Kim Basinger

Her father, Donald Wade Basinger (1923–2016), was a big band musician and loan manager; as a U.S. Army soldier, he landed in Normandy on D-Day.

Her mother, Ann Lee (née Cordell; 1925–2017), was a model, actress and swimmer who appeared in several Esther Williams films.

The middle of five children, she has two older brothers, Skip (b. 1950) and Mick (b. 1951), and two younger sisters, Barbara (b. 1956) and Ashley (b. 1959).

Basinger's ancestry includes English, German, and Ulster Scots.

She was raised a Methodist.

Basinger has described herself as extremely shy, which had a major effect on her during her childhood and young adulthood.

She has said that her shyness was so extreme that she would faint if asked to speak in class.

Basinger studied ballet from about age three to her mid-teens.

By her mid-teens, she grew in confidence and successfully auditioned for the school cheerleading team.

At 17, she entered America's Junior Miss Scholarship Pageant, won at the city level and was crowned Athens Junior Miss.

While she didn't win at the state level, her beauty was profiled in the national program.

She had competed at the state level for the Breck Scholarship and was featured in an ad for Breck in a joint portrait with her mother.

Basinger was offered a modeling contract with the Ford Modeling Agency, but turned it down in favor of singing and acting, and enrolled at the University of Georgia.

She soon reconsidered and went to New York to become a Ford model.

Despite earning US$1,000 a day, Basinger never enjoyed modeling, saying: "It was very hard to go from one booking to another and always have to deal with the way I looked. I couldn't stand it. I felt myself choking."

Basinger has said that even as a model, when others relished looking in the mirror before appearing, she abhorred it and would avoid mirrors out of insecurity.

Not long after her Ford deal, Basinger appeared on the cover of magazines.

She also appears on the cover of the debut album by the band Survivor.

Kimila Ann Basinger (born December 8, 1953) is an American actress.

She has garnered acclaim for her work in film, for which she has received various accolades including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Basinger was born in Athens, Georgia, on December 8, 1953.

She appeared in hundreds of advertisements throughout the early 1970s, most notably as the Breck Shampoo girl.

She alternated between modeling and attending acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, as well as performing in Greenwich Village clubs as a singer.

Basinger is an alumna of the William Esper Studio for the performing arts in Manhattan, New York City.

Basinger began her career as a model and switched to acting in 1976.

In 1976, after four years as a cover girl, Basinger quit modeling and moved to Los Angeles to act.

She made guest appearances on a few television shows such as McMillan & Wife and Charlie's Angels, turning down a regular role in the latter series that eventually went to Cheryl Ladd.

Her first starring role 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 appeared in several television productions, including a remake of From Here to Eternity (1979), before making her feature debut in the rural drama Hard Country (1981).

In 1979, she co-starred with Natalie Wood, William Devane and Steve Railsback in the miniseries remake of From Here to Eternity, reprising her role as prostitute Lorene Rogers in a 13-episode spinoff that aired in 1980.

Hailed as a sex symbol of the 1980s and 1990s, Basinger first gained widespread attention for her performance of Domino Petachi in the James Bond entry Never Say Never Again (1983).

In 1981, Basinger posed for a famous nude pictorial for Playboy, and made her feature debut in the critically well-received but little-seen rural drama Hard Country, which she followed with the Charlton Heston-directed outdoorsy adventure Mother Lode (1982).

Initially a TV starlet, she shot to fame as a Bond girl in 1983 and enjoyed a long heyday over the next two decades.

She went on to receive a Golden Globe nomination for her role in The Natural (1984), starred in the erotic drama 9½ Weeks (1986), and played Vicki Vale in Tim Burton's Batman (1989), which remains the highest-grossing film of her career.

Her other films include No Mercy (1986), Blind Date (1987), My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988), Cool World (1992), The Real McCoy (1993), I Dreamed of Africa (2000), 8 Mile (2002), The Door in the Floor (2004), Cellular (2004), The Sentinel (2006), The Burning Plain (2009), Grudge Match (2013), and Fifty Shades Darker (2017).

Basinger's portrayal of Elena Lincoln in the lattermost earned her a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actress.

Divorced from makeup artist Ron Snyder and actor Alec Baldwin, Basinger cohabits with her longtime hairdresser, Mitch Stone.

She had a high-profile relationship between marriages with musician Prince, with whom she recorded an album, Hollywood Affair, and is the mother of social media influencer Ireland Baldwin from her marriage to Alec.

For her femme fatale portrayal in L.A. Confidential (1997), Basinger won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 2011 Los Angeles Times Magazine ranked her third on the "50 Most Beautiful Women In Film".