Born on December 8, 1953 in Athens, Georgia (USA), Kim Basinger was considered one of the most seductive temptations in Hollywood for a long time. Her characteristics? Blond hair, long legs, flawless face, plenty of sex appeal and some talent for acting.
Terribly shy
Among Kim Basinger's ancestors were Swedes, Germans and Cherokee Indians. Despite being lonely and terribly shy, she showed musical talent early on with a jazz piano playing father and a dancing mother, but after winning a beauty contest she would be a model - working for Breck, Revlon, Clairol and Maybelline in New York City. After seven years in the business she decided to change profession and to try Hollywood: she moved to Los Angeles in 1976.
Charlie's Angels, Bond and Erotics
Kim first broke into television, doing episodes of Charlie's Angels and some other series. In 1980, she married 16-year-older Ron Britton, "a father figure", as Basinger remarked herself. Her debut on the movie screen was called Hard Country, but her first appearance for a larger film audience was Never Say Never Again in 1983, where Basinger played the Bond girl Domino. This was her first breakthrough, but the real exposure came with Nine 1/2 Weeks, an erotic story about a woman, the assistant of an art gallery, who gets into an impersonal affaire with a mysterious, dominant man, played by Mickey Rourke.
Alien and Batman
Apart from the erotic genre (she also starred in Fool for Love as May alongside Sam Shepard), Basinger showed talent in the comedy category. Blind Date with Bruce Willis was followed by My Stepmother is an Alien (co-starring Dan Akroyd) in 1988, a poor movie in which the lanky blonde appeared as an alien in the shape of a gorgeous, attractive, and single lady. Her marriage with Britton broke in 1989, coincidentally or not overlapping her alleged affair with Prince during the Batman takes, resulting in the Prince hit Scandalous. Since Basinger was only a few inches shorter than Michael Keaton (who played Batman) she wore flat heels or was in stocking feet in all their shared scenes.
Academy Award
In the nineties the real Basinger magic seemed to have faded, although she appeared in more than just one or two hugely popular motion pictures. Her major movies in this period include Final Analysis (1992) and Robert Altman's classic Prét à Porter (1995). The major achievement of the nineties came in 1998 however: she won an Oscar for her role in the hard-hitting movie L.A. Confidential. In an interview she said about his remarkable day: "My dress had this pain-in-the-ass train, and the cameras are up your nose. I don't remember anything. I just remember holding up the Oscar and saying, 'This is for you, Daddy!' The Oscar was wet and it was slipping out of my hand; and I remember looking down all of a sudden and I saw the actual thing in my hand and I thought, 'Uh-did I steal this from the bathroom?' I'm still in shock to this day."
On marrying an odd woman
She married Alec Baldwin in 1994, with whom she was credited in The Marrying Man and The Getaway. Baldwin on Basinger: "The reason I fell in love with Kim is that she's so odd. With that kind of beauty, this is a woman who could have married the head of a studio or a big director or a movie star who gets $20 million a movie. She could have everyone shining her ass 24 hours a day. She could have played ball. But she's a very odd woman. I've done plays by Tennessee Williams; he was really able to enunciate certain southern characters. I'm from Long Island-I never really knew they existed. But my wife is one of those people an absolutely maddeningly peculiar, exotic, lovely person." But as happens to most Hollywood marriages, after seven years Basinger filed for divorce in 2001.
Agoraphobia and Ireland
Other little known facts: she's a vegetarian, she bought her own town (Braselton in her home state Georgia) that was a financial fiasco and disrupted her family, she was treated for agoraphobia, she was chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history in 1995, she has a daughter called Ireland, and her last name should be pronounced with a hard g (as in 'go') according to miss Basinger herself.
Sources include:
IMDB at http://www.imdb.com
Prisma Online at http://www.prisma-online.de
Dick Jasper FilmLexikon at http://www.filmstar.de/entertainment/stars/k/kim_basinger.html
Kim Basinger Sanctuary at http://www.konary.com/kim/