Basinger’s back to help steam up our screens

THE film 9½ Weeks, starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, had a huge cultural impact when it was released in 1986, thanks to its steamy sex scenes. And I can reveal that Prime Video have commissioned a remake, in the shape of a ten-part TV series.

The show, which will be more faithful to the ‘ erotic poem’ novella than the film, will once again feature Basinger, but she won’t be the lead. Instead, she has agreed to take a role as a university professor.

It has not yet been determined who the two stars will be, but the thinking is that they should not be too well-known. Filming will start this summer in London and Manchester.

As some may recall, the film starred Basinger and Rourke ( pictured) as a couple of strangers who quickly become embroiled in a hot but completely random affair with sadomasochistic overtones.

The original book — which achieved instant notoriety when released in 1978 — was by American journalist Ingeborg Day, writing under the nom de plume Elizabeth McNeill.

In the book, which is presented as a memoir, the reader learns that what starts as a one-night stand turns into a sexually submissive relationship which lasts for 9½ weeks. At the end, the narrator has a mental breakdown.

Day wrote a second book, Ghost Waltz, in which she grappled with her Austrian father’s Nazi past and the death of her son as a child. She committed suicide herself in 2011 at the age of 70, having never acknowledged publicly that she was the author of her most famous work.