Aside from the occasional cameos that Kim Basinger makes on the Instagram and Twitter feeds belonging to her daughter, Vanity Fair“It Girl” Ireland Baldwin, the Oscar-winning actress and former Bond beauty has kept a low profile in the years since her volatile divorce from Alec Baldwin. Surprisingly though, over a decade later, Basinger has granted a rare interview in which she discusses how she is grappling with her confessed anxieties, acting career, and the modeling trajectory of her daughter.
Timed to the release of her upcoming film Grudge Match—a comedy starring Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone as aging boxing rivals—the actress opened up ever so slightly to People magazine in an upcoming issue. (The quotes were intercepted byThe Daily Mail.)
Of her acting career, which has spanned three decades, an Oscar, and a Golden Globe, Basinger says, “I’ve been so blessed because I’ve had such longevity.” Acknowledging her preference for privacy, she adds, “I’m not a big red-carpet girl. But I love the work.” She says that her lower profile was intended, in part, to help Ireland grow up with some normalcy. “She grew up in the limelight but I tried to provide stability and a quieter world.”
She also acknowledges that she is coping with her agoraphobia and related anxieties, from which she has confessed suffering, without depending on medication. “Now I wake up and enjoy life. I didn’t want to live on drugs. I wanted to face everything I was afraid of.” Proving this, she even confirms that she recently went sky-diving with her teenage daughter. “Falling 12,500 feet out of an airplane was exhilarating!”
Speaking about Ireland’s current profession, as a model signed with Two Management and IMG Models, Basinger said, “I think she wanted to stick her foot in and see what it would bring. And she’s doing extremely well. . . . You just want them to follow their own path, and she totally did this on her own.”
