Kimila Ann "Kim" Basinger (bay-sing-er, often mispronounced /ˈbæsɪndʒɚ/bass-in-jer) (born December 8, 1953) is an Academy Award-winning American film actress and former fashion model.

Early life

Basinger was born in Athens, Georgia. Her father, Don Basinger, was a big band musician and loan manager who landed in Normandy during D-Day. Her mother, Ann, was a model, actress, and swimmer who appeared in Esther Williams films. She has two brothers, Mick and Skip, and two sisters, Ashley and Barbara.

When Basinger was sixteen years old, she started her modeling career by winning the Athens Junior Miss contest. She followed that by winning the title “Junior Miss Georgia”. Basinger then competed in the national Junior Miss pageant. It was there that Basinger was offered a modeling contract with Ford Modeling Agency. Initially turning down the offer in favor of singing and acting, Basinger reconsidered and went to New York to become a Ford model.

Career

Not long after penning the deal, Basinger was on the cover of numerous magazines. She appeared in hundreds of ads throughout the early ‘70s, most notably appearing as the Breck shampoo girl. She achieved a top model status by age 20, earning a salary of $1,000 a day. In the meantime, she alternated between modeling work and attending acting classes at the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse as well as performing in various Greenwich Village clubs.

In 1976, after a five-year stint as a cover girl, Basinger decided to put her modeling career on hold and move to Los Angeles to begin a career in acting. After appearing in small parts on a few TV shows such as McMillan & Wife and Charlie's Angels, her first starring role was a made-for-TV movie, Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold (1978) in which she played a small town girl who goes to Hollywood to become an actress and winds up becoming a famous centerfold for a men's magazine. She was a Bond girl in Never Say Never Again (1983), where she starred opposite Sean Connery. She did a famous pictorial for Playboy in 1983, which Basinger has said led to good opportunities, such as Barry Levinson's The Natural (1984), co-starring Robert Redford, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Academy Award winning writer-director Robert Benton cast her in the title role for the film Nadine (1987). Other directors repeated her in their films, such as Blake Edwards for The Man Who Loved Women (1983) and Blind Date (1987)) and Robert Altman for Fool for Love (1985) and Prêt-à-Porter (1994). Her most prominent appearances include 9½ Weeks (1986), Batman (1989) and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997), for which she received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, as well as the Golden Globe and Screen Actor's Guild Award. Hanson would cast her once more as Eminem's mother in the hit film 8 Mile (2002). She holds the distinction of being the only actress who has both posed nude in Playboy and won an Academy Award.

In 1992 Basinger was the guest vocalist on a re-recorded version of Was (Not Was)'s "Shake Your Head," which also featured Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, and reached the UK Top 5. This makes her also one of a few Academy Award winners for acting roles to have had a hit record, particularly in more recent years.

In the video for Tom Petty's 1993 song "Mary Jane's Last Dance", Basinger played the role of a deceased woman Petty brings home from the morgue for a dinner date, clothing her in a wedding dress. Later, Petty is shown carrying her to a rocky shore and throwing her into the sea. In a macabre ending, she is seen floating in the water with her eyes open.

She was, at an early stage, considered for the role of Donna in film adaptation of the stage musical Mamma Mia!, but lost to Meryl Streep.

Personal life

Basinger married makeup artist Ron Snyder-Britton in 1980. They met on the film Hard Country, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1988. He would later write a memoir titled Longer than Forever, published in 1998, about their time together and about her rumored affair with actor Richard Gere, with whom she starred in No Mercy (1986) and Final Analysis (1992). She later had a relationship with Prince, for less than a year. She met her second husband, actor Alec Baldwin, when both played romantic lovers in the 1991 success , The Marrying Man. They married on August 19, 1993 and appeared in another success in Europe and Russia, the remake of The Getaway (1994). They also played themselves in an 1998 episode of The Simpsons (which also includes Ron Howard), where Basinger corrects Homer Simpson on the pronunciation of her last name and also polishes her Oscar statuette. They have a daughter, Ireland Eliesse "Addie" Baldwin (born October 23, 1995). The couple separated in 2000 and divorced in February 2002. Since then, Basinger and Baldwin have been locked in a contentious public custody battle.

Basinger suffers from agoraphobia, which she blames on discomfort early in her Hollywood career from people "ogling" her when she was required to appear in bikinis. She said she was in "misery because people were looking at [her]" and that she would go "home and play piano and scream at night to let out... frustrations.

Some of her family members recommended that Basinger buy the small town of Braselton, Georgia in 1989 for $20 million, with the hopes of establishing the town as a tourist attraction with movie studios and a film festival, but she met financial difficulties and sold it in 1993. The town is now owned by developer Wayne Mason. In a 1998 interview with Barbara Walters, Basinger admitted that "nothing good came out of it," because a rift resulted within her family. Her financial difficulties were exacerbated when she pulled out of the controversial film Boxing Helena, resulting in the studio suing and winning an $8-million judgment against her at after a trial. Kim filed for bankruptcy and also appealed the jury's decision to a higher court, which sided with her. Eventually, she and the studio settled for a lesser amount.

Basinger is also a vegetarian and PETA supporter.

Filmography

Year	Film	Role	Other notes
1981	Hard Country	Jodie
1981	Killjoy	Laury Medford	aka Who Murdered Joy Morgan?
1982	Mother Lode	Andrea Spalding
1983	Never Say Never Again	Domino Petachi
	The Man Who Loved Women	Louise Carr
1984	The Natural	Memo Paris	Nominated - Golden Globe
1985	Fool for Love	May
1986	9½ Weeks	Elizabeth
	No Mercy	Michel Duval
1987	Blind Date	Nadia Gates
	Nadine	Nadine Hightower
1988	My Stepmother Is an Alien	Celeste Martin
1989	Batman	Vicki Vale
1991	The Marrying Man	Vicki Anderson
1992	Final Analysis	Heather Adams
	Cool World	Holli Would
	The Real McCoy	Karen McCoy
1993	Wayne's World 2	Honey Horneé
	Mary Jane's Last Dance		music video for Tom Petty
1994	A Century of Cinema	Herself	documentary
	The Getaway	Carol McCoy
	Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter)	Kitty Potter
1997	L.A. Confidential	Lynn Bracken	Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; Nominated - BAFTA Award; Golden Globe
2000	I Dreamed of Africa	Kuki Gallmann
	Bless the Child	Maggie O'Connor
2002	8 Mile	Stephanie Smith
	People I Know	Victoria Gray
2004	The Door in the Floor	Marion Cole
	Elvis Has Left the Building	Harmony Jones
	Cellular	Jessica Martin
2006	The Sentinel	1st Lady Sarah Ballentine
	The Mermaid Chair	Jessie Sullivan
2007	Even Money	Carol Carver
2008	While She Was Out	Lead Role	awaiting release
	The Informers	Graham's Mother	awaiting release
	The Burning Plain	Gina	awaiting release

Television work

• Charlie's Angels (1976) (episode: Angels in Chains)
• Dog and Cat (1977) (canceled after six episodes)
• The Ghost of Flight 401 (1978)
• Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold (1978)
• From Here to Eternity (1979) (miniseries)
• From Here to Eternity (1980) (canceled after thirteen episodes)
• Killjoy (1981)
• Sean Connery, an Intimate Portrait (1997) (documentary)
• The Simpsons (1998: 13.17) (as herself)

References

External links

• Kim Basinger at the Internet Movie Database