Jodie Foster as well as "Carny" (1980) and "Foxes" (1980). After attending college at Yale, Foster struggled to transition into adult roles until she gained critical acclaim for playing a rape survivor in the legal drama "The Accused" (1988), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She won her second Academy Award three years later for the psychological horror "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991), in which she portrayed Clarice Starling. Foster made her debut as a film director the same year with "Little Man Tate", and founded her own production company, Egg Pictures, in 1992. The company's first
Jodie Foster box office hits, earning over $140 and $183 million respectively. Foster's first project for Egg Pictures, "Nell", was released in December 1994. In addition to acting as its producer, she starred in the title role as a woman who grew up isolated in the Appalachian Mountains and speaks her own invented language. It was based on Mark Handley's play "Idioglossia", which interested Foster for its theme of "otherness", and because she "loved this idea of a woman who defies categorization, a creature who is labeled and categorized by people based on their own problems and their own prejudices and what