Jodie Foster, 61, has been married for almost a decade, but she has been very coy about her relationship with Alexandra Hedison, 54.
The Oscar-winning actress and the photographer and director have released no details or photos of their top-secret 2014 wedding and only occasionally attend red carpet events with one another. This is why Jodie's public display of affection at the 2021 Golden Globes came as a delightful shock to many after she kissed her wife while accepting the award for Best Supporting Actress for The Mauritanian.
Explaining the reason for keeping her love life private, the True Detective star told The Guardian in January 2024 that she likes to create "compartments" to separate each section of her life. "But the compartments are problematic for my relationships," she said. "I don’t want people to know me in this context."
Referring to her decades-long career, which began when she was just three years old, The Silence of the Lambs actress said: "This is just mine. My friends don’t know it, my kids didn’t know what I did for a living till quite late. They had no idea. I never brought them on set."
She even suggested that both she and Alexandra like to keep their work lives separate from one another. Pointing out their individual strengths, Jodie said: "We like doing our work independently, although there are things that I do better, she recognises.
"I’m a really good letter writer. And she’s extraordinarily visual. Great photographer."
Jodie was previously in a relationship with film producer Cydney Bernard, with whom she shares sons Kit and Charles. They split in 2008 but continued to co-parent their kids, while Alexandra was in a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres from 2000 to 2004.
Despite Jodie jokingly claiming she was "single" when she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2013 Golden Globes, one year before her wedding, she took the opportunity to comment on her sexuality.
"I hope you're not disappointed that there won't be a big coming-out speech tonight because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the stone age. In those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, coworkers and then gradually, proudly, to everyone who knew her. To everyone she actually met.
"But now, apparently I'm told, that every celebrity is expected to honour the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a primetime reality show," she told the audience, before explaining that she always valued privacy throughout her life in the limelight.
"If you had been a public figure by the time you were a toddler, if you had had to fight for a life that felt real, and honest, and normal against all odds, then you too might value privacy above all else," she said. "Privacy. Some day in the future people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was."
More recently, Jodie and Alexandra have shown their support for one another in public. Following Jodie's Golden Globes nomination in 2021, she shared a behind-the-scenes glimpse of her camera set-up at home and wrote: "What happens in quarantine stays in quarantine. Every day I'm a proud wife but today you get a special shout out in the remote land of IG."