Academy Award-winning actor Kim Basinger, best known for films such as 1983’s Never Say Never Again and 1997’s L.A. Confidential, has long been a prominent animal-rights activist. She has campaigned against the dog meat trade, poaching, and animal testing, and has used her platform to urge Craigslist to ban animal listings.
It has been a lifelong fight. Basinger once told Samaritan Mag that she wrote her first animal-rights letter to a local newspaper when she was seven or eight years old. “I’ve always been baffled that we can use [animals] for profit and for entertainment and for all of these things and we call them our best friends,” she said.
Given her history of advocacy, it is perhaps unsurprising that Basinger also reportedly follows a vegan diet. In 2025, a source close to the actor told Closer Weekly: “She’s been vegan for decades now, and she sticks to a very clean, plant-based diet, no processed foods, no sugar, barely any alcohol. She’s up every morning doing her stretches and light yoga, and she swears by daily walks in nature to keep her mind and body sharp.”
Wikimedia Commons
When did Kim Basinger stop eating meat?
It is unclear exactly when Basinger adopted a vegan diet, but we know she stopped eating meat around the turn of the century. How? A deli sandwich.
In the late 1990s, the now-shuttered Stage Deli in New York named a chicken-and-bacon sandwich after the actor. In the early 2000s, however, PETA asked the deli to remove it from the menu, explaining that Basinger had become vegetarian.
“Maybe she doesn’t want it out, now that she’s a big animal-rights person, but two years ago, she told us what she liked, and we named a sandwich after her,” Stage Deli manager Gil Kashkin told the New York Post in 2001. “We made a note of it and then came up with something.”
After receiving PETA’s letter, the deli, which closed in 2012, promised to “whip up a special vegetarian sandwich, which we will name after Kim.”
Basinger’s daughter, Ireland Baldwin, whom she shares with Alec Baldwin, has also experimented with a plant-based diet. In 2015, the model announced that she was embarking on a 21-day vegan challenge, citing both her health and concern for animals.
“I wasn’t fully aware of the effects meat and other animal [byproducts] were having on my skin, weight gain, chronic sinus infections, and overall health,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. “I am looking SO forward to turning my health around, eating clean, and most importantly, saving the [animals],” she wrote on Instagram.
Since then, Baldwin has been through eating disorder recovery and adopted more of a flexitarian approach.
Christie Brinkley / Instagram
More celebrities are embracing vegan diets
Basinger is not the only longtime vegetarian celebrity to embrace veganism. Model Christie Brinkley recently revealed that she is now vegan after following a vegetarian diet for most of her life.
“People seem to think that [it’s] hard to do,” she wrote on Instagram alongside a photo of various homegrown, plant-based foods. “But it’s really not.”
For more plant-based stories like this, read:
JUMP TO ... Latest News | Recipes | Guides | Health | Subscribe
Charlotte is a VegNews editor and writer based in sunny Southsea on England's southern coast.
