Little Man Tate
1991 film by Jodie Foster
Little Man Tate is a 1991 American drama film directed by Jodie Foster (in her directorial debut) from a screenplay written by Scott Frank. The film stars Adam Hann-Byrd as Fred Tate, a seven-year-old child prodigy who struggles to self-actualize in social and psychological settings that largely fail to accommodate his intelligence. It also stars Foster, Dianne Wiest, Harry Connick Jr., David Hyde Pierce, Debi Mazar and P.J. Ochlan.
Little Man Tate was released theatrically on October 18, 1991, by Orion Pictures to critical and commercial success. Reviewers praised Foster's direction, Frank's screenplay and the performances of the cast. The film grossed $25 million domestically, on a $10 million budget.
Plot
Dede Tate is a young working-class woman of average intelligence and strong instincts, raising her seven-year-old son, Fred, alone. Fred shows every indication of being a genius. Fred's reading and mathematics abilities are remarkable, and he plays the piano "at competition level", but his intellect has isolated him from his public school classmates. He calls his mother, who loves him unconditionally, by her first name.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Little Man Tate” as 1991 film by Jodie Foster. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1991 film by Jodie Foster. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1170870. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Little Man Tate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.