The movie that almost killed Jodie Foster
By the age of 13, Jodie Foster was already an Academy Award-nominated star, having picked up a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nod for her memorable turn in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. It was part of a breakthrough year that also saw her win recognition for her performances in Echoes, Bugsy Malone, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, and Freaky Friday.
Somebody so young notching five well-received outings within the space of a calendar year in such disparate genres is nothing short of remarkable. However, Foster is lucky she even got that chance, having had a brush with death opposite a particularly ferocious co-star in her feature film debut.
The future two-time Oscar winner made her first big screen appearance in 1972’s Napoleon and Samantha. It was an adventure drama which finds an 11-year-old boy agreeing to look after an ageing lion named Major when the circus clown he’d befriended is forced to return to Europe.
However, when young Napoleon’s grandfather passes away of natural causes, he runs off with the lion – as well as his pet rooster and Foster’s Samantha – to try and find the grad student who’d helped him bury his guardian. Bizarre storyline aside, history has shown that roping live lions into movie productions has the potential to go horrendously awry.
Sure enough, it was Foster who ended up on the receiving end, which somehow didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for following a career on the silver screen. Then again, the chances of being almost mauled to death by a lion more than once during any livelihood outside of the circus tend to be very slim. It’s not as though she’d have been desperate to sign up for another animal-heavy project, given what happened the first time.
As she recalled on The Tonight Show, it was a seemingly simple walking scene that served as the catalyst. “I was walking ahead of him. He was on an invisible leash, some piano wire,” she said. “He got sick of me being slow, picked me up and held me sideways, and shook me like a doll.”
Understandably, Foster “was in shock and thought it was an earthquake” before she turned around and “saw the crew running off in the other direction.” Fortunately, extricating her from the lion’s jaws proved to be straightforward, at least relative to the circumstances: “The trainer then said, ‘Drop it.’ And he opened his mouth and dropped me.”
What’s even more galling is that the very same lion had almost done the exact same thing to Bob Denver in a 1966 episode of Gilligan’s Island, aptly titled ‘Feed the Kitty.’ And yet, six years later it was back on set and creating another close call, this time with someone who was only nine years old when Napoleon and Samantha released in cinemas.
