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.
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