Jodie Foster is looking old in new movie Hotel Artemis. Playing a 70-year-old nurse who hasn’t been outside for 20 years, she looks pale and grey. It turns out to be makeup (she’s only 55 in real life) but you wonder if this is how Foster feels on the inside, given her long, strange career.

Foster was always old beyond her years. At about the same age Emma Watson was enrolling at Hogwarts, Foster was playing a child prostitute in Taxi Driver. By that stage, she had made more movies than Martin Scorsese. Even in Bugsy Malone, her Tallulah seemed like an adult among kids. In Freaky Friday, she was literally playing a 30-year-old woman in a 14-year-old’s body.

Foster’s career-break student years at Yale weren’t exactly carefree either, thanks to her involuntary association with John Hinckley, the man who shot Ronald Reagan. Hinckley said he did it in Foster’s name, having developed an obsession with her via Taxi Driver. The 18-year-old Foster organised her own press conference, and performed in her college play six days later, not knowing there was a second stalker in the audience who planned to kill her (but changed his mind after deciding she was too pretty). After all that, you could understand if Foster never acted again, or even left the house.

But Foster has always had a head for life’s strangeness. In her adult career, she has gone where other actors feared to tread, and yet the emotion we’re most accustomed to seeing on her face is fear. In The Accused, she insisted on portraying her gang-rape survivor as a trashy good time girl rather than a model citizen, against the studio’s wishes. Dozens of actors had turned the role down. “You have to take those risks or all you’re ever going to be is mediocre,” she said. Perhaps that’s her biggest fear.

Foster’s other Oscar-winning character, Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, was a similar risk. Michelle Pfeiffer had turned down the part, finding the story too disturbing. Foster had no qualms about psychos and flayed corpses. At the end of the shoot, she admitted to Anthony Hopkins that she was scared of him. “But I was scared of you!” he replied.

This history of bravery, often in the face of male predation, ought to make her an icon for the moment, yet she has been measured about the #MeToo movement and refused to speak out against Harvey Weinstein: “People don’t need another soundbite from me.” She has worked with Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. She even directed a movie with Mel Gibson and a beaver puppet. Uglifying herself for a sci-fi such as Hotel Artemis must seem fun compared to all that’s gone before. If anyone deserves that, it’s her. She’s already done far more for the movies than they’ve done for her.

Hotel Artemis is in UK cinemas on 20 Jul