Kim
Basinger (born December 8, 1953 in Athens, Georgia)
is a notable American film actress who entered the profession
after great success as a model. Her most prominent appearances
include Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986), Batman (1989), and L.A.
Confidential (1997) for which she received a Academy
Award for Best Supporting Actress.
From 1993 to 2002, she was married
to actor Alec Baldwin, with whom she later engaged
in a long legal custody battle regarding their child.
During the 1990s, she purchased and
later sold the entire town of Braselton, Georgia.
MAKING the leap from top-tier fashion
model to A-list (or even B-grade) screen star is no
easy business just ask Cindy Crawford, Elle MacPherson,
or Kathy Ireland but the career of cover girl- turned-
Oscar- winning actress Kim Basinger is sure to be
an inspiration to any brave soul hoping to make that
peril- ridden leap from the catwalk to the silver
screen. By her twentieth birthday, Basinger was a
top model raking in $1,000 a day (a phenomenal sum
at the time) doing everything from magazine covers
to shampoo ads; by the time she hit forty, she was
a top actress earning a seven- figure salary per film.
Along the way, she bought (and was later forced to
sell) a small town in Georgia; had a fling with eighties
pop icon Prince; suffered through a very public bankruptcy
filing following a breach- of- contract suit; and
met and married a Baldwin brother.
A middle child with two older brothers
and two younger sisters, Basinger was born and raised
in Athens, Georgia. Both of her parents came from
entertainment backgrounds: dad studied at Chicago's
American Conservatory of Music and spent a few years
playing big- band jazz before marrying Basinger's
mother, a champion swimmer and model who performed
water ballet in several Esther Williams movies. Though
as a toddler she told her father she was going to
be a great actress when she grew up, Basinger was
extremely shy as a child so much so that her parents
once had her tested to see if she was autistic. Eventually,
she followed in her mother's footsteps, becoming a
diver, dancer, and gymnast in high school. She was
just sixteen when she entered the Athens Junior Miss
contest, and sang her way to the tiara with a number
from My Fair Lady, "Wouldn't It Be Loverly."
From there, she went on to win the Junior Miss Georgia
title, and traveled to New York to compete in the
national Junior Miss pageant. While there, she met
fashion modeling magnate Eileen Ford, who on the spot
offered the full- lipped, blue- eyed blonde a contract
with her renowned Ford Modeling Agency. Though she
initially declined Ford's offer, hoping to pursue
a career either in singing or acting, the young beauty
queen had a change of heart when she got back home
to Georgia, and promptly returned to New York.
Moving to the Big Apple was a big
switch for the small- town Georgia girl, and Basinger
never grew more than just barely tolerant of the city
and the social circle she joined there. She later
recalled of her peers: "[They] put on makeup
like great painters. They were very cool, they spoke
other languages. I guess I was intimidated. I never
felt like one of them." Though she may have fancied
herself a social misfit, Basinger proved quite adept
in terms of her new career. Throughout the early seventies,
she appeared on dozens of magazine covers and in hundreds
of ads, most notably as the Breck shampoo girl. She
never abandoned her dreams of performing, and made
time in her busy schedule for acting classes at the
prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse and open- mike-
night performances in various Greenwich Village clubs,
where she sang under the stage name "Chelsea."
Weary of modeling and fearing that her acting ambitions
were slowly slipping away, Basinger moved to Los Angeles
in 1976, looking for a fresh start.
After spending her first six months
in the city living at a motel overlooking the Hollywood
Freeway, Basinger broke into television doing episodes
of such hit series as Charlie's Angels and The Six
Million Dollar Man. She nailed down her first series
role in 1977, as one-half of a male- female LAPD patrol
team in the speedily- canceled cop drama Cat and Dog.
Her unaffected portrayal of a fallen beauty queen
in NBC's Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold won her the
female lead in the network's 1980 remake of the screen
classic From Here to Eternity, and just one year later
she made her feature- film debut in Hard Country.
Convinced that she needed to heighten her public profile,
Basinger took it all off for an eight- page Playboy
layout in 1983. Though her Playboy pics doubtless
had the desired effect of raising eyebrows around
Hollywood, 1983 would also prove a breakthrough film
year for the unabashed actress: she held her own opposite
Sean Connery as Bond girl Domino in Never Say Never
Again; and romped with Burt Reynolds in the Blake
Edwards remake of François Truffaut's The Man
Who Loved Women.
Suddenly a hot property, Basinger
shared the screen with fellow sex symbol Robert Redford
in 1984's The Natural, and blew the lid off the box
office in 1986 with a fearless performance opposite
Mickey Rourke in director Adrian Lyne's sex- drenched
relationship drama 9 1/2 Weeks. The latter film was
roundly reviled in the national press, but its sky-high
ticket receipts established Basinger's status as a
highly bankable star. Shortly thereafter, her marriage
to makeup artist Ron Britton, whom she'd met during
filming on her first movie, fell apart, and by the
time she arrived on the set of 1989's Batman as an
eleventh- hour replacement for Sean Young, Basinger
had struck up a casual relationship with diminutive
rock god Prince. As Vicki Vale, the photojournalist
who becomes the object of desire of both Michael Keaton's
Caped Crusader and Jack Nicholson's Joker, Basinger
reached a career pinnacle that marked the beginning
of a long dry season: seven straight cinematic flops
followed the mind- boggling financial success of Batman.
Also in 1989, Basinger headed up an
investment group that purchased the tiny burg of Braselton,
in her native Georgia, for $20 million. Just four
years later, Basinger filed for bankruptcy after a
judge ordered her to pay Main Line Pictures $8.1 million
for backing out of a verbal commitment to star in
Boxing Helena. Though she eventually appealed that
ruling and reached an out- of- court settlement with
Main Line, Basinger was forced to sell her interest
in Braselton for just $1 million; court documents
revealed that her monthly expenses at the time of
her bankruptcy filing totaled $43,100, including $6,100
for clothing and $7,000 for "pet care and other
personal expenses." On the heels of all the bad
tidings, Basinger rebounded in 1994, with a high-
profile marriage to actor Alec Baldwin, who had assiduously
wooed her for three long years after first striking
up a relationship with her on the set of 1991's The
Marrying Man.
Basinger and Baldwin welcomed a baby
girl into the world in 1995; Baldwin marked the happy
event by flattening a photographer who attempted to
snap a few shots of little Ireland Eliesse as her
parents brought her home from the hospital. After
taking a couple of years off to stay at home with
her newborn child and devote her energies to animal
rights issues, Basinger put all of her troubles behind
her by upstaging such heavyweights as Kevin Spacey
and Danny DeVito with her luminous, Oscar- winning
performance in 1997's highly- regarded noir smash
L.A. Confidential. Freshly stamped with the Academy's
seal of approval, Basinger will next appear in the
Woody Allen film Celebrity, which will also feature
Kenneth Branagh, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Winona Ryder.
Other Films Include :
Never Say Never Again (1983)
The Natural (1984)
My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988)
Final Analysis (1992)
Cool World (1992)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
I Dreamed of Africa (2000)
8 Mile (2002)
Cellular (2004)
source from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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