Full Kim Basinger Biography
Kim Basinger has one child with husband Alec Baldwin and has filed for divorce as of January 2001. She started out modeling, but quickly turned to acting and debuted on the TV series "McMillan and Wife" (1971). She has overcome her agrophobia to star in hit films such as "Nine 1/2 Weeks" (1986), "Batman" (1989) and "L.A. Confidential" (1997).
Kim loves animals and is a strict vegetarian. She devotes a lot of her time to animal rights issues and PETA.
Additional Kim Basinger Biography
Kimila Ann “Kim” Basinger (born December 8, 1953) is an Academy Award-winning American film actress and former fashion model.
Basinger (pronounced (bay-sing-er), often mispronounced (bass-in-jer)) 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 , 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 was married to makeup artist Ron Snyder-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 (which also includes Ron Howard), 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 an $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.
