Foster's interpretation of Starling is highly ranked amongst the greatest screen performances of all-time, receiving a multitude of accolades including the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1992.

Her mentor, Behavioral Sciences Unit chief Jack Crawford, sends her to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer.

When Starling was 10 years old, she was sent to live with her mother's cousin on a Montana sheep and horse ranch, but she ran away when she witnessed the spring lambs being slaughtered, fleeing with a mare also destined for the slaughterhouse whom she named Hannah.

The two grow to respect each other, so when Lecter escapes during a transfer to a state prison in Tennessee, Starling does not fear that he will kill her, as he "would consider it rude".

When she sees a Death's-head Moth, the same rare kind that Buffalo Bill stuffs in the throats of each of his victims, flutter through the house, she knows that she has found her man and tries to arrest him.

At the beginning of Hannibal, Starling is in her early 30s and still working for the FBI, although her career has been held back by Paul Krendler, a Department of Justice official who resents her because he is a misogynist, because she rejected his sexual advances, and because he believes that she humiliated him.

He then subjects her to a regimen of psychoactive drugs in the course of therapy sessions to help her heal from her childhood trauma and her pent-up anger at the injustices of the world.

[2] They disappear together, only to be sighted again three years later entering the Teatro Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires by former orderly Barney, who had treated Lecter with respect while he was incarcerated in Baltimore.

The reader then learns that Lecter and Starling are living together in an "exquisite" Beaux Arts mansion, where they employ servants and engage in activities such as learning new languages and dancing together and building their own respective memory palaces, and is told that "Sex is a splendid structure they add to every day", that the psychoactive drugs "have had no part in their lives for a long time", and that Lecter is "satisfied" with the fact that Mischa cannot return.

Although she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster decided not to reprise her role in Hannibal.

[3] Julianne Moore portrayed the character in the sequel, with Anthony Hopkins himself recommending her for the role after his previous experience working with her in the film Surviving Picasso.

Bryan Fuller, the creator of the TV series Hannibal, stated prior to the show's cancellation his desire to include Clarice Starling as a character in the fifth season, provided that he could get the rights from MGM.

[7] CBS developed the Clarice TV series as a sequel to The Silence of the Lambs set in 1993, created by Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet.

[8][9][10][11] The series stars Rebecca Breeds as the titular character, along with Lucca De Oliveira, Devyn A. Tyler, Kal Penn, Nick Sandow, Michael Cudlitz, and Marnee Carpenter, and premiered on February 11, 2021, on CBS.