Kim Basinger was born December 8, 1953, in Athens, Georgia, the 3rd of 5 children. Both her parents had been in entertainment, her dad had played big-band jazz, and her mother had performed water ballet in several Esther Williams movies. Kim was introspective, from her father's side. As a schoolgirl, she was very shy. To help her overcome this, her parents had Kim study ballet from an early age. By the time she reached sweet sixteen, the once-shy Kim entered the Athens Junior Miss contest. 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. Kim, who had blossomed to a 5' 7" beauty, was offered a contract on the spot with the Ford Modeling Agency. At the age of 20, Kim was a top model commanding $1,000 a day. Throughout the early 1970s, she appeared on dozens of magazine covers and in hundreds of ads, most notably as the Breck girl. Kim took acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, performed in various Greenwich Village clubs, and she sang under the stage name Chelsea. Kim moved to Los Angeles in 1976, ready to conquer Hollywood. Kim broke into television doing episodes of such hit series as "Charlie's Angels" (1976). In 1980, she married Ron Britton (they divorced in 1989). In movies, she had roles like being a Bond girl in Never Say Never Again (1983) and playing a small-town Texan beauty in Nadine (1987). Her breakout role was as photojournalist Vicki Vale in the blockbuster hit Batman (1989). There was no long-orchestrated campaign on her part to snag this plumb role, Kim was a last-minute replacement for Sean Young. This took her to a career high.
Replaced Sean Young for the role of Vicki Vale in Batman (1989).
"I work in a strange business, and trust is a word that's not even in the vocabulary.""I think any girl who comes to Hollywood with sex symbol or bombshell hanging over her has a rough road.""I feel there are two people inside me - me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely."
Salary I Dreamed of Africa (2000) $5,000,000 Marrying Man, The (1991) $2,500,000 No Mercy (1986) $1,000,000
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia: Leggy, full-lipped blonde whose sultry screen presence-the camera really loves her-was honed by years of experience as a top fashion model. Basinger left the cover-girl life for acting in the early 1980s, after testing the waters in the made-for-TV Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold in 1978. She made her film debut in 1981's Hard Country but wasn't really noticed until she became a "Bond girl" in Never Say Never Again (1983), and promoted the film with a nude layout in "Playboy." Routinely cast as a sex object, Basinger did her best in The Natural (1984) and Robert Altman's Fool for Love (1985) before landing the starring role in the 1986 pulp hit Nine Weeks Afterward, she branched out into comedy, starring in several regrettable flops including Nadine, Blind Date (both 1987) and My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988). She played reporter Vicki Vale in Batman (1989), the phenomenal success of which boosted her standing as a bankable star. She behaved accordingly, reportedly hampering (with costar and later husband Alec Baldwin) completion of The Marrying Man (1991).Critics generally haven't been kind to Basinger, to say the least, but she occasionally surprises-and confounds-her detractors. She showed promise in a reasonably complex role as a seductive schemer in Final Analysis (1992). When all's said and done, though, she owes her success more to the raw, animal sexuality she so ably projects, rather than to whatever acting ability she's demonstrated to date. Early in 1993 she garnered headlines for a film she didn't make: The producers of the black comedy Boxing Helena won a multimillion-dollar judgment against her after she allegedly reneged on her agreement to star. (The verdict was later overturned.) Other recent credits include Cool World (1992, as the voice and model for sexy animated character Holli Wood), The Real McCoy (1993), Wayne's World 2 (also 1993, parodying her own sexy screen image as Honey Horn?e), The Getaway (1994, opposite Baldwin), and Ready to Wear/Pr?t-?-Porter (also 1994).
Gender: Female
Profession: Actress
Height: 5' 7