Kimila Ann Basinger (; born December 8, 1953) is an American actress. She has garnered acclaim for her work in film, for which she has received various accolades including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Initially a TV starlet, she shot to fame as a Bond girl in 1983 and enjoyed a long heyday over the next two decades.
Basinger began her career as a model and switched to acting in 1976. She appeared in several television productions, including a remake of From Here to Eternity (1979), before making her feature debut in the rural drama Hard Country (1981). Basinger first gained widespread attention for her performance of Domino Petachi in the James Bond entry Never Say Never Again (1983). She went on to receive a Golden Globe nomination for her role in The Natural (1984), starred in the erotic drama 9½ Weeks (1986), and played Vicki Vale in Tim Burton's Batman (1989), which remains the highest-grossing film of her career. For her femme fatale portrayal in L.A. Confidential (1997), Basinger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Her other films include No Mercy (1986), Blind Date (1987), My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988), Cool World (1992), The Real McCoy (1993), I Dreamed of Africa (2000), 8 Mile (2002), The Door in the Floor (2004), Cellular (2004), The Sentinel (2006), The Burning Plain (2009), Grudge Match (2013), and Fifty Shades Darker (2017).
Divorced from makeup artist Ron Snyder and actor Alec Baldwin, Basinger cohabitates with her longtime hairdresser, Mitch Stone. She had a high-profile relationship between marriages with musician Prince, with whom she recorded an album, Hollywood Affair, and is the mother of social media influencer Ireland Baldwin from her marriage to Baldwin.
Early life and modeling
Basinger was born in Athens, Georgia, on December 8, 1953. Her mother, Ann Lee (; 1925–2017), was a model, actress and swimmer who appeared in several Esther Williams films. Her father, Donald Wade Basinger (1923–2016), was a big band musician and loan manager; as a U.S. Army soldier, he landed in Normandy on D-Day.Kim Basinger. Yahoo Movies. The middle of five children, she has two older brothers, Skip (b. 1950) and Mick (b. 1951), and two younger sisters, Barbara (b. 1956) and Ashley (b. 1959). Basinger's ancestry includes English, German, and Ulster Scots.Stated on Inside the Actors Studio, 1999 She was raised a Methodist. Basinger has described herself as extremely shy, which had a major effect on her during her childhood and young adulthood. She has said that her shyness was so extreme that she would faint if asked to speak in class.
Basinger studied ballet from about age three to her mid-teens. By her mid-teens, she grew in confidence and successfully auditioned for the school cheerleading team. At 17, she entered America's Junior Miss Scholarship Pageant, won at the city level and was crowned Athens Junior Miss. While she didn't win at the state level, her beauty was profiled in the national program. She had competed at the state level for the Breck Scholarship and was featured in an ad for Breck in a joint portrait with her mother.
Basinger was offered a modeling contract with the Ford Modeling Agency, but turned it down in favor of singing and acting, and enrolled at the University of Georgia. She soon reconsidered and went to New York to become a Ford model. Despite earning US$1,000 a day, Basinger never enjoyed modeling, saying: "It was very hard to go from one booking to another and always have to deal with the way I looked. I couldn't stand it. I felt myself choking." Basinger has said that even as a model, when others relished looking in the mirror before appearing, she abhorred it and would avoid mirrors out of insecurity. Not long after her Ford deal, Basinger appeared on the cover of magazines. She also appears on the cover of the debut album by the band Survivor. She appeared in hundreds of advertisements throughout the early 1970s, most notably as the Breck Shampoo girl. She alternated between modeling and attending acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, as well as performing in Greenwich Village clubs as a singer. Basinger is an alumna of the William Esper Studio for the performing arts in Manhattan, New York City.
Career Early roles (1976–1982)
In 1976, after four years as a cover girl, Basinger quit modeling and moved to Los Angeles to act. She made guest appearances on a few television shows such as McMillan & Wife and Charlie's Angels, turning down a regular role in the latter series that eventually went to Cheryl Ladd. 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 also had the lead in a short lived TV series Dog and Cat.
In 1979, she co-starred with Natalie Wood, William Devane and Steve Railsback in the miniseries remake of From Here to Eternity, reprising her role as prostitute Lorene Rogers in a 13-episode spinoff that aired in 1980. In 1981, Basinger made her feature debut in the critically well-received but little-seen rural drama Hard Country, which she followed with the Charlton Heston-directed outdoorsy adventure Mother Lode (1982).
Worldwide exposure (1983–1989)
Her breakthrough role came as Domino Petachi, the Bond girl in Never Say Never Again (1983), where she starred opposite Sean Connery. In his review of the film, Gary Arnold of The Washington Post said Basinger "looks like a voluptuous sibling of Liv Ullmann and has a certain something." Worldwide, Never Say Never Again grossed US$160 million. As part of its promotion, Basinger did a famous nude pictorial for Playboy, which she has said led to good opportunities, such as her role as the romantic interest of a baseball team star in Barry Levinson's The Natural (1984), alongside Robert Redford, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Blake Edwards cast her twice in his films; as a beautiful woman married to a Texas millionaire in The Man Who Loved Women (1983), and as an apparently shy woman who goes on a date with a workaholic man in Blind Date (1987). Robert Altman cast Basinger in the role of a woman hiding from her former lover at an old motel in Fool for Love (1985). In 1986, Basinger starred as a New York City art gallery employee who has a brief yet intense affair with a mysterious Wall Street broker, opposite Mickey Rourke, in Adrian Lyne's controversial erotic romantic drama 9½ Weeks. Though the film failed at the North American box office, it performed very well in Europe, especially France, and acquired a large American fanbase on home video and cable. Roger Ebert praised the film, comparing it to Last Tango in Paris, and said Basinger helped "develop an erotic tension [...] that is convincing, complicated and sensual."
Writer-director Robert Benton also cast her in the title role of a slightly pregnant woman in trouble for Nadine (1987). While most of the films Basinger starred in during this period were released to varying degrees of success, they helped to establish her as an actress. With over US$400 million in box office totals, the highest-grossing film of her career thus far is Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman, in which Basinger took on role of photojournalist Vicki Vale, opposite Michael Keaton. Basinger re-wrote the film's third act with producer Jon Peters with whom she was having a behind the scenes affair. The Hollywood Reporter, in its original review, remarked that "the uniqueness and very soul of the film [...] is achieved through the beautifully defined and probing performances of Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne and Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale".
1990s
Following the success of Batman, Basinger played a glamorous singer, alongside Alec Baldwin, in the comedy The Marrying Man (1991), and starred with Richard Gere, as a woman romantically involved with her sister's psychiatrist, in the neo-noir Final Analysis (1992). Both films were released to moderate box office returns. In 1992, Basinger was also a guest vocalist on a re-recorded version of Was (Not Was)'s "Shake Your Head", which featured Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, and reached the UK Top 5, and starred in what marked her only voice-acting project to date, the film Cool World, directed by Ralph Bakshi, as a cartoon bombshell who longs to become a real human woman.
In 1993, Basinger took on the roles of a woman recently released from prison in the crime film The Real McCoy, a woman named Honey Hornée in the comedy Wayne's World 2, and was in the music video for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' hit single Mary Jane's Last Dance. In 1994, she reunited professionally with Baldwin for the thriller The Getaway, in which she portrayed the wife of a former con, and with director Robert Altman for the comedy Prêt-à-Porter, playing a breathlessly dim-witted cable reporter. Amid financial issues, Basinger went into hiatus from the screen by the mid-1990s.
She made a comeback as the high-class hooker in Curtis Hanson's neo-noir L.A. Confidential (1997), alongside Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe. She initially turned down the film twice, feeling an insecurity at returning to the screen and enjoying motherhood. The Washington Post felt that Basinger "exudes a sort of chaste sultriness", in what Roger Ebert described as "one of the best films of the year". The role earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role, and was also nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She holds the distinction of being the only actress who has both posed nude in Playboy and won an Academy Award. In a 2000 interview with Charlie Rose, Basinger said that L.A. Confidential and her next film, I Dreamed of Africa (2000), were the most pleasurable of her career.
2000s In I Dreamed of Africa, Basinger portrayed writer and environmentalist Kuki Gallmann, with Vincent Pérez, whom she called the "most incredible actor she had ever worked with". The film was described as a "passion project" for her, and she told UrbanCinefile that she "cried for hours" when she had to leave Kenya, where filming took place. Budgeted at US$50 million, I Dreamed of Africa got a 10 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and only managed to pull in US$14 million at the worldwide box office.
Curtis Hanson cast her again, this time as the alcoholic mother of an aspiring rapper, in 8 Mile (2002), opposite Eminem and Brittany Murphy. The film appeared on many top ten lists of the year, and in his review, Roger Ebert asserted: "There has been criticism of Kim Basinger, who is said to be too attractive and even glamorous to play [Eminem]'s mother, but [...] Her performance finds the right note somewhere between love and exasperation; it cannot be easy to live with this sullen malcontent, whose face lights up only when he sees his baby sister". 8 Mile was a commercial success, grossing $242.9 million worldwide.
Basinger starred as the wife of a children's book author, with Jeff Bridges and Jon Foster, in The Door in the Floor (2004), a drama with heavy sexual themes adapted from the novel A Widow for One Year by John Irving. The film found a limited audience in theaters, but in his review, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, felt that "Basinger's haunted beauty burns in the memory" and called it "her finest work".