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Kim Basinger

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Kim Basinger
Kim Basinger at the Academy Awards, March 1990
Born
Kimila Ann Basinger
OccupationFilm actress
Spouse(s)Ron Snyder (1980-1988)
Alec Baldwin (1993-2002)
AwardsNBR Award for Best Cast
1994 Prêt-à-Porter

Kimila Ann "Kim" Basinger (Template:PronEng 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 in 1953. Her father, Don Basinger, was a big band musician and loan manager[1] who landed in Normandy on D-Day.[2] Her mother, Ann, was a model, actress, and swimmer who appeared in Esther Williams films. The third of five children, she has two brothers, Mick and Skip, and two sisters, Ashley and Barbara.

When Basinger was sixteen, 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.

Kim Basinger (1989).

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 is 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

In 1980 Basinger married makeup artist Ron Snyder-Britton, whom she had 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).[3] She later had a brief relationship with Prince.

In 1990 she met her second husband, actor Alec Baldwin, when they played lovers in the film The Marrying Man. They married on August 19, 1993 and appeared in 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.

Basinger and Baldwin had a daughter, Ireland Eliesse "Addie" Baldwin (born October 23, 1995). They separated at the end of 2000 and divorced in February 2002. Since then, the couple have been locked in a contentious public custody battle. Alec Baldwin's book A Promise To Ourselves[4] chronicles the lengths Basinger has gone to deny Baldwin access to their daughter since their separation. They are not on good terms.

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" when strangers looked at her and that she would go "home and play piano and scream at night to let out...frustrations."[5]

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[6] 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.[7]

Basinger is a strict vegetarian and staunch PETA supporter.[8]

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
Awards and achievements
Preceded by Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress
1997
for L.A. Confidential
Succeeded by
Preceded by Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture
1997
for L.A. Confidential
Succeeded by
Preceded by Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture
1997
for L.A. Confidential
Succeeded by

Television work

References

  1. ^ Kim Basinger biography. Film Reference.com.
  2. ^ Kim Basinger. Yahoo Movies.
  3. ^ Britton, Ron. Longer than Forever. Blake Publishing. 1998. ISBN 9781857823257.
  4. ^ Alec Baldwin, A Promise to Ourselves St Martin Press, 2008
  5. ^ Kim Basinger Pinpoints Source of Her Agoraphobia. 17 October 2002 (WENN). Reprinted news at IMDB.com.
  6. ^ Kim Basinger Files Bankruptcy. Straight Bankruptcy.com
  7. ^ For Kim Basinger, the "fire ball" is out - and Veronica Lake is in. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 20 September 1997.
  8. ^ KIM will be present at Venice Festival movie on 27 august 2008 Kim Basinger - Biography

External links


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