Jodie Foster hits the panic button

Jodie Foster

It's every parent's worst nightmare. Flight Plan, a Hitchcockian thriller, stars Jodie Foster as a bereaved woman on a super-jet accompanying the body of her husband on its journey home.

Travelling with her 6-year-old daughter, Foster's character takes a nap and wakes up to find her child has vanished. It's reminiscent of her hit thriller Panic Room, where she thrives in an against-all-odds, claustrophobic situation. And no one plays the quintessential scared but fierce mother quite like Foster.

Off screen, this 43-year-old Yale-graduate, Oscar-winner (The Accused in 1988, Silence of the Lambs in 1991), is mother to Charlie, 7, and Kit, 4. Foster has never acknowledged the father or the method by which she was able to bear children. There has been much speculation about her sexuality and she is allegedly in a relationship with long-time partner, Cydney Bernard.

Directed by newcomer Robert Schwentke, Flight Plan also stars Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings) and Peter Sarsgaard (The Skeleton Key, Garden State, Shattered Glass). With an alleged budget of US$50 million ($71 million), Flight Plan is another hit for Foster after it took US$77.3 million ($110.8 million) in the United States alone.

Born and bred in Los Angeles, Foster is remarkably sane and doesn't adhere to the regular way Hollywood mums raise their brood. She is low key about all aspects, from fame to rearing children. She has no bodyguard, no nanny, no driver to ferry her children around, and she takes them to the park without any help.

On a sunny day at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, Foster, much more glamorous in person than her on-screen roles would have us believe, is affable, funny and down-to-earth.

Playing a parent who can't find her child is a kind of intense emotion that must be easier to play now that you're a mother in real life?

I think so. Yet at the same time, I played a lot of mums before I had children. It's something I'm drawn to. I had a mum, too [laughs]. Our relationship was too close, so I see some of the parallels of that. When I look back on the other roles I did playing a mother before I was one in real life, I think, "Ah, I would never do that."

You only seem to do a movie every three years. Why?

It's a combination of things. Truthfully, there are a lot less roles for me now that I'm over 40. I'm not going to lie and say there are as many roles for women over 40 as there are for younger ones. Once every two or three years is pretty good odds.

Which of your other films are you most proud of?

Silence of the Lambs is a pretty good movie, I think. It's timeless and really taps into, once again, this primal unconscious - not so much - fear, but it captivates something primal in people. Actually, I run into [Sir] Anthony [Hopkins] all the time too, on the boardwalk in Santa Monica, shopping malls, hiking.

You've played a lot of heroine-type, strong women's roles and there are now a lot of those types of roles for women. What has brought about that shift?

Reality finally caught up to films I think, but there were some seminal films that made that happen and I think Silence was one of them. It has never been a female protagonist that has gone through that territory and I think that changed a lot of things.

You started in this business early. Why do you think you have survived in this business and have emerged as healthy as you have?

I think some of it is personality. I think some of it is my mum. My mum was interested in safeguarding my personality. I don't know why there are so many actors who go off the deep end. They go crazy. I seem to have escaped all that. You learn to keep your life safe because you want normalcy.

What's an example of normalcy?

You want to go to Disneyland. You want to make your own plane reservations. You want to cook your own food. You want to ride a moped. There are certain things you want to do that you don't want anyone to take away from you. Some kids say: "I want to be special. I want somebody to make all of my reservations. I want to go out and never be carded and drink until I'm on the floor." They don't want to safeguard their private life and I think that's dangerous.

You've described yourself as being much disciplined - was there any period of rebellion in your life?

No. That's not good. It's a regret I have. Those rebellious years are healthy and I never really had them. And I admire it in my sons. They know they can say, "No - I'm not doing that any more." But I was really a good girl. I followed the rules. I did what I was told and sometimes I wonder what I might have discovered about myself had I not been such a good rule-follower. I always say that I'm not the most talented person in the room but I'm probably the most disciplined.

LOWDOWN

WHO: Jodie Foster, Oscar winner, thriller queen and worried mum in the hijack flick Flight Plan (opening Thursday)

BORN: November 19, 1962, and christened, Alicia Christian Foster

KEY ROLES: Taxi Driver (1976), The Accused (1988), The Silence Of The Lambs (1991), Sommersby, (1993), Nell (1994), Contact, (1997), Panic Room (2002)

TRIVIA: Foster was linked to John Warnock Hinkley's attempted assassination of then US President Ronald Reagan in March, 1981. Hinkley was obsessed with Foster and the movie Taxi Driver, in which Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, tries to shoot a presidential candidate.