The twisty 1997 crime drama L.A. Confidential starred a murderer's row of top-tier actors: Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell. But when Oscar season rolled around, only one of the film's stars took home a prize for acting: Kim Basinger. "If anyone has a dream out there," said Basinger as she accepted the trophy, "just know that I’m living proof that they do come true."
Kim Basinger wins the Oscar
The irony, of course, was that Basinger had achieved her Hollywood dream by playing a woman who had failed to achieve it. Basinger's L.A. Confidential character, Lynn Bracken, was a failed actress-turned-prostitute who went through plastic surgery so she could conform to a fantasy entertained by a number of wealthy johns: a one-night stand with screen starlet Veronica Lake. In the end, Bracken does get her own kind of Hollywood ending, riding off into the sunset with Bud White, the L.A.P.D. cop played by Russell Crowe.
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Today, nearly 20 years after L.A. Confidential first graced theaters, there's an unlikely kind of second chapter. Basinger and Crowe have reunited on the big screen for The Nice Guys—but the power dynamics have shifted. This time, Crowe is a lunkheaded enforcer so low-rent that he doesn’t even have a P.I. license, let alone a badge. And Basinger is the head of Los Angeles' Justice Department, exercising colossal political power in a missing-persons case in which she has a very personal interest.
It's not quite a comeback. Over the years, Basinger has occasionally turned up in wife/mom roles in movies like Charlie St. Cloud, and Grudge Match, and she toplined a long-gestating passion project called The 11th Hour, which arrived on VOD last summer. But unless you've been actively following Basinger's career over the past decade, it's still a little startling when she suddenly pops up in The Nice Guys—like stumbling into an old friend you rarely think of and never visit.
Hollywood has an exceedingly short memory, so it's easy to forget how omnipresent Basinger was in the 1980s and 1990s. She costarred in a miniseries remake of the Best Picture-winning drama From Here to Eternity. She held her own opposite James Bond and Batman. She worked with directors as varied and talented as Robert Altman, Adrian Lyne, and Robert Benton. She earned a Golden Globe nomination for her supporting turn in The Natural. There were also costly mistakes; at the height of her career, Basinger turned down starring roles in both Thelma & Louise and Sleepless in Seattle.
But even as her acting career was pushing forward, the tabloid headlines were beginning to overwhelm her body of work. Basinger was linked to a string of purported high-profile romances: Richard Gere, Prince, and Alec Baldwin, who she married in 1993. That same year, a protracted legal battle between Basinger and Main Line Pictures over a bizarre erotic drama called Boxing Helena ended in disaster when a jury decided that Basinger had breached an oral contract by first agreeing to star, and later pulling out of the project. She was ordered to pay $7.4 million—a decision that sent her into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Hollywood is a difficult business at the best of times, but it’s particularly cruel to its sex symbols. Basinger, as the Hollywood trades repeatedly reminded everyone, had posed for a full-frontal Playboy centerfold spread that ran in 1983. Many of her buzziest roles explicitly cast her as a sex symbol; when she branched out, in films like the under-seen comedy Nadine, the audience didn’t follow.
And then, in 1995, Basinger did something considered unthinkable by most Hollywood stars on the rise: She stopped acting. At the height of her career, she spent a few years not acting, and might have continued that way if L.A. Confidential director Curtis Hanson hadn't aggressively sought her out for the role. "Having played so many sexpots and femme fatales in the past, [Basinger] didn’t want to play a prostitute in L.A. Confidential," reported the Los Angeles Times. The film's casting director, Ed Johnston, summed it up in a single sentence: "She started out as a sex symbol, and the powers that be in Hollywood couldn't see her as anything else."
L.A. Confidential was an ideal showcase for Basinger, and following the film's exceptionally well-received premiere at Cannes, the actress was showered with praise by many outlets that had previously written her off and drubbed her—a coronation that ended with the Oscar statuette. So how did Basinger respond? By taking another hiatus from acting. When she returned in 2000, it was for a passion project: a big-screen adaptation of Kuki Gallmann's memoir I Dreamed of Africa. Though Basinger's performance was widely praised, the film tanked. In the years that followed, Basinger acted only sparingly—most notably, she re-teamed with L.A. Confidential director Hanson to play Eminem's mother in 8 Mile.
Basinger's career is a complicated one to parse. Some of her breaks from acting were clearly her choice; in interviews, she's quick to describe how much of her focus since 1995 has been on raising Ireland, her daughter with Alec Baldwin. Some of her movies were terrible and justly panned. But it's still a little galling to see Basinger opposite her L.A. Confidential costar Crowe in The Nice Guys—gray and paunchy, in one of the sharpest leading roles of his career, while she languishes in an underdeveloped and underwritten bit part at the periphery of the narrative. This remains the reality for the vast majority of Hollywood actresses, and particularly those who were so explicitly lauded for their sex appeal, as Melanie Griffith, Kathleen Turner, and Kelly Le Brock could attest. At the very least, it's hard to imagine Basinger's similarly aged male costars being subjected to an insipid Q&A like this one:
How Kim Basinger Keeps Looking Incredible at 60
But if we're not quite in the midst of a Basinger-aissance, there's at least one more role on her docket that's higher-profile than anything she's done in at least a decade. In an elegant bit of casting, next year's Fifty Shades of Grey sequel Fifty Shades Darker has cast Basinger as Elena Lincoln, the "Mrs. Robinson" who seduced the teenaged Christian Grey and paved the way for his sadomasochistic sexual preferences. It's another role that hearkens back to a key touchstone in Basinger's career—in this case, playing a woman in the midst of a sadomasochistic sexual affair in 1986's 9 1/2 Weeks. And if it's yet another sex symbol role in a career that has turned out to be narrower and more limiting than the one Basinger might have chosen — well, at least she’s the one in control.