When Kim Basinger was 16 years old, she started her modelling career by winning the Athens Junior Miss contest. She followed that up by winning the title "Junior Miss Georgia." Basinger then headed to New York City to compete in the national Junior Miss pageant. It was there that Basinger was approached by fashion modeling mogul Eileen Ford, who offered the young beauty queen a modeling contract with Ford Modeling Agency. Initially turning down the offer in favor of singing and acting, Basinger reconsidered and headed back to New York to become a Ford model. Not long after penning the deal, Basinger’s face graced numerous magazine covers and she also appeared in hundreds of ads throughout the early '70s, most notably appearing as the Breck shampoo girl. She achieved a top model status by age 20, earning a salary of USD1,000 a day. In the meantime, she alternated between modeling work and attending acting classes at the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse as well as performing in various Greenwich Village clubs. Basinger's mother was a swimmer in Esther Williams films and also a model, and both mother and daughter appeared together in an advertisement for Breck shampoo. Basinger has four siblings: two brothers, Mick (who is a marketing director) and Skip, and two sisters, Ashley and Barbara. Basinger suffers from agoraphobia, which is a form of an anxiety disorder, the abnormal fear of experiencing a difficult or embarrassing situation, such as a panic attack, in a public place. In 1976, after a five-year stint as a cover girl, Basinger decided to put her modeling career on hold and move to Los Angeles to begin a career in acting. After appearing in small parts on a few TV shows such as "McMillan & Wife" and "Charlie's Angels", her first star turn was a made-for-TV movie, "Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold" (1978) in which she played a small town girl who goes to Hollywood to become an actress, and winds up becoming a famous centerfold for a men's magazine. She was a James Bond girl in Never Say Never Again (1983), where she starred opposite Sean Connery. She did a famous pictorial for Playboy magazine in 1983.