panic time
What does a star sacrifice for fame? For Jodie Foster, it’s the loss of privacy. The 49-year-old actress has learned to “control the glaring eyes” of the public, but she maintains privacy concerns for the next generation of up-and-coming actors in “the new era of social media and its sanctioned hunting season.”
Mostly, she’s worried for her “Panic Room” co-star Kristen Stewart, who was recently caught having an affair with married director Rupert Sanders.
Notoriously protective of her own privacy, Foster penned an essay in The Daily Beast last week decrying the media scrutiny of the 22-year-old Stewart.
“There’s no guilt in acknowledging the human interest in public linens,” writes Foster. “Lift up beautiful young people like gods and then pull them down to earth to gaze at their seams. See, they’re just like us. But we seldom consider the childhood we unknowingly destroy in the process.”
Stewart was just 11 years old when she appeared alongside Foster in “Panic Room” and Foster finds it painful to reconcile memories of the child actress she “grew to love” on set with the downtrodden woman “walking fast, darting around huge men with black cameras thrusting at her mouth and chest.”
Her advice: “Eventually this all passes.”
Foster would know. As she admits in the essay, she has been an actress since she was 3. That’s nearly five decades in the spotlight.
And what a bright spotlight. At 14, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as a child prostitute in “Taxi Driver.” Due to her fame, John Hinckley Jr. would later become so obsessed with Foster that, in 1981, he famously attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan just to impress her.
The media descended on Foster, who was at the time studying at Yale, but she refused to engage the public’s curiosity, going so far as to cancel a “Today” show interview because Hinckley’s name would be mentioned.
She has since become a two-time Oscar-winning actor and director, but throughout her career most aspects of her life — including her dating status, the father of her two kids and her sexuality — she has kept private.
In many ways, she is a prime example of how to succeed in show business without becoming a public spectacle.
Of course, she came of age during a different time. In the ’70s and ’80s the paparazzi culture was nothing like it is today — and there was no Twitter. She even admits that times have changed. “If I had to grow up in this media culture, I don’t think I could survive it emotionally,” she writes.
But while Foster makes a grand point about the loss