Before becoming a Hollywood movie star Kim Basinger (8 Mile, L.A. Confidential, The Natural, 9½ Weeks, Blind Date) and marrying actor Alec Baldwin (father of her daughter Ireland Baldwin), Basinger was a model in New York with the famous Ford Modeling Agency.
In the early 1970s, she landed the job as the Breck Shampoo girl (with her mother, Ann Basinger, also featured in one of the print ads, see below). In 1974, she quit modeling and moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. She transitioned from one industry to the other with the help of Playboy magazine.
In the early 1980s, she posed for Hugh Hefner’s controversial magazine and the publication dropped the photos to coincide with her breakthrough role as Bond girl Domino Petachi in the 1983 James Bond movie Never Say Never Again, with Sean Connery as the famous 007 Agent.
To celebrate the arrival of summer in Los Angeles this year, Basinger shared a throwback photo of her modeling a tiger-print swimsuit with a leather buckle collar around her neck and gave credit to photographer Richard Fegley who shot her for Playboy magazine at “the legendary Playboy Mansion.”
Basinger also had the opportunity to pose with a cheetah for Vogue magazine (Sheila Metzner photos below).
Note: Six years have passed since Basinger has appeared on the big screen — she played Elena Lincoln (a.k.a. Mrs. Robinson) in the 2017 film Fifty Shades Darker with Dakota Johnson.
Fun fact: Johnson’s mother and grandmother, Melanie Griffith (Working Girl) and Tippi Hedren (The Birds) kept a domesticated 400-lb. lion, as a pet, in their California home — that’s Griffith in the pool with the lion (he’s name was Neil) in the photo above.