What the Hell Happened to Kim Basinger?

It went downhill after she won an Oscar!

Its that man again!!

Wish Kim a happy birthday. She just turned 59 a few days ago. She is a sweetheart no mater how old she gets.

From what I posted in that particular site's comment section:
Why has Kim Basinger reached “What the Hell Happened to…” status. And pardon me if I’m about to repeat things that I’ve already said before:
*Is it because as LeBeau said at the start, Kim was simply a case of a “sex symbol who got old”?

I do think that Kim getting older to the point where she couldn’t plausibly play oversexed/sex symbol roles anymore also hurt. I do agree w/ the notion that much of Kim’s fan-base is male and perhaps wouldn’t be immediately interested in seeing something that doesn’t have her act sexy and/or be glamorous. Hell, I don’t think that her later mainstream movies like “The Sentinel” or “Charlie St. Cloud” made much of a big deal during the promotions/ads of her being in it.

As I said before, she can’t exactly play “oversexed”/sex symbol type of roles anymore (it’s hard to believe that Kim is going to be 60 pretty soon) without it being looked at as creepy and/or unintentionally farcical. Yet at the same time, because Kim is so beautiful, you can’t really easily slip her into “character” parts either.

You can also make the argument that in the latter phase of her career, Kim then became typecast as a “scared housewife” in movies like “Cellular” and this little scene movie “exploitation movie” called “While She Was Out”.

*Her turbulent marriage to and subsequently nasty divorce from Alec Baldwin caused havoc w/ her career.

*Kim made the mistake (if you want to call it that) of not being quicker to capitalize off of the momentum of her Oscar win/brief career resurrection w/ “LA Confidential” by not releasing another movie for three years. And when she did release said movies (“Bless the Child” and “I Dreamed of Africa”), they turned out to be critical and commercial failures. Those were pretty much the last time that we saw Kim Basinger in a mainstream starring vehicle unless you count “Cellular” (which seemed to be built or sold more on its premise than her name).

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.arts.movies.past-films/7oebzOu8feU/NVKtDG70AAAJ

To me, i remember her mostly for her amazing performance in L.A. Confidential.

pretty much the same thing that happpened to michelle pfeiffer

pretty girls get old too

In addition to the other responses here, in 1993 she was scheduled to play the lead female role in Boxing Helena. She dropped out midway through and broke her contract. The move made her look unreliable and she got a bad name in the industry. Filmmakers sued for 8.1 million and won. She went into bankruptcy and settled for 3.8 million.

I think the unreliability factor along with the fact that she was typecast as a sex bomb and aging, led to a lack of roles. She had a small comeback in 1997 in a lead role, but otherwise, she's been relegated to being the mom, as in the movie 8 Mile. It's at least good to see she's still working, though.

I think that after Batman, Kim Basinger slowly started to become a “marked woman” of sorts. Batman arguably gave Basinger some clout that she likely didn’t have before that. But she started to waste it away do to her attitude and on-set behavior.

There was that incident where she purchased that Georgia town, which I don’t think endeared her to most common folk. And then there was her little outburst at the 1990 Oscars, where she said that the Academy messed up when failing to nominate Do the Right Thing for Best Picture. While Kim may have had a point in hindsight, it none the less, made her out to be a loose cannon of sorts, who just said whatever was one her mind w/o any inkling of the possible repercussions. This naturally, goes into her 1991 Movieline interview, which made her come across as needlessly bitter, full of herself and entitled.
http://lebeauleblog.com/2016/02/07/kim-basinger-on-good-kissing-her-academy-awards-outburst-and-conversations-with-god/

I've already addressed the “horror stories” involving Kim and what went on behind the scenes of The Marrying Man and Cool World, so I’m not going to try to go too much into that again. But what made matters worse was when she hooked up w/ Alec Baldwin. Baldwin was himself, becoming despised around Hollywood due to his frequent temper tantrums and ego-centricism that got him booted off of the Jack Ryan franchise in favor of Harrison Ford. By the time that the two did The Getaway, it seemed like most people were rooting for them to fail.

I don’t think that many had much sympathy for Kim Basinger over the Boxing Helena case, because of her building reputation of being a diva, and her not having the foresight right from the jump to know that a movie like that was trash. Plus, for better or worse, it made Kim out to be unreliable.

I think that Kim knew that she was being put into Hollywood jail for a while due to all of her box office flops and lawsuits, and disappeared for a while to “lick her wounds”. She manages an impressive comeback w/ LA Confidential but proceeds to wound up back to where she was before that by first, killing her heat and momentum by not releasing another movie for three years. And then following LA Confidential up w/ junk like Bless the Child and I Dreamed of Africa (which seemed like a vanity project in which Kim wanted to do her own version of Meryl Streep’s Out of Africa).

The voice mail incident probably officially marked the point of no return for Kim Basinger. In other words, it when you get right down to it (even though Alec Baldwin obviously came off looking extremely bad himself), forever ruined her public image (it was already an open secret that Alec Baldwin was/is a hot-head so as unfair and inexcusable as it was, this sort of thing wasn’t that surprising for him) and her relevancy as a result, never truly recovered.

I think that Kim will still get work here and there simply because she’ll always have the caveat of being an Academy Award winner, and she’s still reasonably beautiful enough that people who grew up loving her in the ’80s will be willing to see her. But I seriously doubt that Kim at her age and w/ her well documented personal/emotional baggage, will ever be the lead/marquee, headlining star (or one of them) in a major, widely released film again. And the sad thing now, is that she doesn’t have a Curtis Hanson to “bail her out”.

At the end of the day, I think that Kim Basinger's main issue was that she was when you get right down to it, arguably an above average actress whose main calling card was her good looks and sex appeal. Unfortunately, that sort of thing only has a certain shelf life and I just don't think that Basinger was charismatic or wide-ranging enough of an actress to have anything else to truly fall back on. Plus, you have to take for account that she clearly had/has a lot of personal baggage. And take this with a grain of salt, but a blind item reveal on Crazy Days and Nights, basically implied that the main reason why Kim Basinger doesn't get a lot of high profile, leading roles anymore is because of her diva antics.

http://crazydaysandnights.net/2016/07/blind-items-revealed-2-527.html