Some of the more sleepy guests at an awards breakfast held in Los Angeles last week might have missed the significance at the time, because, as revelations go, it worked better in print than when it was spoken aloud. As prize-winner Jodie Foster announced to her fellow guests at the Power 100 Women in Entertainment ceremony that she wanted to thank ‘beautiful Cydney’, she could, in theory, have been referring to some benevolent, male film mogul, who perhaps spelt the name with an ‘S’. But no, it was clear to the majority that the ‘beautiful’ person in question was Cydney Bernard, the 54-year-old woman that the actress has lived with for 14 years. Just a few moments later the message had flashed around the world: Foster had finally confirmed she was gay. The 45-year-old performer, who has been in the news pretty regularly since she first stepped in front of the camera more than four decades ago, appeared at last to have given in to pressure to ‘come out’.
Reaction to Foster’s admission has so far eclipsed the Golden Globe nomination she also received last week for her role in Neil Jordan’s thriller The Brave One, yet commentators have generally echoed the line taken by New York’s Gay City News which ran the dry headline: ‘Jodie Comes Out. Duh!’
This was, after all, a piece of information that anyone who has followed Foster’s career had picked up long ago. Speculation was already way, way beyond the realms of the lesbian fan sites and Foster’s gayness was about as close to a fact as Hollywood usually gets. For a start, her two sons, Charles, nine, and Kit, six, share ‘Bernard’ as a middle name, so there was never much subterfuge going on.
Media excitement was not centered on Foster’s admission itself then, but on its timing and on what it might say about the state of mind of this endlessly charismatic film star.
‘I feel fragile … unsure, struggling to figure it all out,’ Foster confided at the awards, seeming to invite offers of help. It was all rather unexpected from a woman who until now had faultlessly blocked queries about her private life with a firm ‘no comment’. ‘I am just not going to participate,’ she once added when pressed.