Jodie Foster House: The Beverly Hills Homes She Bought and Sold

Jodie Foster has been famous since she was a child and has spent the whole of her adult life declining to be a public person. Her property record reflects that exactly. Every home she has been documented owning was chosen for seclusion, and since she sold her last well-known one in 2019 she has effectively disappeared from the property record altogether.

The house most people mean when they search her name is the 1950s traditional above Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills that she bought in 2012 for $11.75 million, listed in February 2019 at $15.9 million, and sold for $14.9 million.

This guide covers that property, the two Los Angeles homes that preceded it, and why nobody can currently tell you where she lives.

Jodie Foster’s property record

Who is Jodie Foster?

Jodie Foster is an American actress and director who began working as a child, was nominated for an Academy Award at fourteen for Taxi Driver, and has since won two, for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs. She has directed both films and television, and her recent work includes Nyad, True Detective: Night Country and the French-language feature A Private Life. Nyad brought her a fifth Oscar nomination and Night Country her first Emmy, both in 2024. Away from the screen she is a 1985 graduate of Yale.

She has been married to the photographer and director Alexandra Hedison since 2014. Her two sons, Charles and Kit, were raised with her former partner Cydney Bernard, a production manager she met on Sommersby in 1993; the two separated in 2008. She is, by a wide margin, one of the most privacy-protective major figures in American film, and has been for fifty years.

The Coldwater Canyon house

In 2012 Foster bought a house in the hills above Coldwater Canyon from the producer Colin Callender, paying $11.75 million.

The property was completed in 1952 and runs about 7,500 square feet across two storeys, with five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a media room, a swimming pool and gardens. It sits on more than an acre and a half, behind heavy planting, and its large windows take in views running from downtown Los Angeles to the ocean.

Everything about the choice is consistent with her public reticence. It is set well back on a large lot in a canyon rather than on a visible ridge, it is a traditional 1950s house rather than a statement piece, and the coverage of it at the time repeatedly used the word secluded.

She listed it in February 2019 at $15.9 million and it sold for $14.9 million. Against the $11.75 million she paid seven years earlier that is a gross gain of about $3.15 million, a sound result in a period when Beverly Hills rose steadily, though the cost of any work she did to it in the interim is not documented.

The Hollywood Hills villa

Before Beverly Hills she owned a Spanish villa in the Hollywood Hills, built in 1935, of roughly 6,000 square feet with four bedrooms and four bathrooms.

She listed it in June 2013 at $6.399 million, and it eventually sold for about $5 million, roughly $1.4 million below the asking price and after a considerable time on the market. Period Spanish houses in the Hollywood Hills are desirable but slow, and the gap between ask and close here is typical rather than remarkable.

The earlier Beverly Hills ranch

Further back, Foster bought a Cape Cod-style ranch in Beverly Hills in 2005 for $8.1 million, and listed it in 2011 at $9.975 million.

The sale figure for that property is not documented in the sources reviewed here, so no closing price is given. What the sequence shows is a pattern: she has bought, held for roughly five to seven years, and moved on, each time within a small radius of the same part of Los Angeles. That is a considerably shorter hold than most established actors of her generation, whose portfolios are surveyed in accounts such as the one on Meryl Streep’s houses.

Where does Jodie Foster live now?

The public record does not establish it, and in her case the absence looks deliberate rather than accidental.

Here is what is known. She sold the Coldwater Canyon house in 2019. No purchase by her has been reported since, in Los Angeles or anywhere else. She continues to work primarily in and around Los Angeles, including her recent television and film projects, and has given no indication of leaving. She has never given a house tour, never appeared in a shelter magazine at home, and does not post from inside her own house.

The reasonable inference is that she bought something else, quietly, through an entity that has not surfaced. That is standard practice, and for someone who has spent decades minimising her public footprint it would be surprising if she had done anything else. But an inference is not a fact, and no specific home can be attributed to her today. Other Los Angeles actors have managed similar quiet transitions, though few as completely; the comparatively well-documented record on Kristen Stewart’s Los Feliz house shows how visible these purchases usually are.

Sources

• Forbes and The Real Deal on the February 2019 listing, the 2012 purchase from Colin Callender at $11.75 million, and the property’s size and setting.
• Cottages & Gardens on the $14.9 million sale and the house’s features.
• Today on the Hollywood Hills villa, its listing and its eventual sale.
• NBC News on her earlier Beverly Hills listing.