BEVERLY HILLS, CA — The Hollywood press is noting that one of the more a night of surprises and laughs, the 70th annual Golden Globe Awards may be most memorable moments during Sunday night’s Golden Globes presentations was the speech delivered by actress Jodie Foster, which some are referring to as her “coming out” speech.
After accepting the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, Foster opened her remarks by joking, “I’m just going to put it out there, loud and proud. I am, uh—single.”
The Academy Award-winning actress (“The Accused,” “Silence of the Lambs”) referred to her relationship with her former partner of 20 years, Cydney Bernard, with whom she has two sons.
With their children in attendance, Foster, 50, said that Bernard is “my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life, my confessor, ski buddy, consiglieri, [and my] most beloved BFF of 20 years,” and added, “I am so proud of our modern family.”
“I already did my coming out 1,000 years ago, in the Stone Age,” Foster told the audience. “Those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers and then gradually to everyone that knew her, everyone she actually met. But now apparently I’m told that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance, and a primetime reality show.”
She continued, “You guys might be surprised but I am not ‘Honey Boo Boo Child.’ No, I’m sorry. That’s just not me. It never was and it never will be. But please don’t cry, because my reality show would so boring.”
Foster, whose breakout role was as a teenage prostitute in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” told the attendees about living her life in a fish bowl. “If you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe then you, too, might value privacy above all else. Privacy. I have given everything up there from the time that I was three years old: that’s reality show enough, don’t you think?”
About her plans for the future, the actress offered, “This feels like the end of one era and the beginning of something else.”
