Unlike many child stars, Jodie Foster has grown up to carve herself a serious career in the movie business, not just as an exceptional actress but as a director, as we see in tonight's painful Thanksgiving reunion, Home For The Holidays (Pearl, 9.30pm).
When Foster was three years old her mother put her forward to appear naked in a suntan lotion commercial. By the age of 14 she was the main breadwinner for her family and had been nominated for an Oscar, for her wonderful performance as 12-year-old hooker Iris in Taxi Driver.
But acting was never enough. Foster found the time and the inclination for a high-powered academic life, studying comparative literature at Yale. With that background, she is now as ambitious behind as she is in front of the camera, busy directing and producing movies for her company Egg Pictures.
Home For The Holidays, her second film, is a bitter-sweet comedy for Thanksgiving. Holly Hunter plays Claudia, a single mother laden with woes: she has just been fired from her museum job, her teenage daughter has announced that she plans to lose her virginity that weekend and she has a stinking cold. On top of all that, she has to cope with the annual mix of drumsticks and family dysfunction that Americans call Thanksgiving, having to go home to join a plethora of obnoxious but sometimes loveable relatives for the occasion.
It is an obvious story, laden with heavy-handed jokes. But Foster still manages to capture the spirit of mixed-up family life.
The director knows full well the pressures of single-parenthood, her mother having brought up four children single-handedly. She, too, is now a single mother. She also knows of frosty sibling rivalry, with her less successful brother Buddy telling all in an unauthorised and unnecessary biography of her life.