Despite what CNN entertainment correspondent Kiki King reported as hard news over a ticker reading "Jodie Foster...Star of Taxi Driver and The Accused...Total lesbian...Admitted so at Hollywood luncheon...Thanked someone called her 'beautiful Cydney'....Must be longtime girlfriend...Jodie Foster...Star of Taxi Driver..." in an infinite loop, the actress's speech at a Women in Entertainment event in December was not the definitive soft-outing Foster-watchers had long hoped for. At least not according to a recent interview with Parade, in which The Brave One suddenly grew very skittish when the questions poked too close to home:

"When I look back at my life, I think it has been about the search for meaning and connection," Jodie Foster tells PARADE.

[Asked] why she has not yet fallen in love, she gets irritated and explains, "Oh, my life is basically from the head up. I'm definitely not proud of that. I'm very analytical.

Foster will not address long-standing rumours about her sexual orientation or name her sons' father. When asked about her personal life, she fidgets and turns wary. "I don't think there is any good thing about fame," she asserts. "In this business, in order to care for yourself and the people you love, you have to separate your professional life from your personal life."

Sadly, it would seem whatever courage-stores inspired Foster to inch ever so gingerly outside her glass closet have now been depleted, as she's right back to her old routine of delivering ambiguous, tangential answers to direct questions about her personal life. Still, the understandably frustrated Parade editors really should have just appreciated that she was willing to sit down with them at all, and not taken the liberty of drawing their own conclusions about the cumulative effects of years of psychic compartmentalisation and repression by sprawling her across their cover looking utterly straightjacket-ready.

• 'Why Didn't I Rebel More?' [Parade.com]

Tags: gays | jodie foster