“Oh my God…! Thank you!” cried Kim Basinger with emotionas she was accepting her Oscar for her role in ‘LA Confidential’ in 1998.If anyone out there has a dream, please know that I am living proof that they do come true“, she said through tears in front of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Twenty-five years later, as the actress turned 70 on Friday, December 8, Kim is part of the history of cinema, but also fashion and music.

Although for a long time her life graced the headlines around the world, nowadays little is heard of the woman who embodied the term “sex symbol” in the 1980s.

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In 1983, a Playboy cover opened her movie doors. The actress, who was born in 1953 in Georgia, brought curves back… into fashion, first as a Bond girl in Never Say Never Again (Irvin Keshner, 1983) and later as a gallery owner who rediscovers her sexuality through bdsm, cherries and honey in ‘9½ Weeks’ (Adrian Lyne, 1986).

Basinger’s personality she has been in the spotlight throughout her career. However, the woman who made half the world… sweat is actually shy and has suffered from stage fright throughout her professional life.

The actress has never hidden the fact that she has suffered greatly from the effects of fame – she has experienced frequent anxiety attacks as well as agoraphobia, a condition she has struggled with for years and which has seen her seclude herself at home for months each time. In 2022, she told the British newspaper “Daily Mail” that she still feels anxiety from time to time, but it no longer paralyzes her.

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In 1986, Kim Basinger left the audition for “9½ Weeks” in tears. After calling her agent to complain that she felt humiliated and that it was the worst experience of her life, she received 24 red roses and a note from director Adrian Lyne. The rest is history: she got the role that made her famous in every corner of the planet – not for the reasons she had in mind, but because of her shapely figure.

The scene of her stripping in front of Mickey Rourke turned her into a romance legend in the late 1980s, but also haunted her forever. The “mark” she left on her career, but also on her life, remains. “I wanted to get up and leave,” the actress, who was 33 at the time of filming, later confessed.

Since her Hollywood debut in the 1970s, Kim Basinger she has often landed roles based on her looks, most of which are femmes fatales and romance thriller characters. She herself has spoken many times about feeling like a sex object. According to Rotten Tomatoes, he has made four times more bad movies than good ones. In total, only six of her films have garnered positive reviews, both from critics and the general public. In fact, Kim Basinger has been nominated six times for Razziethe annual awards for Hollywood’s worst actors.

In 1998, Kim Basinger thanked Alec Baldwin, her husband and father of her only daughter, for his unconditional support in her film career. Ten years later, after a bitter divorce and millions of dollars in lawyers’ fees, her life made headlines in all the tabloid magazines.

After almost a decade of marriage (1993-2002), the divorce was difficult. Even more so because the couple had to go through it under the gaze of thousands of paparazzi who thronged the doors of the courts. It was a long, complicated breakup. They fought over custody of their only daughter, Ireland Baldwin. Friendship was out of the question. A few years later, the fallout was still felt: In 2006, Baldwin took Basinger to court again for allegedly violating the terms of the guardianship, People magazine reported at the time. The court ruled that the actor was lying.

A whole city for her

When she was making a lot of money thanks to films, covers and interviews, Basinger decided to buy Braselton, an entire town in the state of Georgia. The year was 1989 and her goal was to create a theme park dedicated to Hollywood, modernize its buildings and promote tourism in the area. However, the plan never came to fruition, as the compensation she was forced to pay after she refused to honor the contract for a film she had promised to star in was so high that she was forced to sell it for far less than she had paid, according to the ‘Looper’.

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Her talent has remained in the shadows, while other modern performers have managed to stay relevant thanks to the many television series that brought them out of obscurity. Even so, living away from the cameras doesn’t seem to bother her much – in fact, she only took the role in ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ at the insistence of her daughter Ireland.

Also, we no longer see her at public events or red carpets in Hollywood or anywhere else. What hasn’t changed over the decades is her fight against animal abuse: Basinger has been a vegetarian since she was 8, as well as an animal rights activist. The description on her Instagram account leaves no room for doubt: “Actor who hopes that all of humanity will one day treat animals with the respect they deserve.”