well received by the critics. She has focused on directing in the 2010s, directing the films The Beaver (2011) and Money Monster (2016), as well as episodes for Netflix television series Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, and Black Mirror. She also starred in the films Carnage (2011), Elysium (2013) and Hotel Artemis (2018).