When Kim Basinger was 16 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.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.Basinger's mother was a swimmer in Esther Williams films and also a model, and both mother and daughter appeared together in an advertisement for Breck shampoo. Basinger has four siblings: two brothers, Mick (who is a marketing director) and Skip, and two sisters, Ashley and Barbara. 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.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).[1] 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 time 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.[edit] Other Controversies
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.[2][edit] Filmography
Hard Country (1981)
Mother Lode (1982)
Never Say Never Again (1983)
The Man Who Loved Women (1983)
The Natural (1984)
Fool for Love (1985)
9½ Weeks (1986)
No Mercy (1986)
Blind Date (1987)
Nadine (1987)
My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988)
Batman (1989)
The Marrying Man (1991)
Final Analysis (1992)
Cool World (1992)
The Real McCoy (1992)
Wayne's World 2 (1993)
A Century of Cinema (1994) (documentary)
The Getaway (1994)
Ready to Wear (Prêt-à -Porter) (1994)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
I Dreamed of Africa (2000)
Bless the Child (2000)
8 Mile (2002)
People I Know (2002)
The Door in the Floor (2004)
Elvis Has Left the Building (2004)
Cellular (2004)
Jump Shot (2005)
The Sentinel (2006)
While She Was Out (2007
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