Once, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger reigned as Hollywood’s most scandalous couple. They
had reportedly made life unbearable for everyone on set, where they met and started dating. Then,
going through a disaster of divorce, they ended up dragging their own young daughter into it.
Anyone remembers a phone call no child should ever get from a parent?
Today we’re taking a look at how it all began and where they are now.
The actors’ paths first crossed when they were both cast in The Marrying Man in 1990.
Before the co-stars had even met, Basinger had commented on the placement of her and
Baldwin’s photos alongside one another in the director’s office,
saying, “We are going to make a terrific couple….”
According to People, they met for dinner to discuss the film, and things quickly turned
romantic. For Alec, at least. “He kissed me and then asked me if I wanted kids,” Kim remembered.
She called him “psychotic” and attempted to steer their conversation back to the movie.
He then called his friend and told him that Basinger was “driving me insane,”
and, “we’re getting married.” Of course, cause that’s why you SHOULD get married.
For Kim, love sprung when the co-stars were on their way to set and saw a dog get hit by a
car. The actor asked Alec to go after the dog, so they could bring it to the vet. And he did.
And they rescued the pup. Overall, the couple ended up having twelve four-legged friends.
“She wants you to get out of the car and get the dog on the Hollywood Freeway,
so you jump out of the car and get the dog,” Baldwin said back in 2000.
“It’s 20 degrees below zero, but if Kim wants vegetable soup from the blah-blah diner,
I put on my boots and go get it, because I love Kim.”
Sparks flew between the stars during their first rehearsal. Then, four days into the
shooting, crew members learned that their relationship had escalated dramatically.
Sitting together in a car between takes, the two stars had a particularly private conversation
everyone could hear thanks to the on-set headphone intercom system. The crew members
listened in as she told him about “her plans for the night’s romantic activities in… detail.” A few
weeks later, the two started living together. And once the stars got together, they stayed
together. The couple maintained a united front for the duration of the shoot, drawing battle lines
between themselves and the rest of the production team. According to one crew member, if they were
in a good mood at home, they came to the set in a good mood. If they were bad at home, watch out.
Baldwin later countered, accusing Disney-planted “spies” of spreading
negative stories about the couple… Kim was dubbed difficult and Alec — temperamental.
From the beginning, Basinger maintained her own schedule,
frequently arriving to set late and holding up scenes with specific requests. At one point, she
told Disney that she needed a break from filming to fly to Brazil for a… psychic consultation. The
studio granted that request — provided that she pays $85,000 a day to make up for the delay. The
actor subsequently decided to stay in Los Angeles. Fifteen years before Russell Crowe effectively
damaged his time on Hollywood’s A-list by throwing a phone at a Soho hotel employee,
Baldwin’s career took a turn following his own phone-hurling incident.
Once, the actor nearly hit a production electrician with a director’s chair hurled
from his trailer. He later apologized to the electrician in front of the crew
and secured front-row centre tickets to a Carlos Santana concert as a conciliatory gift.
Soon, Baldwin’s temper became a regular focus of press coverage.
Besides allegedly assaulting two camera operators, the actor has also been in the headlines after
being kicked off an American Airlines flight in 2011 and punching another man over a parking spot.
“Hollywood also blames Basinger for ruining Alec Baldwin,” a celebrated industry journalist Kim
Masters once wrote, saying that the actor was perceived mainly as a “swell fellow”
before that film. But Baldwin made it clear that a break-up wasn’t in the cards. “This
is not some Hollywood romance that’s played out between ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” he said at the time.
And during reshoots that he expressly didn’t want to film, Baldwin took his
fury out on his trailer, punching a massive dent in its side. At the end of production,
the crew were handed out T-shirts that read, “I survived the reshoot of The Marrying Man.”
Baldwin and Basinger wed in 1993, just SIX WEEKS after the 30 Rock star’s proposal. Alec
reportedly did all the planning for the affair, held at the actor’s Long Island beach house. They
welcomed their daughter, Ireland, two years later. In 1994, the showbiz couple headlined Saturday
Night Live. Their monologue was a bit where each actor would drop a deal-breaker about their
relationship, and the other would explain why the reveal just made them love their spouse even more.
Charming. The passion that had once fortified their
relationship ended up defining its aftermath. In January 2001, less than a year after Baldwin
had gone on record to call his wife “lovely,” Basinger filed for divorce.
“I’ve known for a year and a half that she was thinking about this,” Basinger’s father, Don,
said at the time. “I love Alec,” he continued. “He’s the most kind and generous man I’ve ever
known in my life, and he’s overcome some very difficult things … All but one: his anger.”
According to Don, Alec has that kind of anger where he reaches down for something that hurts,
something that may have happened a year or two ago, and then abuses you with it.
It has happened publicly. But when it started happening in front of Ireland, Kim finally said,
“Well, I’m not going to put up with that.” The relationship’s tendency toward the volatile
didn’t strictly come as a surprise. Basinger once said Baldwin would tell her, “I hate you,
you know,” and she’d respond, “I hate you back.” Ummm, healthy.
Another point of contention was their living situation. While her husband had always dreamed
of settling down on Long Island, Kim said that she was less sold on the commute to work.
“I’m a gypsy at heart. I’d take off in a minute and go live in France for a year. I’d go live in
Africa. But Alec is obstinate,” she said. The divorce and subsequent custody
battle soon turned bitter. In 2006, Elle asked the actor
to pick a movie title for his romantic life. He chose Psycho. Wow, that’s an interesting choice.
A year later, Alec was embroiled in scandal when a verbally abusive voicemail he’d left for his
then-11-year-old daughter was leaked to TMZ. As the custody battle waged on, the actor’s team
accused Kim’s camp of leaking the voicemail, a claim that was intensely denied by the latter.
The following year, he released a book about his divorce. In A Promise to Ourselves, he described
his ex-wife as having “the legal equivalent of Munchausen syndrome”. It is a psychological
disorder where someone pretends to be ill or deliberately produces symptoms of illness in
themselves. He also compared the way she told him she was pregnant with their daughter to
“someone telling you that they had wrecked your car.” Umm, what?
Basinger did not appear to appreciate the media spectacle Baldwin had contributed to. The couple’s
daughter, Ireland, didn’t have the easiest time during the process. “Divorce is hard on a kid,
no matter how you cut it,” Basinger said. And theirs was very public and nasty. “I brought
up Ireland in a very unconventional way.” Kim wanted her to be free. If she wanted
to have friends over, write over the walls with a pen, that was fine in the household.
The actor wished for her childhood to be full of love and light and animals and friends.
Years later, Baldwin, too, reflected on his divorce. “From 2000 to 2006… I can barely tell
you what I did for those six years,” he said, comparing his divorce to the First Indochina
War … “It was a period that was so painful, I was staring off a cliff for six years.”
It took some blood, sweat, and tears, but Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin
eventually got to a peaceful and amicable place. According to Basinger, they are cool now. Life
goes on. Still, she didn’t pass up the opportunity to make a joke at her ex-husband’s expense.
“I did this film, The Marrying Man, where I met my eventual ex-husband, but I was teeter-tottering
because I had also been offered Sleeping with the Enemy,” she said. “Isn’t it funny that I
turned down Sleeping with the Enemy, and then I went on to sleep with the enemy!” Whoa, Kim.
After the very public and overly dramatic divorce, Baldwin married his current wife,
Hilaria, in 2012. The happy couple has six children (go big or go home, right?).
Baldwin called his ex “one of the most beautiful women that has ever lived,” noting,
“even divorce doesn’t muddy my view of that.” The good news is the former lovers are
cool now, and Ireland has a great relationship with her half-siblings.
As for Basinger, she was last rumoured to be dating hairstylist Mitch Stone,
and her current passion in life is animal rights. In an interview with Samaritan Mag,
she said, “I’m working on something 24/7 with the Humane Society, as well as with my daughter,
Ireland.” Clearly, she’s keeping busy and putting her passion to good use.
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