Kim Basinger

Georgia-born Kim Basinger studied dancing and singing from childhood, intending to make her professional bow as a musical comedy performer. While still a high schooler, Basinger left for New York to pursue a career as a model; her blonde hair and beautiful, pliable features were equally suited to the demureness of Breck's home-permanent ads and the more revelatory requirements of Playboy magazine. After studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, she made her starring debut in the 1978 TV-movie Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold. The reviews were kind but condescending, noting that as an actress, Basinger was very pretty. Basinger countered her critics with an excellent performance as prostitute Lorene Rogers in the 1979 TV miniseries From Here to Eternity, which led to plum acting assignments in theatrical features. She became best-known during the 1980s for her work in such films as the Bond flick Never Say Never Again (1983), The Natural (1984), Batman (1989), and, perhaps most infamously, in Adrian Lyne's 9 1/2 Weeks (1986). Successfully dissipating the standard "dumb blonde" onus often attached to models-turned-actresses of the decade, Basinger was an active environmentalist offscreen, and in 1989 she endeared herself to the Georgia chamber of commerce by purchasing a small village not far from her home town of Athens and attempting to pump up the local economy. Much of the laudatory press enjoyed by Basinger and her actor husband Alec Baldwin was scuttled during the troubled filming of 1991's The Marrying Man, wherein the couple allegedly comported themselves in an unprofessional a manner. This storm subsided, but within a year the actress made headlines again due to a costly lawsuit. Determining that Basinger's verbal agreement to appear in the film Boxing Helena was legal and binding, a judge ordered the actress, who'd pulled out of the project, to pay $8,000,000 in damages to the film's producers. Recast with Sherilyn Fenn, Boxing Helena proved to be just as disastrous as Basinger feared, and after she was forced to declare bankruptcy, her appeal was accepted by the court. In 1997, following a few more years of career difficulties, Basinger surprised observers with one of the year's most triumphant comebacks. For her role as a hooker with a heart in Curtis Hanson's lavishly praised L.A. Confidential, she won both the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, as well as renewed critical respect. Two years later, she combined her onscreen career with her offscreen committment to environmental causes with her portrayal of real-life wildlife preservationist Kuki Gallmann in Hugh Hudson's I Dreamed of Africa.