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Jodie Foster's career has been famously wild. As a child, she appeared in lightweight Disney films like "Napoleon and Samantha" and "Freaky Friday," while also taking the world by surprise playing an underage sex worker in Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." Throughout the 1980s, she successfully continued acting as she grew, appearing in films like "Foxes," "The Hotel New Hampshire," and "The Accused," for which she won her first Academy Award. In 1991, Foster won her second Oscar for playing FBI cadet Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme's bleak serial killer thriller "The Silence of the Lambs," one of the few films to win "The Big Five" Oscars. That same year, Foster made her directorial debut with the child-prodigy drama "Little Man Tate."

From then on, Foster was a Hollywood staple, leading multiple high-profile studio dramas like "Maverick," Robert Zemeckis' "Contact," and "Anna and the King." She also worked with...

Jodie Foster has been around in the business long enough that she says that when she did Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro were intimidated by her experience. The True Detective actress not only made movies as a young star, but she would partake in daring roles like The Accused and The Hotel New Hampshire. However, as a teen actress, Foster would also be known for being in films like Freaky Friday. In the 70s, a little film titled Star Wars came around, and Foster was said to have been offered the role of Princess Leia, which ultimately went to Carrie Fisher.

Foster had turned down the opportunity to take part in George Lucas’ space opera. The Hollywood Reporter reveals that Foster has finally addressed why she passed on the future iconic role. While promoting True Detective: Night Country, Foster appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon where Jimmy asked Jodie,...

In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, Jodie Foster, one of our most guarded movie stars, confessed, "I am a solitary, internal person in an extroverted, external job. I don't think I will ever not feel lonely. It's a theme in my life. It's not such a bad thing. I don't need to be known by everyone."

Movie stardom can be a curse in this regard. Each performance, splashed across a big screen and examined time and again in the home-viewing format of your choosing, draws us near to them. We want to know them, befriend them, tear up the town with them... we want them. And since we are typically not an empathetic species (particularly in the United States), too many of us do not understand why these seemingly blessed individuals recoil from the public eye or feel ambivalent about their success.

This tension has been the central theme of Foster's career,...

“Mosquito Coast” producer Veritas Entertainment Group is shopping TV adaptations of two high-profile novels — Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons” and John Irving’s “The Hotel New Hampshire” — among other projects in the works from the boutique outfit that specializes in adaptations of books and other existing IP.

“13 Reasons Why” writer Thomas Higgins is on board to adapt “Charlotte Simmons” with “13 Reasons” showrunner Brian Yorkey and Paramount TV. “Better Call Saul” producer is attached to develop “New Hampshire” for TV with MGM Television.

Veritas is also preparing to take out a series package for the upcoming novel “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” from author Mark Manson. Writer Aaron Zelman is tackling that project which is set at Sony Pictures TV.

Veritas is headed by two longtime literary agents — Bob Bookman and Alan Gasmer — and producer Peter Jaysen. Gasmer and Jaysen joined forces seven years ago to create Veritas Entertainment.

The Fast and the Furious franchise star Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges and 3x Primetime Emmy winner Beau Bridges are signed on to star opposite Queen Latifah in the Netflix movie End of the Road.

The Equalizer star plays Brenda, who after losing her job, and being recently widowed, embarks on a cross-country trip with her family to start a new life. But in the New Mexico desert, cut off from help, they must learn to fight back when they become the targets of a mysterious killer.

Ludacris and Bridges previously starred together in the 2008 Mark Wahlberg action movie Max Payne.

Millicent Shelton directs off a screenplay by The Intruder scribe David Loughery, which was previously written by Christopher J. Moore. Tracey Edmonds is producing for Edmonds Entertainment; with Mark Burg from Twisted Pictures and Brad Kaplan. EPs are Latifah and Shakim Compere for Flavor Unit Entertainment; Ben Pugh and Erica Steinberg for 42.

Bridges won a Primetime Emmy for 1997’s The Second Civil War (Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Special), 1993’s The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Special) and 1992’s Without Warning: The James Brady Story (Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Special). He also won two Golden Globes for The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or TV Movie) and Warning: The James Brady Story (Best Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie). His feature credits include One Night in Miami, The Descendants, Charlotte’s Web, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Greased Lightning, Norma Rae, The Hotel New Hampshire, and more. Recent TV credits include Masters of Sex, Homeland and Goliath. He is repped by CAA.

Ludacris starred in the Oscar winning Best Picture Crash, and next appears in Universal’s F9 which has already amassed over $256M at the foreign box office before its June 25 U.S. start. He is a 3x Grammy winner for Best Rap Album in 2007, Release Therapy; Best Rap Song that year “Money Maker” with Pharrell Williams; and 2005 Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, “Yeah” with Usher and Lil Jon. His albums Word of Mouf, Chicken-n-Beer and The Red Light District went multi-platinum. He is repped by CAA and Fox Rothschild.

In tragic news, Lisa Banes has been identified as the victim of a hit-and-run accident that happened in Manhattan on Friday afternoon. The actress has appeared in many film and TV projects including Gone Girl, Nashville, The King of Queens, Desperate Housewives and Legacy. Deadline reported that on Saturday, she was in the intensive care unit of Mount Sinai Morningside in critical condition with a severe brain injury.

The NYPD said that police received a 911 call around 6:30pm on Friday. The incident took place on the crosswalk at West 64th and Amsterdam Avenue and the caller said that a pedestrian had been involved in a collision with a vehicle. The subsequent report by the Highway District's Collision Investigation Squad deduced that Banes had been walking with right of way through the crosswalk when a scooter ran a red light, hitting her and knocking her to the floor where she...

Wilford Brimley, the actor known for his work in Cocoon, The Natural and The Thing, has died. He was 85.

Brimley, whose additional credits include The Electric Horseman and The Hotel New Hampshire, died Saturday at his Utah home, a rep for the actor confirmed to Deadline.

Born in 1934 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Brimley had a film and television career with scores of roles to his name. From his time in the film and television industry, mainly in the 1970s, Brimley has taken on a wide variety of roles including Grandpa Sam Ferrans in Summer of the Monkeys, Chief Hawkins in My Fellow Americans and governor in The Round and Round.

From 1986 to 1988, Brimley starred as Gus Witherspoon in the family drama Our House. He appeared on the show for 46 episodes. The actor worked alongside Deidre Hall, Shannen Doherty and Keri Houlihan, playing the family patriarch.

The actor’s last...

Let’s be honest: it’s been a minute since a truly great horror novel has staked its claim so unabashedly and confidently. Enter A Cosmology of Monsters. A labor of love for Alabama author Shaun Hamill, his first novel has pumped some much-needed new life into horror; effortlessly folding in fantasy elements while also not being afraid of leaning heavily into real-life horror themes scarier than any ghost. Hamill is helping usher in a new era of novelists who grew up on the works of Stephen King, Anne Rice, or H.P. Lovecraft, but also want to challenge the genre’s boundaries with what horror can say and how it’s said. Owning its horror influences proudly, there is a meta quality to Cosmology that sets it apart.

A true family saga, A Cosmology of Monsters is first and foremost grounded in multiple decades' worth of intergenerational trauma and constant loss,...

There’s an in between zone that parents often look for if they’re easing their kids into horror. If they’re fans of the genre themselves, the urge to take the tykes from Scooby-Doo to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is very tempting. I was one of the fortunate ones who was allowed to cut out the middleman and dive right into the heady stuff. So it was then that I missed out on a great bridge between the two extremes, The Midnight Hour (1985), ABC’s successful bid to get the Thriller-crazy crowd on their side.

Originally airing November 1st as part of The ABC Friday Night Movie (really? There was no Thursday slot open to make it for Halloween?), The Midnight Hour fought off CBS’ Dallas for its first half and NBC’s Miami Vice for the back, but those shows weren’t the ideal demographic anyway – this...

Novelist John Irving has signed with Gersh, The Hollywood Reporter has exclusively learned.

Irving won an Oscar in 2000 for adapting The Cider House Rules, his own novel. Other novels of his that have received the big-screen treatment include The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen Meany (adapted as 1998’s Simon Birch) and A Widow for One Year (made into the 2004 film The Door in the Floor).

Irving’s other accolades include three National Book Award nominations (including a win for Garp) and an O. Henry Award for the 1981 short story “Interior Space.” His...

Norman Twain, a prolific Broadway producer of the 1960s and ’70s whose Hollywood credits later included 1989’s Lean on Me starring Morgan Freeman, died August 6 following a brief illness. He was 85. A producer whose Broadway and off-Broadway career included stagings of plays by John Osborne, Anthony Creighton and John Guare, Twain moved to California in the 1970s. In addition to Lean on Me, he was an associate producer of 1984’s The Hotel New Hampshire and the 1975 TV…...

The leaking of a sex tape can make or break a celebrity. In Rob Lowe's case, it was the catalyst he needed to hit rock bottom and check into rehab in 1990 – and he's been sober for 26 years now. But even after that fall from grace, Lowe says his career wasn't completely dead.

"I've been fortunate that I've always, always, always worked. Even after the sex tape was made public, it was like: You're still a professional baseball player, but you're playing for Double or Triple A," Lowe, 51, says in the new issue of GQ, on stands Monday. "I lost...

The 1994 film Blue Sky is something of an anomaly from the mid-90s. Filmed in 1991, it would be the last film feature of British auteur Tony Richardson’s career, who had been working in television for several years prior, ever since his coolly received 1984 adaptation of John Irvine’s The Hotel New Hampshire. Then, due to the bankruptcy of Orion Pictures, the film’s distributor, the final product was shelved for three years, at long last released in the autumn of 1994, going on to snag actress Jessica Lange her second Academy Award. Now, twenty years later, it’s a prestige that would seem near impossible to attain for a feature treated to the same fate in today’s market. This distinction potentially sets the film up for failure, which perhaps explains the lack of continued enthusiasm surrounding it.

Nuclear engineer Hank Marshall (Tommy Lee Jones) is forced to uproot his...

Actor, comedian, producer, and all-around nerd Seth Green is celebrating the big 4-1 on Feb. 8. And we mean nerd in a good way -- come on, he even got married at Skywalker Ranch, how awesome is that?

Green began his rise to fame at the age of seven when he landed a role in an RCA commercial – but if it were up to Seth, he would have started even earlier.

Flashback: 9-Year-Old Elijah Wood Wants to Study the Sea

“When I was 2 years old I told my parents I wanted to be in entertainment. They go, ‘Yeah right, now go to sleep!’’ Green told Et back in 1988. “They never took me seriously, and [when] I was about 6 I told them that they were wasting the best years of my career, and if they didn't do something than I would have to.”

Talk about knowing what you want to do early in life!

Our favorite...

We all from time to time enjoy a comfortable stay when vacationing anywhere in the world. So why should movie characters not appreciate a great place to stay as well? Interestingly, big screen hotels and motels almost play an important part as an extra movie character in addition to serving as a backdrop to the proceedings.

In Enjoy Your Stay: The Top 10 Movies About Hotels/Motels let’s look at some special selections where hotels and motels in film are featured and play a primary role in plot and theme. Cinematic room service has never been so accommodating.

The Enjoy Your Stay: The Top 10 Movies About Hotels/Motels selections are (in alphabetical order):

1.) The Best Exotic Manigold Hotel (2011)

Director John Madden’s The Best Exotic Manigold Hotel juggles various topical matters at hand: the aging process, deception in advertising, exotic travel and cultural clashing. Madden assembles a notable cast...

Exclusive: And here I thought the win streak of the New York Knicks was impressive. For a third day in a row, Paradigm has added an Oscar winner to the agency fold. And another longtime client of Robert Bookman, who moved over from CAA. Paradigm just signed screenwriter and iconic novelist John Irving. Irving won the Oscar making his debut as a screenwriter by adapting his own novel The Cider House Rules. Many of his novels, from The World According To Garp to A Widow For One Year, A Prayer For Owen Meany and The Hotel New Hampshire, have been turned into films. Irving won the National Book Award for Garp. The signing comes after the agency inked Ted Tally and Tom Stoppard.

Tags: AfterEllen.com HuddleJodie FosterThe AfterEllen.com HuddleIMDb

No matter what you thought of Jodie Foster's Golden Globes speech, you have to admit the woman is an all-star actress. She's been in more than 40 films and over 25 TV series, so it was hard to decide what her best role ever could be. It wasn't hard, though, to discuss how good she was in every single one.

Group, what's your favorite Jodie Foster film?

Dorothy Snarker: I absolutely, positively cannot pick just one because she was my very first crush. So there. Rules be damned. For sentimental reasons, Stealing Home because it came out during my formative years and I watched it on a seemingly endless loop on our family's contraband HBO feed. Those blue eyes mesmerized me. For action reasons, Flightplan because she took a role originally written for a male lead and helped to, again, show that women...

When Bellamy Young was on Broadway, her mother attended 17 times. Young, who has more of a Southern drawl than her character, first lady Mellie Grant on ABC's Thursday drama, "Scandal," explains.

"It wasn't even to watch the whole show," she tells Zap2it. "She would listen to people talk about her daughter."

Her mom didn't push her on the stage but created a routine for Young's debut, at age 5, for a youth jamboree. She sang a Shirley Temple song.

"I started singing when I was about 3 and dancing soon after," Young says. "Mom just started looking for outlets where I could perform and availed herself of any opportunity she could in the mountains of North Carolina in the '70s."

Much as she loved singing, Young wanted to be a physicist. She was shocked when Yale accepted her.

"I thought they were just being polite," she recalls of being accepted into the Ivy League.

Today we are talking to an actor who has appeared in over fifty feature films and starred in plays on Broadway and in the West End all about his career thus far, looking ahead to his new role as John Sculley in the forthcoming jOBS, co-starring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak, directed by Joshua Michael Stewart - the one and only Matthew Modine. In this all-encompassing chat tracing the past to the present, Modine also manages to give us the scoop on his featured role in the final part of Christopher Nolans Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, and shares his candid impressions of working with Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the rest of the starry cast of the sure-to-be blockbuster of the summer. Additionally, Modine illustrates his experiences working with director Robert Altman on screen and stage projects as diverse as Short Cuts and Streamers on film,...

With "Midnight in Paris," Woody Allen's comic look at nostalgia and its limitations, having earned four Oscar nominations last week (including nods for Best Picture, Allen's direction and his original screenplay), it's a good time to take a look back at Allen's 1987 comedy "Radio Days." Another comic take on nostalgia, "Radio Days" is now officially a golden oldie itself, having been released exactly 25 years ago, on January 30, 1987. A fond look, filtered through memory, of a 1940s New York childhood, the radio broadcasts that captivated audiences back then, and the behind-the-scenes gossip about the performers who voiced them, "Radio Days" may be best known today for launching the career of Seth Green -- then a 12-year-old who played the Allen-like narrator as a boy. But there's also a wealth of little-known true stories behind the film, some of them from Allen's own life, some from classic radio lore, and some...

HollywoodNews.com: Our selected celebrity to be included in our “Hot Hollywood Celebrity Photo Gallery of the Day” is Jodie Foster. She just premiered her new movie “The Beaver” in Cannes.

Jodie Foster ◄ Back Next ►Picture 1 of 11

Jodie Foster - 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival - "The Beaver"

◄ Back Next ►Picture 1 of 11

Jodie Foster - 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival - "The Beaver"

Alicia Christian “Jodie” Foster (born November 19, 1962) is an American actress, film director, producer as well as being a former child actress.

Foster began acting in commercials at three years of age, and her first significant role came in the 1976 film Taxi Driver as the preteen prostitute Iris for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Also that year, she starred in the cult film The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress in...

Adapting John Irving novels to the screen is a tricky bit of business.

When the elements come together successfully, the results can take the generally pleasing forms of The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules (for which Irving himself handled screenplay honors).

When they don't, you're stuck with the lumpy Hotel New Hampshire or the treacly Simon Birch, which was loosely based on Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Breaking the tie, The Door in the Floor -- taking its cue from the first part of Irving's A Widow for One Year -- falls satisfyingly into the plus category.

A tragicomic rumination on life and death and love and sex (but not necessarily in that order), the production is graced by bold performances, lyrical visuals and, most notably, Irving's own words, which have made the transition quite intact thanks to a faithful but still filmic adaptation by writer-director Tod Williams.

With its tragic emotional underpinnings and complex characters, the Focus Features release would have seemed more at home in the fall release schedule rather than taking on potential blockbusters like I, Robot and King Arthur, but the counterprogramming gambit could work in the picture's favor, giving it a neat jump on all those upcoming awards hopefuls.

As with the earlier section of Irving's 576-page novel, Door chronicles a fateful summer in the splintering lives of an East Hampton couple still struggling to cope with the tragic deaths of their two sons.

While free-spirited Ted Cole (a terrific Jeff Bridges), a successful children's author and illustrator, has seemingly moved on from the mourning process by indulging his weakness for infidelity, his wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), remains in a troubling state of withdrawal.

The pallor over their seaside household has forced their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's equally capable little sister), to grow up fast.

But a coastal disturbance soon arrives in the form of Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), a young man who's ostensibly hired on as Ted's intern but quickly develops a major crush on Marion. Much to his surprise, his feverish sexual yearning is reciprocated, though their steamy affair doesn't exactly lead to a tidy emotional recovery for the damaged family unit.

Williams, who made his feature debut with "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole" and is working on a remake of To Have and Have Not for Benicio Del Toro, does a careful job of extracting and reshaping the Irving material, never shying away from the book's more overtly sexual elements, without detracting from the film's own separate identity.

Key to that success is a strong ensemble playing flawed characters that essentially dare the audience to like them.

The fundamentally likable Bridges gamely pushes all that goodwill to the far edge as the unorthodox Ted, logging one of his best performances in the process.

Basinger, meanwhile, who shared the screen with Bridges in Robert Benton's Nadine, really immerses herself into her character's complex layers with similarly impressive results.

Also doing gutsy work is Mimi Rogers, who has been given very little to hide behind as the needy, hot-blooded object of Bridges' daytime affections.

Behind the camera, cinematographer Terry Stacey (American Splendor) is responsible for some truly lovely compositions, movingly underscored by Marcelo Zarvos' eloquent music.

The Door in the Floor

Focus Features

Focus Features and Revere Pictures present a This Is That production

Credits:

Director-screenwriter: Tod Williams

Based on the novel A Widow for One Year by: John Irving

Producers: Ted Hope, Anne Carey, Michael Corrente

Executive producers: Roger Marino, Amy J. Kaufman

Director of photography: Terry Stacey

Production designer: Therese DePrez

Editor: Affonso Goncalves

Costume designer: Eric Daman

Music: Marcelo Zarvos

Cast:

Ted Cole: Jeff Bridges

Marion Cole: Kim Basinger

Eddie O'Hare: Jon Foster

Eleanor Vaughn: Mimi Rogers

Ruth Cole: Elle Fanning

Alice: Bijou Phillips

Eduardo Gomez: Louis Arcella

MPAA rating R

Running time -- 111 minutes...