Actress and honoree Jodie Foster at the Women in Entertainment awards. Photo / Reuters

Actress and honoree Jodie Foster at the Women in Entertainment awards. Photo / Reuters

It's hardly a secret in Hollywood that Jodie Foster is gay. Everybody with an interest in her private life - whether prurient or more personal - has known it for at least as long as she has been an Oscar-winning actress, which is pushing 20 years by now. (She won an Academy Award for her role as a rape victim in 1988's The Accused, and again three years later for her indelible performance as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs.) An equally open secret is that she is one of the Hollywood few who is actually in a stable long-term relationship.

Scour the internet and it doesn't take long to find out that her partner's name is Cydney Bernard, that they have been together since 1993, and that they are bringing up two children conceived and delivered by Foster - Charles, 9, and Kit, 6.

Foster herself, though, has always been hugely reluctant to talk about any of this. More than most, she is fiercely protective of her privacy - not entirely surprising, given the facts of her early life, when she entered the goldfish-bowl world of a child star and became prey to one stalker after another, including John Hinckley, the man who shot Ronald Reagan.

Occasionally she has alluded in interviews to one titbit or another about her children, but she has - until now - made absolutely no public reference to her partner or to her sexual orientation. That changed, in the tiniest of ways, just last week when Foster, now 45 and as much of a film producer and director as she is an actress, received a special award at a breakfast thrown by a group called Women In Entertainment.

Towards the end of her remarks, according to the lone reporter in the room (an entertainment beat reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News), she thanked her nearest and dearest, including "my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss".

What was striking was not the acknowledgement itself. (Websites that breathlessly proclaimed Foster had "come out" were surely overstating their case.) Rather, it was the sadness of everything that had gone before and the peculiar agony of being anything other than a straight heterosexual in a town as supposedly progressive and forward-thinking as Los Angeles.

Here was one of the world's most successful women, with an enviable and growing body of work to brag about, and she couldn't - except in the most roundabout way and after 14 years - feel comfortable acknowledging her life partner in public.

Imagine Gordon Brown never being able to acknowledge Sarah, or the Queen being unable to talk about "my husband and I".