An equally open secret is that she is one of the Hollywood few who is actually in a stable long-term relationship. She and her partner Cydney Bernard have been together since 1993, and they are bringing up two children conceived and delivered by Foster - Charles, who is nine, and Kit (6).

Foster herself, though, has always been hugely reluctant to talk about any of this. More than most, she is fiercely protective of her privacy - not entirely surprising, given she entered the goldfish-bowl world of a child star and became prey to one stalker after another, including John Hinckley, the man who shot Ronald Reagan.

Occasionally she has alluded in interviews to one titbit or another about her children, but she has - until now - made absolutely no public reference to her partner or to her sexual orientation. That changed, in the tiniest of ways, last week when Foster, now 45 and as much of a film producer and director as she is an actress, received a special award at a breakfast thrown by a group called Women In Entertainment.

Towards the end of her remarks, according to the lone reporter in the room (an entertainment beat reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News), she thanked her nearest and dearest, including "my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through all the rotten (sic) and the bliss".

What was striking was not the acknowledgement itself. (Websites that breathlessly proclaimed Foster had 'come out' were surely overstating their case.) Rather, it was the sadness of everything that had gone before and the peculiar agony of being anything other than a straight up-and-down heterosexual in a town as supposedly progressive and forward-thinking as Los Angeles.

Here was one of the world's most successful women, with an enviable and growing body of work to brag about, and she couldn't - except in the most roundabout way and after 14 years - feel comfortable acknowledging her life partner in public.

Imagine Gordon Brown never being able to acknowledge Sarah, or the Queen being unable to talk about "my husband and I".

In her speech, Foster talked about her insecurities more generally. "I feel fragile ... unsure, struggling to figure it all out, trying to get there even though I'm not sure where there is," she said. "I've been working in this business for 42 years and there's no way you can do that and not be as nutty as a fruitcake."


People in Hollywood are, famously, only as big as their last film, and the knives are perpetually out to have the mighty fall and the talented go astray - but it is doubly, triply, quadruply difficult for a woman over 40 whose sexuality is, at least surreptitiously, seen as a strike against her and whose best work is often seen as being quite some distance in the past.

Given the media reaction to Foster's single, innocuous acknowledgement of her partner, it's not hard to understand why she has been so reticent up to now. It's been the grist of gossip columns and news articles across the globe, a clear invasion of the very privacy she works so hard to maintain. Gay advocates have encouraged her to be more open still and come all the way out of the closet; more homophobic writers have taken a more sneering tone, using the mini-episode as an excuse to pour more of their favourite invective on the den of iniquity that they believe Hollywood to be.

Foster is lucky, in the sense that her sexual orientation is already well-known and is unlikely to dent her chances of landing a big part or sewing up a movie deal. Most actors don't even dare talk about it.

"It's a death sentence for your career," Eve Gordon, a (heterosexual) film and TV actress told me last year. "All my friends who are gay keep it secret. They don't even know where to draw the line socially ... It's like being a communist in the McCarthy era. It's a gigantic terror."

Inch by inch, that terror may be receding. At least, its limits are being tested as never before, in the wake of two highly unusual public declarations of homosexuality by reasonably prominent actors. One, TR Knight, works on the hit hospital drama Grey's Anatomy. The other is Neil Patrick Harris.

The implications for the future careers of Knight and Harris remain to be seen.

One thing, though, seems sure and has been true of Foster for years: that while it's considered ok for unambiguously straight performers to play gay parts (think of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain or, going much further back, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia), it's almost unheard of for gay or suspected gay actors to do the same thing.

Likewise, the biggest fear gay actors have is that, once their sexuality becomes public knowledge, they won't get the straight parts any more either - certainly not the romantic lead-type roles, because the studios will be afraid they will no longer convince audiences that they can possibly be attracted to their co-stars of the opposite sex.

This is neanderthal thinking, of course - don't actors make a living pretending to be something they are not all the time? Foster herself has made a brilliant career of delving into the darker recesses of her characters' (unvaryingly straight) sexuality, never more so than in The Accused when her Sarah Tobias had to fend off the suspicions of the legal system that she had 'asked' to be gang-raped by dressing provocatively and flirting with her attackers.

In the past few years, Foster hasn't been called upon to play those sorts of parts - a function of another Hollywood prejudice, this time against women too old to play romantic leads and too young to play grandmothers. In her past few performances (Flight Plan, The Brave One, Inside Man) she's essentially been a cog in the wheel of thriller-type plots that didn't require unusual amounts of soul-baring.

Her producing and directing interests have tended to explore other topics, too. Her first film as director, Little Man Tate, looked at the issue of precociously brilliant children (something she was herself, at least to some degree).

Her latest project is a biopic of Leni Riefenstahl, the technically brilliant film propagandist for the Nazis. Foster landed her first job when she was three - a Coppertone suncream commercial - and never looked back. Her father had walked out on the family a few months before she was born, leaving her mother, a film producer, to fend for herself. Jodie went on to become the most successful child star of her generation, appearing in 50 films before she finished school - everything from Disney family fare to her most notorious early role as a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese's classic Taxi Driver.

It was after this film that would-be assassin Hinckley told the world he had shot Reagan out of love for Foster. The shooting in 1981 shattered whatever was left of Foster's privacy and she was followed everywhere on the campus of Yale University, where she was studying by a media pack. She was called to testify at Hinckley's trial and when she told the court she had no relationship with the accused, Hinckley threw a pen at her and yelled: "I'll get you, Foster!" That prompted another stalker to follow her around Yale. These were not events designed to make Foster feel comfortable about going public with anything. To her credit, she has a life, and has made it a brilliant success. If she tells us to back off, she has her reasons.