Kim Basinger started her career as an Amazonian blonde sexpot, but has since proven her acting ability when given good material (a situation that has happened all too infrequently). The Georgia native moved to NYC after high school and landed a contract with the Ford modeling agency. After five years as a cover girl, Basinger made the segue to acting, beginning with a guest appearances on shows like "Starsky and Hutch" and "Charlie's Angels". She landed the regular role of a cop in the short-lived ABC series "Dog and Cat" (1977) before scoring in the title role of the NBC TV-movie "Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold" (1978). The same network tapped her for the role of Lorene Rogers (originated on the big screen by Donna Reed) in the 1979 miniseries remake of "From Here to Eternity" and its short-lived spin-off the following year. Despite additional roles in TV-movies, Basinger never seemed to click on the small screen.
Her big screen debut was promising: Basinger's Southern accent helped her win the role of the forlorn girlfriend of high-living cowboy Jan-Michael Vincent in the low-budget but well-received "Hard Country" (1981). In another outdoorsy film, "The Mother Lode" (1982), she co-starred with director Charlton Heston. Her career gained momentum in 1983 after she appeared as Bond Girl Domino Petachi in "Never Say Never Again" and co-starred with Burt Reynolds in Blake Edwards' remake of "The Man Who Loved Women" (both 1983). A nude layout in PLAYBOY the same year also garnered her much attention and she began to be considered for better quality roles, such as the femme fatale Memo Paris who romances Robert Redford in "The Natural" (1984). Having previously lost two roles to Jessica Lange ("The Postman Always Rings Twice" 1981 and "Frances" 1982), Basinger inherited a role that had been earmarked for Lange: Sam Shepard's half-sister in Robert Altman's film of Shepard's Off-Broadway hit "Fool for Love" (1985). While she acquitted herself in the film, it was a box-office disappointment.
Despite her best efforts to demonstrate her range and capabilities, Basinger had a string of misfires in the late 80s, beginning with Adrian Lyne's style-over-substance examination of an obsessive relationship in "9 1/2 Weeks" (1986). Her attempts at comedy, while admirable, were often sabotaged by the material as in Blake Edwards' "Blind Date" (1987) or "My Stepmother Is an Alien" (1988). The actress finally found better material (replacing an injured Sean Young) as the voluptuous Vicki Vale, love interest for Michael Keaton's "Batman" (1989). Then came the mixed blessing of "The Marrying Man" (1991). The film itself--a 1940s romantic comedy--had a long and troubled shoot and bombed at the box office. But Basinger and co-star Alec Baldwin fell in love and married in 1993.
Continuing to capitalize on her Marilynesque persona, Basinger was a cartoon vamp who becomes human in Ralph Bakshi's live action/animated mishmash "Cool World" (1992) and in a cameo as Honey Hornee in "Wayne's World 2" (1993). Teaming with Baldwin, she inherited the role originated by Ali MacGraw in "The Getaway" (1994), a pointless, inferior remake (although she acquitted herself in a gritty change-of-pace role). That same year, Basinger was quite good as a pushy fashion reporter in Robert Altman's overblown and meandering "Ready-to-Wear (Pret-a-Porter)". After a three-year hiatus which included giving birth to a daughter, she triumphantly returned to films in a much-lauded, Oscar-winning portrayal of a 50s-era Hollywood call girl with more than a passing resemblance to screen star Veronica Lake in Curtis Hanson's "L.A. Confidential" (1997).
Basinger has also received much off-screen publicity for her work on behalf of animal rights and for her 1993 legal battles over an alleged verbal contract to appear in the controversial film "Boxing Helena" (1993). When the court ordered her to pay in excess of $8 million, the actress was forced to declare personal bankruptcy and sell her interest in the town of Braselton, Georgia (which she and a group of investors had purchased in 1989). Eventually, the ruling in the breach of contract suit was overturned on appeal.
Basinger and Baldwin had been tabloid fodder before, when Baldwin's temper exploded on paparazzi photographers when they tried to photograph his wife and daughter, but their highly-touted relationship, typically portrayed as idyllic, endured intense media scrutiny when they filed for divorce in January of 2001. Meanwhile, Basinger seemed unable to capitalize professionally on her Oscar triumph, making only two tepidly received films from 1997 to 2001, "I Dreamed of Africa" (2000), in which she played a woman recently transplanted to the Dark Continent who discovers both the splendors and the shadowy underbelly of her new home, and "Bless the Child" (2000), a dreary Satanic thriller. But things changed in 2002 when Basinger re-teamed with Hanson to star as Eminem's troubled mother in "8 Mile," a fictionalized telling of the hip-hop artists rise from the streets of urban Detroit. Basinger's role opposite Al Pacino in the p.r. minded, scandel mongering "People I Know" (2003) was largely extraneous, but she played the weepy widow of Pacino's suicide brother with delicate grace.
She was given a meatier role in "The Door in the Floor" (2004), an adaptation of John Irving's A Widow For One Year, in which she and Jeff Bridges play a couple whose painful loss has caused them to exist in a constant state of quiet emotional war. The actress invested the role, in which she seduces a much younger man but nevertheless seems to grow from the experience rather than be morally compromised, with the heartbreaking, emotionally hungry quality, and critic Roger Ebert's comments on Basinger's presence in the film also applies to much of her best work: "There can be something hurt and vulnerable about her, a fear around the eyes, a hopeful sweetness that doesn't seem to expect much."
Those same qualities helped enliven her next effort, the pop thriller "Cellular" (2004), a clever, inventive yet much more commercially minded and slickly crafted film in which she plays a kidnapped science teacher who desperately communicates with a total stranger (Chris Evans) through a jury-rigged cell phone. At times gimmicky and ingenious in its complications and plot twists, the film always benefits by Basinger's utterly believable desperation. |
