Even though there are probably only a dozen well-known lesbian celebrities, I still get confused sometimes. Jodie Foster had a long-term partner for the better part of two decades. Then they split up, and it was all very hush-hush because Jodie hadn’t even confirmed anything about her sexuality. Until last year’s Golden Globes, which was the weirdest “coming out” speech I think I’ve ever heard. Anyway, Jodie Foster has a new partner, Alexandra Hedison. Alexandra was also with Ellen DeGeneres before Ellen got with Portia de Rossi. Alexandra and Jodie have apparently been together for less than a year (???) and now they’ve tied the knot!
Congrats to Jodie Foster and her new wife Alexandra Hedison. I can exclusively reveal that the Oscar winner and her photographer girlfriend of almost a year got married this past weekend. A rep for Foster confirms the happy news.
As E! News first reported, the two started dating sometime last summer.
“It’s pretty serious,” a source told us in September. “They’re totally in love.”
Internet chatter about the two began in the summer when the two were photographed together at a technology seminar at Fox Studios in Los Angeles and out to dinner with friends a few days later. Both were at the opening of Alan Cumming’s Macbeth in NYC back about a year ago, but they weren’t photographed together.
Hedison, who dated Ellen DeGeneres for about three years before things ended in 2004, has had her photography shown in New York and Los Angeles. She also has several acting credits, including playing Dylan Moreland on Showtime’s hit lesbian drama series, The L Word, for three seasons.
In accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes last year, Foster thanked her ex Cydney Bernard, spoke of her need for privacy and also declared that she did her “coming out a thousands years ago, in the Stone Age.”
Foster and Bernard, who are coparents to sons Charles and Kit, called it quits after 20 years in 2008.
You’ve got to wonder: Jodie was with Cydney for 20 years and there was no ring? And then Alexandra swoops in and she’s got the ring in less than a year? I ain’t saying she a golddigger. But I am saying she’s like THE trophy wife/girlfriend to the most powerful lesbians in Hollywood. Anyway, congrats to Alexandra and Jodie. I hope their wedding was lovely and I hope they will be very, very happy together.
Photos courtesy of WENN, Getty.
Congrats. Both brides are pretty.
Congrats, etc. Good-looking couple.
It seems as if succesful, rich, middle-aged lesbians are not too different from their heterosexual male counterparts! (thinking of Depp). Fear of age and loneliness makes them fall in love hard and wanting to seal the deal as soon as possible, trying to solidify elusive happiness before it escapes them…
… The difference being, of course, that Alexandra is only seven years younger than Jodie, whereas Amber is 23 years Depp’s junior. Alexandra has a beautiful face by the way.
+1
+2
+3
Congrats to both of them.
Congrats to the happy couple. I wish them a happy life together.
Also there was no “sealing the deal” before?! Marriage equality is just very recent.
(Which is also why there was no ring for 20 years @ Kaiser)
I thought the same thing.
You are right to mention this, Cheap trick. I hadn’t thought of it, because I ‘m from a country (The Netherlands) where gay people have been getting married since 2001. So I’m kind of taking this possibility for granted, which I shouldn’t.
By the way in another post you wrote ‘There are also studies that show that lesbian women are the ones of all LGBT+ people who want marriage equality the most. Maybe because being in a double-woman household comes with some disadvantages like a double wage gap and stuff?’ I read about a study which showed that on average lesbian women earn more than their heterosexual counterparts. This article discusses that phenomenon: http://boingboing.net/2010/12/23/lesbians-make-more-m.html
@Calcifer
I can’t access the original study your link referenced but I’m a bit skeptical. For example, what was their sampling like? I would find it a bit hard to believe that a representative number of disadvantaged lesbian women would be out and willing to participate in such a study to the same degree as either their straight counterparts or as otherwise advantaged queer women.
I can see some basis for the idea that lesbian women may, on average, be more likely to be employed in traditionally male-dominated fields where the wages are higher and that lesbian women may overall not take as much maternity leave as their heterosexual counterparts since only one partner in a couple would be giving birth to any given child. But that doesn’t take into account the higher rates of employment discrimination that out and gender non-conforming queer women face (there is still no federal employment protections act for LGBT people in the US). And regardless, I’ve found other articles that acknowledge that even if lesbian women are payed somewhat more than straight women on average, bisexual women are payed the least of the three groups and all three still make less than straight or gay men. In that regard, I think Cheap Trick’s original assertion about lesbian couples often earning less than straight couples probably still stands.
I always find it interesting, when a couple (straight, gay, lesbian, etc.) are together for such a long time and even have children together and never get married. Then they break up, and badda boom, badda bing, they are engaged/married to a new partner. Justin Theroux/Heidi Bevins/Jennifer Anniston (BALLS), Johnny Depp/Vanessa Paradis/Amber Heard, just to name a couple…I wonder what the difference is??????
There are some studies about that, at least with heterosexuals. If you live together for whatever period of time ( I don’t remember the cut-off, off hand, maybe a year or two), then you are statistically less likely to marry. Also, long engagements seem to end up with the non-matrimonial ending too. But I wonder if the parties had been married, if the end of the non-binding relationship would have been the point that the couple would have divorced anyway, had they made a contract out of it to begin with. I don’t know if that has been studied.
I think with marriage, aside from finding someone suitable, it has a lot to do with timing. But I would suspect, on some level, that they remain in these relationships for familiarity sake, but know that they aren’t really working. Then, presto, they meet someone else, and there is that ‘new car smell’, with its intoxicating chemistry, and then they get married. Jodi wasn’t completely out, so it was probably more comforting/safe to remain with her long-term partner, until she did come out. (?)
You cook posts amazingly, Kiddo. *sideyes my long engagement*
@kiddo…”new car smell” had me rolling on the floor!!!! Its true, too…whenever, I get into a friends new car, it makes me want to buy one. Good thing for my hubby and I, we both drive our old cars until they basically conk out!!!! lol
Just anecdotally, I’ve seen a lot of these ‘new car smell’ marriages break up after a year or two. Sometimes the rush of novelty can be mistaken for true love…
Thanks for your post Kiddo, very interesting… In addition to what you wrote, it seems to me that when people get older they can have a particularly strong urge to marry their new partner (especially if that partner is significantly younger than they are themselves). Whatever the reason may be, I think it can sting if you are the ex partner…
Agree completely, Kiddo. That’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t live with someone. No judgment, I just wouldn’t want to tie up my life with someone that much unless we were both 100% committed. I’ve seen this happen many times when people move in together and stay together out of inertia, then finally break up, and one or both get married within a year or two. You can love someone, but know in your heart that you shouldn’t or don’t want to marry them.
SO agree. Longtime relationships, when they die, often die of a long slow death during which attraction and lovey/sexy feelings gradually degrade. The next attraction seems all that amazing because the person has forgotten what a honeymoon phase is, precisely because their last honeymoon phase was decades ago. And they are starved for it, and feel like they’ve come upon manna from heaven the moment their blood is up. “Rebound” is rebound in part because of this.
That said, I wish them uber-well. Sometimes it sticks!
The best way to get over an old love is to get under a new one.
Snark,
Too funny!
Kiddo,
I’ve seen the studies too. It’s not all bleak but it is discouraging when you look at everything.
I’m gonna jump on the bandwagon and give Kiddo props for a great post and a shout-out to Mrs BPitt for dropping a “balls”.
I think it most definitely goes as Kiddo describes..hard for me to relate because I live off of “new car smell”. I never really give myself enough time with a guy to become disillusioned.
Side-note: today is last Thursday all over again. What is it about Wednesday night drinking? Is Wednesday the new Thirsty Thursday?
I don’t know…but I feel like ass.
Lol, let´s ignore the fact that there was NO legal possibility to marry a person of the same gender and see what studies about heterosexuals say instead, that might explain why lesbian partners of 20 years did not get married. And everyone is like, oh yeah, sounds insightful. I can’t even of how heteronormative this is, ahaha.
There are also studies that show that lesbian women are the ones of all LGBT+ people who want marriage equality the most. Maybe because being in a double-woman household comes with some disadvantages like a double wage gap and stuff?
@TheOriginalKitten, What I like about you is that you aren’t a nasty hungover, you’re actually quite funny.
Well we made it a good eleven or so posts before someone dropped the “heteronormative”, so that’s good at least.
Once a friend of mine told me that she would only marry someone if she would do it within the first two years of the relationship, when your neurologically “in love”, because she was sure that if she would wait long after that she wouldn’t be so keen on it anymore. 🙂 I found it a bit funny (even if she was just being snarky).
I don’t believe in the institution of marriage, so I would only sign a paper if it would make any practical sense, or if it would be important for my partner. The people I know who married after such a short time of relationship were: a) coming from a painful breakup b) wanting to start a family, and believing in marriage as a first step for that. Most often a) and b) together plus c) wanted to proof themselves and others that they had moved on. Just my practical experience…The cynic in me always wonder about people who get married after a short relationship, but I understand that other life experiences might modulate this.
@Cheap Trick, I wasn’t putting anyone down nor making judgements about commitments in re lesbians. I was discussing the only study widely available, which was carried out with heterosexuals. I was extrapolating to a degree because Jodi married a new person, not her long term partner, even though she technically couldn’t marry prior, during their time together. Removing the legality aspect, there are some similarities in non-married partners of all sexual orientation. When the opportunity to marry was granted, she went in another direction, no shade thrown: At her or the heterosexuals. I don’t really understand why you are taking offense. None was intended. Perhaps, all of the lesbian relationships last longer, you might be right. We were discussing this one, where there were similarities to other types of relationships.
Also, MrsBPitt started to ponder specifically about heteros.
@ Godwina (who wrote) ‘SO agree. Longtime relationships, when they die, often die of a long slow death during which attraction and lovey/sexy feelings gradually degrade. The next attraction seems all that amazing because the person has forgotten what a honeymoon phase is, precisely because their last honeymoon phase was decades ago.’
You are so right about this! And it is understandable. Still I think it is sad that ‘fresh passion’ can burn through an earlier commitment to a long term partner. Often, after the breakup and looking back on what happened, it can seem the passion wasn’t worth giving up the long term relationship for. But then it ‘s too late. I have seen this happen several times in my circle of friends and family. People just seem to lose their heads when they really fall in love with a new person and burn too many bridges.
I’ve wondered about that myself, maybe they want a complete change of what they had before? I dunno, it is interesting though.
I was with my first partner for 18 years. Neither of us were particularly interested in getting married, so we didn’t bother. He passed away. The man I’m with now cared about getting married, so we got married. That’s really all it was, I honestly didn’t mind either way so it really just depended on the other person’s needs/wants. I was just as committed to my first partner as I am to my husband, just as happy, just as in love…the fact that I married one man and didn’t marry another signifies nothing about how I feel/felt about them or the state of the relationships.
No idea about Justin/Heidi, but both Vanessa and Johnny were pretty open about the fact that it was her who didn’t want marriage, I’m sure if it was up to him they would have been married, if nothing else the man loves proposing.
I don’t think the studies indicate that there are no outliers, or exceptions to the rule. Also, I don’t think the studies indicated whether all of the parties broke up. Some people can be committed to a relationship without a legal document; perhaps they never marry, but remain together. I’m not sure, and I’m too lazy to go searching. 🙂 I’m sorry about your loss, but glad you found someone who makes you happy. Maybe for some, the idea that they aren’t ‘tied down’ legally makes the commitment more poignant since they aren’t obligated by law to stay together, but they are doing so out of want.
Penny,
I’ve read studies that are similar (or the same) as Kiddo’s. IIRC, it was the majority of the participants (as Kiddo stated), but the % I think was in the 60-70% range. Clearly still had a decent chuck of people that bucked the trend that the majority experienced. Key word is remember but I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t an issue of 90% being the majority and you experiencing an anomaly.
I am glad to hear that you’ve been lucky enough to be loved by two wonderful men.
Well said Penny. There is always a story behind the numbers and percentages. I’ve seen this happen a ton of times as well. The couple lives together and doesn’t get married. As soon as that relationship ends, he marries the first woman he sees (or so it seems). I chalked it up to his being a jerk, forgetting that I was not in their relationship, so I wouldn’t really know what went on. Its just easier to form an opinion from the numbers and personal observation.
Great insights, Kiddo. Also, I think timing is such a huge factor in any relationship and it can work in mysterious ways.
Although for LGBTQ people, marriage wasn’t even an option twenty years ago — we can’t know what sort of private ceremony/commitment Foster and Bernard might have had, because they wouldn’t have sold the photos to People. So for all we know, they might have been as married as they could be.
Foster has dated at least one other person since breaking up with Bernard, so at least this isn’t a rebound thing. Congrats to both of them.
(How incestuous is the Hollywood lesbian scene anyway?)
Everyone is more or less a captive to proximity. It’s just that there are less of the upper echelon in those circles, where the rest of us have a larger pool that we can drink from?
I think TOK and I are drinking from the same pool. 😉
Yeah, but YOUR collective pool is full of beer, tequila and mimosas, LMAO.
Drinking? I’m deep-sea diving in that sh*t.
Maybe Vanessa and Heidi were the ones that didn’t want to get married and their partiners did. So when he was released he went for the ring.
I was confused about this too. Was it her new wife who she thanked at the Globes, or was it the other long term relationship?
She thanked her former partner and fellow co-parent in her speech. Jodie was single at that moment.
I agree it was a fairly awkward speech, at least at first, but I love how much praise and admiration she gave for her former partner. I found it touching.
I thought I was tripping when she gave that speech. It was so all over the place and nonspecific, and then Mel Gibson praise, and stream of consciousness, amazingly disjointed.
She seemed very nervous to me, but it’s not fresh in my mind, especially as I’m trying to figure out how you amazingly make certain words bold.
For some reason, this explanation keeps disappearing.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1082353/how-do-i-make-text-bold-in-html
Only use lower case b, instead of the word bold.
Ha, kiddo, I thought my brain was malfunctioning in some way during her speech. It was just not computing.
@Esmom, Cracking me up.
Thanks Kiddo!
Funny.
Thank You
(I’m testing the instructions.)
Are italics the same thing but with an i?
And her speech was an amazing stream of consciousness and not always clear (repeated viewings help).
The italics seemed to have stopped working after they were fiddling with the site. I don’t know why, I guess you can try it.
Of course she was nervous. To come out to somebody is really terrifying, to publicly come out on a stage probably even more so.
Eve is able to use italics.
Testing Italics
**ETA**
Nope, didn’t work.
Anyone know how to do italics?
That’s right, Eve is a
Sorceressgenius as well. It’s all coming back to me from my early days when I was just an innocent poster on a dog forum. Now I’ve graduated to celebrity snark, ha. Oh and sorry to hijack the thread…Eve is hilariously funny too, so she’s a double threat.
did it work?
ohh I feel fancy, thanks Kiddo
I need italics now!
*damnit and my underlines keep disappearing too.
@Cheap Trick, It was a joke. I do that on most threads.
Congrats to them! It does seem quick after she had such a long relationship before, but good luck to them, hope it’s a happy marriage.
HA! I love Alan Cumming, but he’s no Macbeth. I’m dying of lulz over here.
Jodie Foster gets more beautiful every day. Wow.
Congrats!
I always found JF incredibly annoying. Just can’t with this woman.
Holy sh-t, I just remembered I interacted with her once a very long time ago, in a pub in an incredibly touristy locale. Had no clue who she was (she was wearing a ball cap) and I asked her if I could borrow one of the seats from her table. Later the owner of the pub said to me, I cannot f-cking believe you stole one of Jodi Foster’s chairs! And yeah she wasn’t friendly by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m sure she thought I was trolling.
Or maybe she was secretly disappointed that you didn’t fall all over her, fawning?
If I were the one with some batshit obsessive stalkers calling me at home, writing me creepy letters, attending my classes @ university, and trying to assassinate a politician in hopes to impress me, I’d be weary of random people innocently asking to borrow a chair, too.
Cheap Trick, good point, I’d forgotten about that. Kudos to her for even going out in public, I guess.
But who is friendly to someone who asks for a chair. They say can I use this chair you say yes and then you both go about your day. I would be a little freaked out if I asked to use a chair and the person wanted to have a whole conversation with me. It would be so uncomfortable.
Yeah I wasn’t offended in the slightest, prob more embarrassed in retrospect more than anything.
I can imagine embarrassment. I stood in line the other day at Trader Joe’s behind a (minor?) celeb, Bonnie Hunt. It took me a little while to figure out why she looked familiar. Anyway, it’s my habit to check my emails while standing in line and she kept glancing at me and I realized maybe she thought I was trying to snap her photo or maybe madly Tweeting about spotting her. I wasn’t. But I felt a bit like an intrusive douche.
Congrats. Alexandra is beautiful.
I don’t think AH is a gold digger at all. I think she is a very attractive, thoughtful, creative woman whom other attractive, thoughtful, and creative women are naturally drawn to. I have never really Portia Duhwhatever (gold digger?) and was sad when I heard Ellen had cheated on AH with plastic Portia. AH quietly moved on from that (unlike Tammy Lynn Michaels), and I am glad she has found love with Jodi Foster. They seem like a really good match. Congrats all around!
Her father is David Hedison (whom she resembles). He’s not A list but he’s been around forever and in tons of TV shows.
He was one of my dream hunks when I was a child – seriously good looking.
I watched The LWord -ironically on the show she was pegged as a gold digger.
Alexandra has mad game!!!
Maybe Cydney Didn’t want to get married to Jodie.Vanessa didn’t want to get married to Depp.
They look gorgeous together! I wish them much happiness!
Didn’t Jodie Foster name her kid Kitt – wonder if she is also a fan of Knight Rider.
She named her 2nd son “Kit”, which is short for “Nikita”, if my memories are correct .
Mazel tov! They both look fantastic in that photo – seems like being together as a couple suits them.
They make an attractive couple, but it does seem to me that they’re rushing into this. I wish them well, but can’t help but hope that Jodie got a prenup.
Congratulations to Jodie and Alexandra. I hope they’ll have a lovely life together!
Eh. I give a pass to people that marry relatively quickly if they’re not in their 20’s anymore. I think at their age, they know what they want out of life, and what works for them and what doesn’t. I think you just understand your needs better as you age. Life is too short to wait for happiness because someone else thinks you should wait 3 years.
Good luck to them!
I completely agree. I think 8-9 months is long enough to date someone if you know what you’re looking for.
I wonder if her vows were as awkward and bitter as that golden globes quasi-coming out speech. Congratulations to both Brides!
I read about this last night on the Advocate. I too was surprised for all the reasons you mentioned. BUT good for them and congrats! I hope they have a happy marriage.
I don’t understand the comparison with straight guys who marry their new gf quickly after being unmarried in previous long term relationship. Jodie dates women so she couldn’t have married her previous partner even if she had wanted too because it was not possible at the time.
If I ever had to marry a woman it would be Jodie. Always loved her! Congrats to the happy couple.
I’m from the US, but if you get married in another country where gay marriage is legal, is the marriage valid if you move to a US state where it is not legal?
There are surely people on here with a lot more knowledge, but I think the answer is yes and no. There are federal benefits that you would be entitled to regardless of whether or not your new home state recognized same sex marriage, such as filing your federal income tax jointly, but you would not be entitled to certain state benefits.
Maybe Cydney was the one who didn’t want to get married. And Jodie was the marriage minded one.
I always think it’s a slap to the face of the ex-long term partner when people marry someone else within a year of breaking up.
It’s an irrational stance to take, but I can’t help it.