When Jodie Foster discovered acting wasn’t a foolish profession

Jodie Foster had always envisioned herself as a writer.

“I didn’t genuinely believe I aspired to be an actor when I matured because it seemed somewhat of a foolish job,” the Oscar-winning actress and director stated during a Radcliffe Day event on Friday with Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and head of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Acting appeared too shallow to provide intellectual fulfillment as a vocation, she remarked. However, Robert De Niro took her under his mentorship and enhanced her improvisational abilities while they co-starred in “Taxi Driver.” De Niro led the 1976 Academy Award winner, while Foster portrayed a young sex worker, a part for which she garnered her inaugural Academy Award nomination.

“My 12-year-old perspective was astounded. I quickly recognized that acting encompassed more than merely delivering lines and ‘being yourself,’” she shared with Gates, who served as Foster’s thesis supervisor at Yale in the early 1980s. “I hadn’t examined it as I might scrutinize a book or inspect a painting. I hadn’t genuinely regarded it as an artistic discipline, and … it was up to me to push myself beyond that.”

Foster attended the Harvard Radcliffe Institute to accept the 2025 Radcliffe Medal, awarded by Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, acknowledging her achievements over a six-decade tenure as an actress and filmmaker, along with her advocacy for suicide prevention among LGBT youth.

During the annual Radcliffe Day festivities, Foster reflected on her transformation from a 1970s Disney child star to a distinguished director and two-time Academy Award winner for prominent performances in “The Accused” (1988) and “Silence of the Lambs” (1991).

Famously reticent, Foster opened up about the trauma she endured as an 18-year-old freshman at Yale following an assailant’s attempt to harm President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in a bid to win her affection. She was compelled to go into hiding, unable to reside on campus or attend classes, and required constant security.

The ordeal, she stated, was “a trial by fire. I matured quickly” and gleaned valuable life lessons concerning the significance of community and also some adverse ones, like “now you can trust no one.”

Foster mentioned that she intentionally refrained from discussing the experience for decades.

“I aspired to have a lengthy career where I would be recognized for myself and my contributions, and I wanted my identity to hinge upon what I created,” she clarified to Gates. “I simply didn’t want to be ‘that girl’ whom an insane man selected abstractly to serve as a footnote in history.”

Foster also addressed motherhood and the intricate relationship she had with her own. Brandy Foster, a single parent of four, urged her daughter into acting and modeling at age 3 and managed her career for many years, directing her towards numerous films that achieved acclaim and commercial success.

“Due to her generation and her status [as a] pre-feminist woman, she desired me to be respected above all, and so she orchestrated, in some ways propelled me into, a career where she could feel esteemed because her daughter was esteemed,” she stated. “That carried significant weight and responsibility.”

Diana Nyad, the record-setting endurance swimmer who inspired “Nyad,” the 2023 biopic for which Foster received her fifth Oscar nomination, spoke about Foster’s detail-oriented nature as an actress and her position as a somewhat reluctant LGBTQ icon.

Foster expressed pride that individuals say she has aided in fostering greater acceptance of LGBTQ persons within the film industry, yet she wishes she “could have accomplished more” to be a vocal leader.

“My primary concern … was to endure intact, emotionally and intellectually,” she noted. “What I didn’t want was to end up deceased in a hotel room with a needle in my arm.” Achieving that necessitated “a form of emotional security and privacy that was uncommon for the film industry” in those times and perhaps even more so now.

“I don’t believe I would have survived it unchanged” if she were a young actress today, Foster remarked. “But back then, the method for enduring it was to assert, ‘I am off limits. You cannot possess me. You can have all this aspect that I provide you. You can have my artistry… You can rely on me, but you cannot have all of me.”

Earlier in the day, actress Amy Brenneman ’86, distinguished filmmaker Mira Nair ’79, Naomi McDougall Jones, an advocate for gender equality in the film sector, and television showrunner Saladin K. Patterson engaged with Stacy L. Smith, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, discussing how underrepresented women persist in the film and television domain and the challenges still needing resolution both onscreen and behind the scenes, despite social progress.

Since 1987, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute annually honors exceptional women who have made an enduring impact on the globe. Previous honorees include Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, labor leader Dolores Huerta, former Secretary of State and New York Senator Hillary Clinton, and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.