Jodie Foster Says She Was 'Pretty Mad' at Her Mom in Her 30s, but 'I Really Appreciate Her Now'
- - Jodie Foster Says She Was 'Pretty Mad' at Her Mom in Her 30s, but 'I Really Appreciate Her Now'
Tommy McArdleJanuary 20, 2026 at 10:46 PM
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Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty
Evelyn Foster and Jodie Foster, undated -
Jodie Foster spoke to her relationship with her late mother, Evelyn, in a new interview
Evelyn managed Jodie's career from childhood through the early 1990s, and Foster said she "wanted me to have a long career, not a short one"
Evelyn died at 90 in 2019 from complications related to dementia, as her family announced at the time
Jodie Foster is sharing her appreciation for her late mother, Evelyn Foster, though she noted she did not always appreciate her mother's role in shaping her career.
Foster, 63, spoke to her relationship with her mother, who died at 90 in 2019, during her Monday, Jan. 19, appearance on the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast as she promotes her new movie, A Private Life.
"I really appreciate her now. I mean, I'm sure I was pretty mad at her in my 30s, like all of us, and then suddenly really started seeing the other side of the story," she told host Conan O'Brien, after he expressed that he thinks Evelyn "did an extraordinary job" raising Jodie and managing her career into the 1990s.
"I think there was this vicarious thrill for her — she wanted me to be all the things she couldn't be. She wanted me to be respected. She didn't want me to be objectified," Jodie said. "She wanted me to have a long career, not a short one; she didn't want me to play somebody's just sister, mother, daughter, she wanted me to be a central character because she grew up in a pre-feminist time where she didn't have any of those opportunities. It worked out for me."
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Jodie Foster and Evelyn Foster on Dec. 4, 2007
Jodie famously began acting in the late 1960s as a child and broke out with an Academy Award-nominated role in 1976's Taxi Driver, in which she starred opposite Robert De Niro. In fact, the actress told O'Brien, 62, on his podcast that she thought of acting as "kind of a dumb job" before making Taxi Driver and said her mother at one point "supported" that line of thought.
"My mother would say, 'Hey, your career is going to be over when you're 18, so what are you going to do after that?' She wasn't wrong," she recalled. "That's pretty much the way it usually works, most child actors don't work after they're 18, and so they have to come up with, you know, what's their next act. And so she was preparing me for that."
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Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty
Evelyn Foster and Jodie Foster, undated
Jodie and her siblings Lucinda, Constance and Bud, announced Evelyn's death in May 2019; she died from complications related to dementia, and her children described her as "the strongest person her family has ever met, a champion, a fighter, full of fire and love," in an obituary.
Jodie, who currently stars in the France-set movie A Private Life, took inspiration from her late mother for her latest role. "My mom, when she went to France, became someone new. She walked the streets, and she’d go to Metros, and she’d go to the flea market. And her life had this whole new — she was a whole new character," she told PEOPLE at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September.
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