The movies Kim Basinger apologised for making: “I’ve made some bombs in my life”
Not every actor has the guts to admit to starring in some bad movies, but Kim Basinger holds her hands up to the cinematic crimes she has committed.
The actor has had an interesting career, because even though she has appeared in some great movies and even earned herself an Oscar, she’s also been in a fair few duds. In fact, it’s easy to forget that Basinger is actually an Academy Award winner, because the Golden Raspberry Awards have attempted to crown her one of the worst stars seven times.
Basinger isn’t a bad actor, but when you’ve got that many Razzie nominations to your name, it’s certainly going to cloud your legacy a bit.
It seems like she just needed a better agent, because while she hit the mark right with movies like LA Confidential and Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter, she can’t say the same about various comedies that bombed at the box office and with critics. You can never know for sure if a movie is going to be successful or not, although you’d think that Basinger might have had an inkling that these movies weren’t going to be award-winning hits.
One of her early career critical bombs was the romantic comedy Blind Date, in which she starred opposite Bruce Willis. The 1987 movie was criticised as being a rather forgettable venture, and Roger Ebert even claimed, rather brutally, that Basinger looked “dowdy” in the film. It did pretty well at the box office, but that wasn’t enough to save it from the critics, who weren’t convinced by the gags; that’s what you get when you take on a movie that was initially made for Madonna and Sean Penn to star in, I guess.
Another flop was 1988’s My Stepmother is an Alien, which didn’t receive much acclaim at all, with general audiences and critics unimpressed by the film, which starred Dan Aykroyd as a scientist raising his daughter as a single dad following the passing of his wife, only to meet the extraterrestrial Celeste, played by Basinger, who secretly comes to Earth. It didn’t sound like it was ever going to be the next When Harry Met Sally, and of course, it wasn’t.
Talking to the Daily Express, Basinger once admitted her cinematic flaws, “I know what it takes to put a film together, but I can’t help produce some really bad comedies sometimes. I’m sorry. I’ve made some bombs in my life, but I came from comedy and worked with some really great people who taught me so much. I had great teachers, so whenever I get to exercise that, I do.”
It seems like her penchant for comedy has just been wasted on bad ones, and if she’d been given some better scripts, perhaps the actor could’ve had a more prosperous career as a comedic star.
The Marrying Man, which she starred in with future husband Alec Baldwin, was another major flop for Basinger, and she even earned a Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Actress’ from it. A romantic comedy, the movie was marred with behind-the-scenes controversy, with Basinger reportedly claiming that she didn’t find the film very funny at all.
She should’ve exited the project before it was too late, because it certainly didn’t help her career, which not only earned her a Razzie nomination, but the fact that both she and Baldwin were accused of acting like divas certainly didn’t do much for her reputation.
