Thriller film following years. Rob Reiner's "Misery" (1990), based on a book by Stephen King, featured Kathy Bates as an unbalanced fan who terrorizes an incapacitated author (James Caan) who is in her care. Other films include Curtis Hanson's "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" (1992) and "Unlawful Entry" (1992), starring Ray Liotta. Detectives/FBI agents hunting down a serial killer was another popular motif in the 1990s. A famous example is Jonathan Demme's Best Picture–winning crime thriller "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991)—in which young FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) engages in a psychological conflict with a cannibalistic psychiatrist named Hannibal
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