Name: Kim Basinger
Date of Birth: December 8, 1953
Place of Birth: Athens, Ga., USA
Sign: Sagittarius
Education: University of Georgia
Occupation: Actress

The beautiful model turned Oscar winning actress was born and raised in Athens, Georgia, to a jazz musician father and a champion swimmer/model/water ballet performer mother. Kim was so shy as a child that her parents had her tested to see if she was autistic. One thing was for sure; even with her bashfulness, Kim knew she was going to be an actress and she always told her parents so.

Since performing is in both her parents' genes, this was not so hard to believe. Basinger took diving, dancing and gymnastics lessons in high school. She was sixteen when she entered the Athens Junior Miss contest, and won by singing a number from My Fair Lady. She later won the Junior Miss Georgia title and moved on to compete in the national Junior Miss pageant held in the Big Apple.

It was in New York where Eileen Ford of the Ford Modeling Agency met Kim Basinger and offered her a modeling contract. At first, she refused the offer since her heart was in singing or acting, but she immediately returned to New York after changing her mind while in Georgia.

Basinger had to make quite an adjustment when she moved to New York, as she found that the people there wore a lot of makeup and knew many languages. The different culture and lifestyle of such a fast-paced city like New York was intimidating for a small-town girl such as Basinger, but this didn't stop her from adapting to her new career. She graced dozens of magazine covers and hundreds of ads throughout the early seventies, and was mostly known as the Breck shampoo girl.

Kim moved to Los Angeles in 1976 looking for a fresh start where she could break into acting, since she was afraid her acting skills were not being practiced. Though her modeling career was successful, she never ceased to dream of performing, and always made time for acting classes and open-mike-night singing performances at different New York clubs under the stage name "Chelsea".

Her first six months in the city of angels were not so glamorous, as Basinger lived at a motel overlooking the Hollywood Freeway. She finally broke into television with roles in episodes of Charlie's Angels and The Six Million Dollar Man. After a year in L.A., Basinger landed her first role in the short-lived series Cat and Dog, where she was the female in a male-female LAPD patrol team.

Thanks to her performance in NBC's Katie: Portrait of a Centrefold, Basinger won the female lead on the network's 1980 remake of From Here to Eternity and made her feature-film debut in Hard Country. Although she was getting roles, Basinger felt that a spread in Play.boy was necessary to increase her status in the public eye. It definitely did not do harm to her film career. She took on the role of Bond girl Domino in Never Say Never Again opposite Sean Connery, and was a notch in Burt Reynolds' belt in the remake of The Man Who Loved Women.

The roles with Hollywood sex symbols started pouring in. In 1984, she starred in The Natural with Robert Redford and in the sexy box office smash 9 ½ Weeks with Mickey Rourke. It was this film that made Basinger more than a hot property; she was now the key to high ticket sales. In 1989, Basinger starred as Vicky Vale in the huge success Batman, where she was casually involved with the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Batman was to be her last box office hit for the seven years that followed.

1989 was also the year Basinger purchased the burg Braselton, in Georgia, for $20 million. In 1993, she was sued by Main Line Pictures and had to pay them $8.1 million, which forced her to file for bankruptcy. Even though she reached an out-of-court settlement with Main Line, Basinger was forced to sell her interest in Braselton.

At least she had finally found love in her life, after her marriage with makeup artist Ron Britton failed. In 1994 she married Alec Baldwin after a three-year courtship since meeting on the set of The Marrying Man. In 1995, their first baby was born, which prompted Basinger to take a few years off from her career. She still kept busy with her activism in animal rights organizations such as PETA.

She returned to the big screen with a vengeance, which resulted in an Oscar winning performance in L.A. Confidential, co-starring Kevin Spacey and Russell Crowe. She can next be seen in the upcoming summer movie I Dreamed Of Africa, the story of an Italian woman who moves to dangerous Africa.