When Ireland Baldwin uploaded a carousel of photos from her adorable daughter Holland’s 2nd birthday celebrations on Tuesday, May 20, all eyes were on one woman: her lesser-spotted mom, Kim Basinger.
Smiling underneath an enormous straw hat and sunglasses, the movie siren, 71, was clearly happy to be celebrating with her family — but just as eager to keep a low profile too. Although the star of L.A. Confidential and 9 1/2 Weeks, who was married to Ireland’s dad, Alec Baldwin, from 1993 to 2002, also posts on Instagram from time to time — usually to passionately promote the causes of animal rights charities — she is rarely photographed herself. Aside from sporadic voiceover work, she also hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2017’s Fifty Shades Darker, but says she is “picky” about roles rather than retired.
The truth is, Basinger wouldn’t have it any other way. While her breathtaking beauty and obvious talent for acting meant that a Hollywood career was inevitable — and like many starlets, she modeled first — it has always been at odds with her, as she puts it, “excruciatingly shy” personality. These days, after a terrifying battle with agoraphobia that Ireland helped her conquer, the actress doesn’t put herself under pressure to perform when she doesn’t want to, preferring to stay under the radar as much as possible.
But of course it wasn’t always possible. During her peak sex symbol years in the 1980s and ‘90s, she was always hitting the headlines for crazy reasons, like allegedly only washing her hair with bottles of Evian (sounds chilly!) and for once buying a whole town in Georgia. She also enjoyed a brief romance with Prince, after she starred in Batman (1989) and he worked on the soundtrack, and was even linked with Eminem when she played his mom in 8 Mile (2002), but the pair denied the rumors.
Kim Basinger and Ireland Baldwin Courtesy of Instagram / Ireland BaldwinAnd, most famously, there was her messy split from Baldwin which led to a drawn-out custody battle for Ireland. “My relationship with my daughter Ireland was so negatively impacted by my divorce from her mother and having a very protracted custody battle,” said the actor in a March 2025 episode of his reality show, The Baldwins. “One of my most regrettable things about the whole thing was how it affected Ireland.”
In 2007, the controversy hit a crescendo when a shocking voicemail message was leaked in which Baldwin called his then 11-year-old daughter a “rude, thoughtless little pig.” The tough period made Basinger determined for Ireland to be raised with love. “Divorce is hard on a kid, no matter how you cut it,” she told Net a Porter’s The Edit in 2016. “And ours was very public and nasty. So I brought up Ireland in a very unconventional way. I just wanted her to be free. If she wanted to have her friends over and write over the walls with pen, that was fine. I wanted her childhood to be full of love and light and animals and friends.”
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Despite her archetypal blonde bombshell looks, Basinger has always been a little unconventional. Growing up in Athens, Georgia, with a model mom and musician dad, she didn’t feel like she fit in. As she told Interview in 2021, “I was so shy at school that I hardly ever talked, so everybody thought I was kind of a hermit.”
The young Basinger didn’t even like celebrating her birthday. “I’m just not a party girl,” she said. “I’m all for anybody having a party who wants that. The funny thing about me and birthdays or any kind of celebration where it brings attention to you in that way is that it’s never been anything that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed — even as a little kid. My mother used to say, ‘Sometimes we’d have a birthday party and you would just wander off.’ But she said it was just my way in the world. It wasn’t anything that I was truly interested in. I’d have to open up all those presents in front of all those people, and then they’d look at you.”
Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger in 1992 Vinnie Zuffante/Getty ImagesA professed desire to not be looked at might sound odd from a woman who grew up to be one of Hollywood’s biggest sex symbols. But when Basinger acts, she — literally — becomes a different person, and she loves it. “It’s the only thing that’s kept me above water — emotionally, physically, in every sense of the word,” she told Variety in February 2025, in her first big interview in years. “It just keeps me going. I love that space between ‘Action’ and ‘Cut.’”
She just doesn’t love watching the finished product. “Watching myself still makes me uneasy — and when you’re younger, you’re even more unforgiving,” she told Interview. “There are movies that I did and I know what I did and I know the story, and I don’t want to see that. I know that sounds weird because a lot of actors like to rush to the monitor, and they like to laugh at themselves or cry at themselves or whatever. But I would be mortified to look at a monitor.”
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There was even one particular occasion when Robert Redford, her costar in The Natural (1983), forced her to sit through their movie together. “Redford made me go watch myself at the opening of The Natural,” she recalled. “He said, ‘We’re walking the red carpet, we’re going in, and we’re sitting down.’ I went, ‘Uh-oh.’ Because most of the time I just do the red carpet and wait until the lights go down and then I leave. I was very proud of the movie, though. That was a hurdle for me to get over.”
In more than four decades in Hollywood, Basinger has taken on some of the sexiest roles going, winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her iconic turn as call girl Lynn Bracken in 1998’s L.A. Confidential and famously appearing opposite Mickey Rourke in controversial erotic drama 9 1/2 Weeks — very ahead of its time, in 1986. In 1983, she was even a Bond Girl, starring opposite Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again.
Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks in 1986 Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesBut, how on earth does someone seemingly so shy and self-conscious throw herself into these sizzling roles? “It’s a very hard thing to shoot a beautiful love scene,” she said in her Variety interview. “You think it’s just lay down with a bunch of baby oil. It’s not. It can really work your nerves. I didn’t ever think of myself as a sexual Bond thing. I saw those women and I thought, ‘Jesus, I don’t have that!’ I grew up a tomboy.”
It was, unsurprisingly, 9 ½ Weeks that pushed her boundaries to their limits. “I went into the audition not knowing what I was going to do,” she recalled to Interview. “And I remember it was just a weird, sexual kind of scene, and I was not happy at all when I left. I said ‘I could never..’ and I cried in the car on the way home.”
Despite her reservations, it became one of Basinger’s best-known roles. “It’s so funny, the roles we all play in this life,” she said. “You’d think with all the magazines and the covers and all the sexy stuff I’ve done, that that’s hugely a part of me. But even though I’ve played those roles and I’ve dressed up and been on the covers of these things and done this and that, it is all such pretense. So I just thought, ‘I can’t be one of those girls.’ I wear bib jeans. I don’t wear underwear like that. I don’t move in the world like that.”
These days, Basinger’s slightly hippy tendencies are what drives her. Her partner, Mitchell Stone, was previously her hair stylist — but he’s also a photographer, and the pair share a love of nature. When Stone, who has been in a relationship with the actress since 2014 following years of friendship, recently shared via Instagram a stunning picture of an elephant he had taken while he and Basinger both worked on the critically-panned I Dreamed Of Africa (1998), she was quick to comment: “These were absolutely unequivocally, gorgeous photos. And such a magical time in Africa… A memory that will live in me until the day I die…”
Kim Basinger and Mitch Stone in 2016 GVK/Bauer-Griffin/GC ImagesHowever, the role in question took its toll on Basinger. “It took a lot of mental and emotional healing after I Dreamed of Africa to come back after living in the bush for as long as we did,” she told Variety. “It was really just a shock to my system.”
She also told Interview: “I’m very sensitive to energy and people and life and animals and a lot of things. I mean, either you are or you are not, and I’m very aware of things.”
It’s this sensitivity that led to one of the most difficult periods of Basinger’s life — and perhaps the reason she is sometimes described as reclusive. She revealed in a 2022 interview with Jada Pinkett-Smith on her Facebook talk show Red Table Talk that she had suffered from agoraphobia: defined by the Mayo Clinic as an anxiety disorder that involves fearing and avoiding situations that might cause panic or the feeling of being trapped “I wouldn’t leave the house,” she revealed. “I would no longer go to dinner. It’s really horrible to feel that it won as really fiercely as it did during those years, and not know what it was. It’s like something just completely shuts down within you and you have to relearn everything.”
Basinger revealed that she even had to relearn to drive after the phobia made her too frightened of tunnels. “Everything became a big job to figure out how to do it,” she said. “You live with a dry mouth all the time, you’re very shaky, you’re just so exhausted all the time.”
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The actress received treatment and credits her model daughter Ireland, now 29, with helping her through the traumatic time. “She’s brought me out of my shell,” she said, describing her as “a great teacher and a great healer.” She added: “I was really scared because I didn’t want to tell anybody in my work what was happening.”
The experience had echoes of Basinger’s own childhood, when she would skip school to take care of her mom, who also suffered from anxiety. “That started affecting me in so many ways that I felt like I had to be home with my mom to save her,” she said on Red Table Talk.
Family has always been important to Basinger — which is probably why she didn’t mind appearing on Instagram to celebrate her beloved granddaughter’s birthday (She also described the toddler to Variety as “my little tiny, tiny, little angel.”). Doing right by her daughter was why it was necessary to heal from her rocky marriage to Baldwin and its subsequent messy fallout. “Alec and I have a great relationship,” she said in her 2025 Variety interview. “I have great respect for where he is today, and his family. You know, we don’t spend Christmases and holidays or see each other very much. But we talk. He’ll pick up the phone and call me, and we have a very genuinely cordial and I think loving relationship in a lot of ways, just because we share a daughter, and I don’t wish him anything but everything good.” Referring to her ex’s trial for involuntary manslaughter after a fatal accident on a movie set (the case was thrown out), she added: “He’s been through a lot lately. But Hilaria seems to have a great handle on that. So more power to her.”
Kim Basinger and Prince in 1988 Kypros/Getty ImagesBaldwin’s very public life with Hilaria, via their reality show The Baldwins, is the antithesis of anything Basinger would ever consider doing, of course. “Your anonymity is like a helium balloon,” she told Variety. “It slips out of your hand, and that’s it. I found that out pretty young. Getting off airplanes all over the world and having people stalk your hotel rooms and bodyguards and police and this and that and thinking, ‘What?’ You’re just dumbfounded.”
Aside from her family, there are very few people who can motivate Basinger to give up her low profile. But one of them was classic singer-songwriter Tom Petty, who died in 2017. Basinger appeared as a corpse in his 1993 music video for “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” and still considers it a career highlight. But working with the similarly private Petty was challenging for both of them. “I’m not gregarious,” she told Vulture in 2021. “I was more introverted than he expected, I think, so to have two excruciatingly shy people not say many words to each other was a rather interesting way to start the day off.”
Even now, Basinger is still so proud of her role in the video that she tells people about it randomly. “I was talking to a girl the other day when she was blowing out my hair at a salon,” she recalled to Vulture. “She said, ‘I love Tom Petty. Tom Petty was my favorite.’ I had my [covid] mask and my glasses on, so I don’t know whether she recognized me or not. But on the way out I looked at her and said, ‘Have you ever watched the ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ music video?’ She responded, ‘Oh yeah, what a rad video, I love it.’ I said, ‘When I leave, you go look it up again, okay? Because I’m Mary Jane.’ I never, never do that, ever. I value my privacy. I tell this because I want to make it very clear that a lot of musicians come, a lot of musicians go, and a lot of musicians make a stamp on the world. Tom is somebody who definitely made a stamp on his own generation and generations after that. He’s a member of a rare breed. Their flames never go out. They just don’t ever go out, they just grow.”
The other thing that inspires Basinger to compromise her anonymity? Her favorite furry friends. A lifelong animal lover with two rescue dogs of her own, the actress now campaigns for animal rights. In 2019, she joined protesters in Seoul, South Korea, to rally against the dog meat trade, telling CNN, “I do think that government is going to have to not turn a blind eye and really come up with solutions.”
Kim Basinger in 2018 gotpap/Bauer-Griffin/GC ImagesAnd in May 2025, she teamed up with Priscilla Presley to speak out about Los Angeles Zoo sending its two remaining Asian elephants to Tulsa Zoo rather than a sanctuary, accusing mayor Karen Bass of having “no compassion whatsoever.” She explained: “This is a blatantly inhumane choice knowing that there was the option to send both of them to a sanctuary to live out their lives rather than into another lock-up zoo situation. Captivity and chains is no way these animals should ever have had to live. There is not one redeeming quality to being shackled in prison.”
These days, she’s pretty philosophical, as she enjoys her quiet life with Stone and their dogs. “You have to trust the journey,” she told Interview. ”That has become my motto for years: trust the journey. Because in the end, we’re all kind of fearful. We all have fears and insecurities and ups and downs.”
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Despite Basinger’s own ups and downs — her two divorces (Baldwin was her second husband. She was also married to makeup artist Ron Snyder from 1980 to 1989), as many movie flops as triumphs and her own struggles with anxiety — she is grateful for everything life has thrown at her. And when life gives her lemons, she’s pretty good at making lemonade. She even once bought a town in Georgia for $20 million dollars, and failed spectacularly in her bid to turn it into a tourist attraction and movie production hub, creating a rift with investors, including family members. According to Eugene Levy, it was even a source of inspiration for Schitt’s Creek. “Who knew? I love that show,” said Basinger in Variety. “So, hey, made for good material. That would be lovely to have those royalty checks.”
Ultimately, Basinger is grateful that she gets to enjoy her low-key life, showing up and speaking out when it matters, but not feeling under pressure to be a movie star. “I’m very thankful that I’ve had such longevity and variety,” she told Interview. “There are so many things in this life that I want to do and I can’t do them all. I know that my inbox will be so full the day that I leave the planet. So you try to stay interested in life and bring some kind of comfort and pleasure to others on this planet as you’re going through this journey.”
Kim Basinger in 1998 HAL GARB/AFP via Getty ImagesShe added: “We need to listen more, to hear the silence and live in it. You don’t always have to be doing something. The most of something that you can do sometimes is to be in the present doing nothing. It’s just taking in the value of what each moment has to offer. And then when it comes to exchanges with people, I think, the more genuine you can be, the more giving you can be, the more you will, in the end, feel fulfilled.”
It’s clear that Basinger gets great fulfillment from the cozy world she’s created around her, regularly writing sentimental words on Instagram about how much her family and animals mean to her. Posting a baby photo of Ireland when she turned 29 in October 2024, she wrote: “The best thing I have ever done in my life is bringing this little soul to this planet. Being her mom has brought me every happiness… every joy… and continues to define the depths of love… Deeper than the deepest ocean… Wider than the sky… Passed the stars up to Heaven and down to the bugs in the grass….”
In fact, perhaps Basinger’s Instagram bio best sums up the person she is today. It reads: “Actress that hopes all of humanity will one day treat animals with the respect they deserve.” Family first, animals second, and as for movies? Whenever she feels like it.
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