Kim Basinger

Kim Basinger reached film by the least promising route available: modelling, a Breck shampoo contract, then television. Her first feature was Hard Country in 1981 and nobody paid much attention. The one that changed things was Never Say Never Again in 1983, opposite Sean Connery in his last outing as Bond. It is not a good film, but it put her in front of an audience that had not previously been asked to consider whether she could act.

The eighties then ran through her at speed. The Natural in 1984 brought a Golden Globe nomination. 9½ Weeks in 1986 was the film that set how the decade looked at her, largely on terms she did not choose. And in 1989 came Batman, where she played Vicki Vale in what was for a time the largest commercial success in the world. That is three quite different kinds of visibility inside five years, and not many of them were about the work.

Then the collapse. In 1989 she and a group of investors bought most of the town of Braselton, Georgia, for a reported twenty million dollars. In 1993 she lost a breach-of-contract case over the film Boxing Helena and filed for bankruptcy. The Braselton land went in 1995 for 4.3 million. For several years she was better known for the litigation than for anything she had put on a screen, which is a difficult position to argue your way out of.

The recovery came in 1997 with L.A. Confidential, in which she plays a call girl cut to resemble Veronica Lake - a part that is explicitly about a woman being valued for a resemblance. It won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, along with the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award. The then-and-now comparison for Basinger is not really about ageing. It is about what happens when somebody finally writes her a part with a person inside it.