Kim Basinger

Kim Basinger (born December 8, 1953, Athens, Georgia, U.S.) is an American actress whose blond good looks and comedic skills made her a top movie star in the 1980s.

Basinger took dance lessons as a young child, and at the age of 16 she began competing in beauty contests. At a national pageant in New York City, she was seen by a modeling agent and later signed a contract with the Ford Models agency. She spent five years modeling, notably for shampoo advertisements, before moving to California in hopes of becoming an actress. She quickly found work playing guest roles in 1976 and 1977 on such television shows as Charlie’s Angels, The Six Million Dollar Man, and McMillan & Wife, and in 1977 she was chosen to costar in a short-lived police series, Dog and Cat. She played the title character in the TV movie Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold (1978) and played a prostitute in both the three-part (1979) and extended 12-part (1980) miniseries From Here to Eternity. Basinger made her film debut opposite Jan-Michael Vincent in the little-seen Texas drama Hard Country (1981), and her breakthrough performance was in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again (1983).

Basinger was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her performance as a temptress in Barry Levinson’s baseball film The Natural (1984; starring Robert Redford) and won praise for her role in Robert Altman’s Fool for Love (1985; based on a play by Sam Shepard). Basinger costarred with Mickey Rourke in the controversial and explicitly sexual 9 1/2 Weeks (1986). She costarred with Richard Gere in the thriller No Mercy (1986), with Bruce Willis in Blake Edwards’s Blind Date (1987), with Jeff Bridges in the comedy Nadine (1987), and with Dan Aykroyd in My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988).

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Oscar-Worthy Movie Trivia

Perhaps Basinger’s best-known role was as the reporter Vicki Vale in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). She appeared as the lust object/love interest in a series of minor films before portraying a reporter in Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994; Ready to Wear). Basinger’s performance as Lynn Bracken, a Veronica Lake look-alike in a stable of prostitutes who have been surgically altered to resemble the top female stars of the early 1950s, in the noir L.A. Confidential (1997) earned her both a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Following her Oscar win, Basinger earned headlines more for the drama surrounding her divorce (2002) from actor Alec Baldwin than for her film work. Her later roles included the troubled mother of the protagonist in the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (2002), a kidnap victim in the thriller Cellular (2004), and the love interest of an aging boxer in Grudge Match (2013). After acting in The Nice Guys (2016), she appeared in Fifty Shades Darker (2017) and Fifty Shades Freed (2018), both of which were based on E.L. James’s series of erotic novels.