At just 12 years old, Jodie Foster was cast in Martin Scorsese’s crime drama, “Taxi Driver,” playing Iris, a victim of child sexual abuse (then seen as a young prostitute), opposite the legendary Robert De Niro. It was a controversial role, given her age, but it landed her an Oscar nomination for best actress in a supporting role, and her career skyrocketed exponentially. While Foster had previously worked with Scorsese on the 1974 movie “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” she learned quickly that “Taxi Driver” would be a completely different experience.
In an April 2016 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Foster explained, “As a kid, I thought it would be a job like all the others, but when I got there, I realized it was creating a character from scratch, which I’d never done before.” She added that she and De Niro would often work on their lines together, and despite finding him boring while he was in character, she said, “[I]n those few outings, he really helped me understand improvisation and building a character in a way that was almost nonverbal.”
Foster’s incredible performance, despite the role’s controversy, gained the young actor an enormous amount of recognition, and she starred in four other movies that same year. Little did she know that this was just the beginning of a successful, decades-long movie career.
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