Kim Basinger Conquers All
From fighting your fears to learning to listen, this enigmatic actress shares her hard earned words of wisdom.
Story by Mark Seal
That's what I kept thinking as I watched Kim Basinger, 51 in December, leave her husband (co-star Jeff Bridges), seduce a 16-year-old boy, and decimate an audience without saying much of anything in The Door in the Floor, a movie based on a section of the John Irving bestseller A Widow for One Year. Knowing little beforehand about the film, I had been dragged to the movie by my wife and when it was over I couldn't think of anything except Marion, the burned-out shell of a blonde who lost two sons and a husband, and whom Basinger portrayed almost like a character in a silent movie. "There can be something hurt and vulnerable about her, a fear around the eyes, a hopeful sweetness that doesn't seem to expect much," wrote Roger Ebert in his review.
The next morning, I was raving on the phone to her publicist, who said that because of my enthusiasm for the film, Basinger would speak with me.
Then the telephone rang, and soon Basinger is telling me a story, about learning to act without speaking, about learning to follow fear into the dark places it leads, and, ultimately, about learning to shut up and listen to a world that knows more than we do.
"It takes a long time to learn how to act, to learn how to be real, just be real in any situation," she says. "It's a long courtship before you are comfortable enough to let the camera really peer inside of you as deeply as you can." Basinger says she is the unlikeliest woman to ever climb a stage, a girl so shy in school her mother would phone her teachers and beg them not to call on her daughter to read before the class, because Kim would faint, which she did on numerous occasions. That she would ever stand up before a camera is still a mystery to her, and that she would someday stand before millions of people with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in her hand is beyond her wildest dreams.
"It's a horrible feeling, vertigo," she says. "You hang onto the back of the chair and just fall to the ground."
She is back in the classrooms of her youth in Athens, Georgia, a tall, gangly blonde with the oversize lips, to whom a summons to read before the class was a death sentence. "I [would stand] up and start to read, and I couldn't," she says. "It's not that I couldn't read. I could read very well, especially if I was secure, but I could not say a word out loud in front of people. So I stammered and stuttered, and then all of a sudden it became quiet." She would see everybody laughing, but couldn't hear the voices. Then, she would faint.
It is a hard scene to conjure: the future Breck girl and former Mrs. Alec Baldwin, who has been described as a Southern belle straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, a cross between Scarlett O'Hara and Marilyn Monroe, stymied by the specter of reading before a class. After all, she was born into the performing arts. Her mother was a model who worked in underwater films during the Esther Williams period, and her father, whom she calls "a real hero to me," attended the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago and played in big-band era orchestras.
But Basinger says she never considered stepping onto a stage until she heard about a Junior Miss pageant right after seeing the movie My Fair Lady. The Pygmalion story of the chambermaid who rose to grace struck a chord deep within her. "I remember sitting there with some mild anxiety, thinking, 'That's what I want to do.' I wanted to be on the screen." The pageant included a talent contest and she wanted to sing "Wouldn't it Be Loverly" from the film. The idea terrified her, however, because singing meant audiences, and that was unthinkable for Kim Basinger.
She told her father about it, and he made her a bet: "That you will get through it and you won't die." He hired a pianist and after a period of study, Kim was ready for the competition. She walked out on stage and she began to sing. "It is monumental how important that moment was," she remembers. "In that auditorium you could have heard a pin drop, because nobody in the school thought I could talk, much less sing."
Not only did she not faint, she hit all the right notes, won the pageant, and progressed to the Georgia Junior Miss competition. There, a rep from Breck shampoo asked her if she had thought about modeling. Basinger hadn't, but the rep invited her to compete in yet another competition, where her success ultimately took her to New York.
In Manhattan, modeling queen Eileen Ford asked her to sign on with her agency. Basinger insisted on going home to college first, but after two unsatisfying semesters at the University of Georgia, she called Ford, who invited her to live at her home in New York.
As a model, she earned so much money that she remembers carrying around $25,000 in residual checks in her purse, "because [I] didn't have a bank account." She was 18 years old and had learned the first lesson about herself: "I am challenged by my fears," she says.
"My goal in life is to conquer as many of my fears before the day I die. One of my agents put it best one day when he presented me with my role from 8 Mile. He said, 'She will either hate it or she will fear it, and if she fears it, she will do it.' He was right. It is just a routine I go through … making the decision to start a movie, jump in with the sharks. Every time I start a movie, it is the first day of school for me."
She switched from modeling in New York to acting in Los Angeles, and during her career she has starred with Bruce Willis in Blind Date, Robert Redford in The Natural, Sean Connery in the Bond film Never Say Never Again, Michael Keaton in Batman Returns, and many others. The role that pushed her into the public consciousness, of course, was her riveting performance in 9 1/2 Weeks, opposite Mickey Rourke. But she's never had a more productive year than 2004, which saw the release not only of The Door in the Floor (available on DVD in December), but, immediately afterward, Cellular, an action/suspense film, and a comedy, Elvis Has Left the Building. Yet even today she still suffers that relentlessly edgy sense of panic. "Jack Lemmon said it best: 'The day I don't fear it, is the day I quit acting,' " Basinger says.
The role she feared most was the one that won her an Oscar: the 1997 hit L.A. Confidential, in which she played Lynn Bracken, an aspiring Veronica Lake who metamorphoses at night into a call girl. It was a role that Basinger, then married to actor Alec Baldwin and off the screen for three years to stay at home with their infant daughter, Ireland, now 9, turned down twice. "I can't play a whore, I just had a baby!" she told her agent.
I can still see her as the conflicted call girl in her immaculate art-deco living room, like some twisted angel in hell, her blond hair curving like a snake's belly over one eye as Bud (early Russell Crowe) fights for her soul. Basinger swears she does not wake up every morning looking like Lynn Bracken; she says she emerges into the bombshells she portrays on screen thanks to a team she calls "my 'Wreckin' Crew.' They transform me into these sexy people and they dress me for every event in the world," she says. "I come in and I am your basic tomboy farmer in big, baggy jeans and a T-shirt that is hanging off of me. I have a body makeup girl, who looks at me and says, 'God, how have you made her a movie star?' "
In L.A. Confidential, she delivered a breakthrough performance. But 1997 was the year of Titanic, the Oscar-dominating mega hit, and everyone knew Gloria Stuart was going to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar - and no one knew it better than Basinger.
She did not prepare an acceptance speech and some part of her was relieved just to be nominated. "I was ready to stand up and clap for Gloria," she says. "I had rehearsed standing up and clapping." But then the envelope was opened and, she says, everything went blank. "I honestly don't know how I got up the stairs, especially with the weight of that gown," she says. "I walked up there and I don't remember anything." She held up her Oscar and said, "This is for you, Daddy!" Then she found herself back in reality, an Oscar in her hand, thinking, "How did this get here?"
In between movies, her real life has been as dramatic off-screen as on. She's been through two divorces, from her first husband, makeup artist Ron Britton, whom she married in 1980 and divorced nine years later, then from actor Alec Baldwin, whom she met on the set of the movie The Marrying Man. They married in 1993 and divorced in 2002. She devotes considerable time to animal rights causes, but what's made the biggest headlines have been two ill-fated business choices: namely, trying to preserve the tiny town of Braselton, Georgia, by buying it, which caused a major rift in her family and almost bankrupted her, and losing a court fight after backing out of the movie Boxing Helena, which did bankrupt her.
"I have hit rock bottom in my business and my life before," she says. "You know [that feeling] when you think that grapes have fallen from the tree? And all of the sudden you look up and here comes this big foot, because it ain't over yet, and you are going to be made into grape juice. That's what I'm talking about. I mean grape juice … ." Her voice trails off. "It is honestly saying that you have no control; hand it over, just hand it over."
It all seemed crazy, inexplicable, but not pointless. "I have used every single one of those experiences," she says. "That is where I am getting to go to now as an actress. I have accumulated a reservoir that is quite full of those emotional experiences, good, bad, and ugly, where I can draw from all those emotions."
This is the key to learning how to act without speaking, to saying more with a look than you could ever say with mere words.
When she got the script for The Door in the Floor, she says she didn't fear it; she understood it. She understood a character who had lost everything. "It was just a time in my life where I identified with Marion," she says. "Not in the same scenario, but, you know, I'm a mom, she's a mom. I understood her. I really got her."
She internalized Marion, and the character emerged from the depths.
"There are external performances and there are internal performances," she says. "I have a phrase: 'Shut up to your own self, and listen, just listen.' When you listen and really hear all that is going on from other people and just from so many other entities that can enter in when you are quiet to your own self, it speaks volumes. You can speak volumes, you really can."
"The greatest thing you can ever do is forgive, yes, but forget, never," she says of her myriad experiences, good and bad. "Use them, use them as gifts," she advises. "In the end, it was the worst of times that gave me my greatest strengths."