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It's been almost seven years since Kim Basinger was last seen on a big screen. It was in February 2017, when Fifty Shades Darker – the film sequel to the 50 Shades of Grey saga – arrived in theaters to add a couple of cayenne peppers to the recipe for that year's Valentine's Day with the addition of the actress to the cast as a great novelty. Who better to give life to the partner and ex-lover of the protagonist of the erotic franchise than the great sexual myth of the eighties and nineties? Although the film's run at the box office reinvigorated the public's interest in the Oscar winner for L.A. Confidential, and she herself ratified her intention to resume her award-winning career, the truth is that her participation ended up being a professional epilogue that will not be corrected in the short or medium term.
Jamie Dornan and Kim Basinger, in 'Fifty Shades Darker'.
Kim Basinger celebrates her 8th birthday on December 70 in the same way she has celebrated the rest of the anniversaries of her last decade: away from the spotlight – she has not stepped on a red carpet for four years – and focused on her health. Unlike other peers of her generation, who have condemned the ageism and machismo in force in Hollywood as responsible for the defenestration of their careers as they get older, the isolation of the actress from the State of Georgia has nothing to do with discrimination or typecasting in the role of sex symbol. She herself said in 2021 that she felt in "a privileged position to continue receiving offers", but other factors beyond the vocational one have marked her recent trajectory.
The most urgent and pressing has been his mental health. In one of the few interviews she has given in the last fifteen years, Basinger opened up about her struggle with agoraphobia, a disabling anxiety disorder that translates as the fear of being in or situations from which it may be difficult to escape or ask for help in the event of a panic attack. such as enclosed places or open spaces susceptible to crowding. Although she has suffered from it since childhood, the actress said that in a period of the eighties she spent months without leaving the house or receiving guests. It took her more than a year to feel able to go through the tunnels of Malibu again, where she lives, and she even had to learn to drive again. "You live with a dry mouth all the time, you're very unstable and you feel exhausted all the time," she confessed on Red Table Talk.
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She famously suffered a panic attack during the filming of Nine and a Half Weeks, when her co-star, Mickey Rourke, and the director, Adrian Lyne, agreed to push her to her physical and emotional limit – even hitting her – to optimize her performance. She never told a co-worker for fear that the stigmas surrounding mental health would hurt her meteoric career, but it did earn her a reputation as a difficult actress to work with. Kim Basinger has credited her 28-year-old daughter Ireland with a pedagogical and healing role in her recovery. "I still feel anxiety sometimes, but I've worked really hard so that I don't get paralyzed like I used to before. I've found that taking the focus away from myself helps me. I know it's ironic for an actress! That's why I love being a mother and advocating for animals – that's when I really feel powerful," she says.
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It is precisely thanks to Ireland, the result of her controversial relationship with actor Alec Baldwin that lasted for a decade and ended with an acrimonious divorce, that the star made her last appearance in front of the cameras. It took place in March of this year, on the occasion of the celebration of the young woman's baby shower that a couple of months later would give birth to Holland, the first granddaughter of the actress. The unusual party took place at a strip club in Los Angeles and Basinger was accompanied by her partner since 2014, stylist and photographer Mitch Stone. As Ireland herself revealed, her mother was petrified when she saw her daughter receiving lap dances and hid in a corner with a glass of white wine for the rest of the night. However, the transience of his return to public life was not enough for the most sensationalist press to take advantage of the occasion to theorize about his hypothetical aesthetic retouches and an appearance described as "unrecognizable". Her firstborn was also the first cause of Basinger's progressive departure from the industry, after suffering from eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia and entering a rehabilitation center in the middle of the last decade for her addiction to alcohol and drugs.
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Gone are the days of three movies a year, of making the covers of magazines and the folders of teenagers around the world, or eccentricities made in Hollywood such as buying an entire town – Braselton, near his hometown – for $20 million. Kim Basinger's current reality seems much more mundane or, at least, as mundane as the routine of someone who spends his days in his mansion in Maui, Hawaii, can be. The truth is that his distance from the industry has been such that the only thing he has done in these seven years of drought has been to pose for a Miu Miu campaign and lend his voice to a video game. He is currently focusing his efforts on the animal rights cause that he has fervently defended for years, using his media profile to, for example, confront governments such as those of Indonesia or South Korea in search of the illegalization of the trade and consumption of dog meat. Her Instagram account, with more than 300,000 followers, is a public showcase in which she shares different initiatives of protection groups and defines herself in the description of the social network as "an actress who wishes that all humanity will one day treat animals with the respect they deserve".