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Kimila Ann Basinger (born December 8,
1953) is an Academy Award winning American film actress
and former fashion model.
Early life: Basinger (pronounced (bay-sing-er),
often mispronounced 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 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
modelling career by winning the Athens Junior Miss
contest. She followed that up by winning the title
“Junior Miss Georgia”. Basinger then headed to New
York City to compete in the national Junior Miss
pageant. It was there that Basinger was approached by
fashion modeling mogul Eileen Ford, who offered the
young beauty queen a modeling contract with Ford
Modeling Agency. Initially turning down the offer in
favor of singing and acting, Basinger reconsidered and
headed back to New York to become a Ford model.
Career: Not long after penning the deal,
Basinger’s face graced numerous magazine covers and
she also 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 star turn 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 James
Bond girl in Never Say Never Again (1983), where she
starred opposite Sean Connery.
She did a famous pictorial for Playboy magazine 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. Another important
Academy Award winning writer-director Robert Benton cast
her in the title role for the film Nadine (1987).
Other famous 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).
Personal life: Basinger was married to makeup
artist Ron Synder-Britton in 1980, whom she 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 met her second husband actor Alec
Baldwin when both played romantic lovers in the flop The
Marrying Man (1991).
They married on August 19, 1993 and
appeared in another flop, the remake of The Getaway
(1994). They also played themselves on an 1998 episode
of the The Simpsons, where Basinger corrects Homer
Simpson on the pronunciation of her last name and also
polishes her Oscar statutette. They have a daughter,
Ireland Eliesse "Addie" Baldwin (born October
23, 1995), but the couple separated in 2000. Divorced in
February 2002, Basinger and Baldwin have since been
locked in a very public, contentious custody battle.
Basinger suffers from agoraphobia, which is a form of an
anxiety disorder, the abnormal fear of experiencing a
difficult or embarrassing situation, such as a panic
attack, in a public place.
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, the studio sued her
and won a $8-million judgment against her at the trial
level. Basinger 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. |
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