THE WOMAN WITH A PLAN

Foster doesn’t act as often as she used to. And that’s OK with her

Jodi Foster works when she feels like it, a luxury she’s earned after more than 40 years in the entertainment industry.

“I’ve discovered this about myself in the last few years: I learned a lot about how to stay happy and I like it,” said Foster during a recent interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto.

If that means being home in Los Angeles with her two children, Charles, seven, and Kit, four, then that’s what she does. If that means waiting a few years between films, then that’s how it goes.

So what if her last major role was in 2002’ s Panic Room? She’s back with Flightplan, a thriller that passed the Foster test.

Opening on Friday, the film features the 43- year- old actress playing a recently widowed mother whose daughter disappears on a flight from Berlin to New York. As she searches for her missing child on board, the passengers and crew suspect she’s delusional, while she begins to believe there’s a conspiracy.

It’s the sort of mystery that captured Foster’s undivided attention. It intrigued her enough to say yes to a script originally written for a male lead. It was subsequently modified to meet her specifications, which means the woman’s emotional and psychological turmoil becomes the focal point.

And sure, Panic Room and Flightplan share similarities. “They’re both thrillers in confined spaces with a mother-daughter in both,” Foster says. But she points out that Flightplan “is really the profile of this desperate mother who may or may not be descending” into madness. “ That’s why I made the movie.”

Translating parental anxiety onto the screen was the easy part for Foster, who still marvels at how emotionally vulnerable she is as the caregiver for two young boys.

“Clearly I am flooded with fears,” she says of her status as a parent. “ And somehow I don’t feel for myself the same way my veins are open for them. But the second you have a child, you care about your living.”

And, she might add, care less about her professional future. “I thought that I was going to have to figure out how to juggle them into my life,” she says. “ What I didn’t realize is how completely consumed by them I would be.”

Foster is revealing, to a point. She refuses to discuss her relationships and her sexual orientation, although she does admit she’s reconciled with her mother. And yes, Foster says, she does sound like her mom when she’s disciplining her children, who often remind her of how young she was when she started performing.

She remembers debuting at age three as the Coppertone Girl, her adolescent days on Mayberry, RFD, My Three Sons and Paper Moon, and her Oscar-nominated performance as a teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver. “That’s when I first thought of myself as an actor,” she says.

There was high school at L.A.’ s Lycée Français, and graduating from Yale University. She recalls how she proved herself all over again as an adult in her Oscar- wining roles in 1988’ s The Accused and 1991’ s The Silence of the Lambs.

For the rest of the 1990s, Foster says she was driven like every other actor. She produced lots and directed two movies — 1991’ s Little Man Tate

and 1995’ s Home for the Holidays — and acted up a storm, from one movie to the next.

Motherhood changed that cycle. “I’d be crazed if I didn’t keep busy in the film industry,” Foster says. “ But I think there is a strange, symbiotic, primal connection between me and my children where my entire identity is consumed with being there for them and protecting them.”