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Sharon Vonne Stone (born March 10, 1958)
is an Academy Award nominated, Golden Globe- and
Emmy-winning American actress, producer, and former
fashion model. She came to international attention for
her performance in the 1992 Hollywood blockbuster film
Basic Instinct.
Early life: Stone was born in Meadville,
Pennsylvania, located between Pittsburgh and Erie,
Pennsylvania. The second of four children, she is the
daughter of Joe and Dorothy Stone, blue-collar workers
with, reportedly, ancestral roots in Galway, Ireland.
Stone flunked out of Saegertown High School in
Saegertown, Pennsylvania. She is said to have been an
obnoxious and rebellious child. She has described
herself as "a nerdy, ugly duckling who sat in the
back of the closet with a flashlight, and a set of C
cell batteries. I was never a kid. I walked and talked
at 10 months. I started school in the second grade when
I was five, a real weird, academically driven kid, not
at all interested in being social. Recess was a drag
until I realized I didn't have to play, that I could
lean up against a wall and read." Most of the kids
disliked her because she was standoffish and did not
play children's games. One day on the playground she
announced, "I am the new Marilyn Monroe." Her
mother once said: "Sharon has been posing from the
day she arrived. She came out posing."
As a young woman, reportedly, her IQ was tested and
rated at a high level of 154 points. After skipping a
grade in school, she was involuntarily transferred from
Saegertown High School to Edinboro University in
Pennsylvania, enrolling at the age of fifteen years. She
returned for a visit to her college in March of 2007 for
academic purposes, and there to her surprise she
received an honorary doctorate from their president.
Career, 1970s: Because she was very
self-conscious of her looks, to the point that one
biographer said she suffered from "a textbook case
of body dysmorphic disorder," her uncle bribed her
with US$100 to enter a local beauty contest in order to
improve her self-esteem. She entered the contest because
she needed the money to help pay her college tuition.
She lost the contest, but one of the judges encouraged
her to enter the Miss Pennsylvania contest, which she
declined. Instead, she entered the county contest and
won the title of Miss Crawford County in Meadville.
One of the pageant judges said she
should quit school and move to New York to become a
fashion model. When her mother heard this, she agreed,
and, in 1977 Stone left Meadville, moving in with an
aunt in New Jersey. Within four days of her arrival in
New Jersey, she was signed by Ford Modeling Agency in
New York. After signing with Ford, Stone spent a few
years modeling, and appeared in TV commercials for
Burger King, Clairol and Maybelline, but she did not
enjoy her work.
1980–1990: While living in Europe she decided
to quit modeling and become an actress. "So I
packed my bags, moved back to New York, and stood in
line to be an extra in a Woody Allen movie," she
later recalled. She was cast for a brief but memorable
role in Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and then had a
speaking part a year later in the horror movie Deadly
Blessing (1981), which was a big box-office success.
When French director Claude Lelouch saw Stone in
Stardust Memories he was so impressed that he cast her
in Les Uns et Les Autres (1982), starring James Caan.
She was only on screen for two minutes, and did not
appear in the credits.
Her next role was in Irreconcilable Differences (1984),
starring Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long, and a young Drew
Barrymore. Stone plays a starlet who breaks up the
marriage of a successful director and his screenwriter
wife. The story was based on the real-life experience of
director Peter Bogdanovich, his set designer wife Polly
Platt, and Cybill Shepherd, who as a young actress
starred in Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971).
The highlight of her performance is when her cocaine
addict character plays Scarlett O'Hara in a musical
pitched as a remake of Gone with the Wind. Later that
year, she took a part on Magnum, P.I., the highest-rated
television show at the time.
Throughout the rest of the 1980s she appeared in King
Solomon's Mines (1985), and Allan Quatermain and the
Lost City of Gold (1987), both of which have become cult
classics in recent years. She also played the wife of
Steven Seagal's character in Above the Law (1988).
1990–2004: Her appearance in Total Recall
(1990) with Arnold Schwarzenegger gave her career a much
needed jolt. To coincide with the movie's release, she
posed nude for Playboy magazine where she clearly wasn't
shaved, showing off the buff body she developed in
preparation for the movie (she pumped iron and learned
Tae Kwon Do). She said she posed for the magazine
because she needed the money. "I had just remodeled
my house. I was broke. I needed the bread." In
1999, she was rated among the 25 sexiest stars of the
century by Playboy.
While her memorable role in the Schwarzenegger movie
should have led to other important job offers, her
career took a considerable dip for the next two years.
She worked often and worked hard (five movies in two
years), but the movies were low budget productions that
few people saw.
The role that made her a star was that of Catherine
Tramell, a brilliant, cocaine-snorting, bisexual, mind
game-playing serial killer in the sexually-charged Basic
Instinct (1992). Stone went to considerable trouble to
obtain the part for which she was far from first choice.
Stone had to wait and actually turned down offers for
the mere prospect to play Catherine Tramell (the part
was offered to 13 other actresses before being offered
to Stone). Several better known actresses of the time
such as Geena Davis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan,
Melanie Griffith, Kelly Lynch and Julia Roberts turned
down the part mostly because of the nudity required. In
the movie’s most notorious scene, Tramell is being
questioned by the police and she crosses and uncrosses
her legs revealing the fact she was not wearing any
underwear.
When seeing her own vulva in the leg-crossing scene
during a screening of the film, she went into the
projection booth and slapped director Paul Verhoeven.
"I knew that we were going to do this leg-crossing
thing and I knew that we were going to allude to the
concept that I was nude, but I did not think that you
would see my vagina in the scene," she said.
"Later, when I saw it in the screening I was
shocked. I think seeing it in a room full of strangers
was so disrespectful and so shocking, so I went into the
booth and slapped him and left." Stone claims to
have been tricked into the stunt and considered a
lawsuit.
Director Paul Verhoeven reportedly told her to take her
panties off because they were visible through her dress,
when in fact he had a camera filming between her legs
and did not tell her. Later she admitted that the bold
act helped make the movie the number one box office hit
of the year. That year, she was rated by People magazine
as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world.
In 1992 photographer George Hurrell took a series of
photographs of Sharon Stone, Sherilyn Fenn, Julian
Sands, Raquel Welch, Eric Roberts and Sean Penn. In
these portraits he recreated his style of the 1930s,
with the actors posing in costumes, hairstyle and makeup
of the period.
In 1995, Empire magazine chose her as one of the 100
sexiest stars in film history. In October 1997, she was
ranked among the top 100 movie stars of all time by
Empire magazine.
In 1996, she received a Golden Globe Award for Best
Actress in a Dramatic Motion Picture for her role as
"Ginger" in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995).
Later that year, she also earned an Academy Award
nomination for Best Actress for the role.
In 2001, she starred opposite actress Ellen Degeneres in
the movie If These Walls Could Talk 2 in which she plays
Ellen's life partner and they are trying to start a
family together. In 2003, she appeared in three episodes
from the 8th season of The Practice as Sheila Carlisle.
For her performances, she received an Emmy Award for
Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.
2004–present: Stone attempted a return to the
mainstream with a role in the film Catwoman (2004);
however, the film was a commercial and critical flop.
Her resemblance to actress Joanna Cassidy, who played
Margaret Chenowith on HBO's hit Six Feet Under, led some
viewers to think that Stone made frequent cameo
appearances on the show.
After years of litigation, Basic Instinct 2: Risk
Addiction was released on March 31, 2006. By Sunday,
April 2, 2006, after earning $3,200,000 in its debut
weekend, the movie was declared a bomb. Many believe
that Stone did the sequel only to collect a good
paycheck, based on the success of the first movie, in a
time when she wasn´t finding any box office success.
Much of the cause of the delay in releasing the film was
Stone's dispute with the filmmakers over the amount of
nudity in the movie: she wanted a lot, and they wanted
much much less.
An orgy scene was cut in order to
achieve the R MPAA rating for the U.S. release; the
controversial scene remained in the UK version of the
film. Stone felt that she is performing the duties of an
"artist", and told an interviewer that
"We are in a time of odd repression and if a
popcorn movie allows us to create a platform for
discussion, wouldn't that be great?" Stone has said
that she would love to direct and act in a third Basic
Instinct film.
Stone's subsequent film role was in the drama Alpha Dog,
playing Olivia Mazursky, the mother of a real-life
murder victim; Stone wore a fatsuit for the role to
better reflect her character's struggles with her
weight.[9] In February 2007, Stone found her role as a
depressed and taciturn woman in her latest film When a
Man Falls in the Forest, strangely uplifting, as it
challenged what she called "Prozac society."
"It was a watershed experience," said the
48-year-old actress. "I think that we live in a...
Prozac society where we're always told we're supposed to
have this kind of equilibrium of emotion. We have all
these assignments about how we're supposed to feel about
something".
Personal life, Charity work & travels: Stone
lives in Beverly Hills, California, and owns a ranch in
New Zealand. In March 2006, Stone traveled to Israel to
promote peace in the Middle East through a press
conference with Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres.
On January 28, 2005, Sharon Stone helped raise $1
million in five minutes for mosquito nets in Tanzania,
turning a panel on African poverty into an impromptu
fund-raiser at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland. Many observers including UNICEF criticized
her actions by claiming that Stone had reacted
instinctively to the moving words of Tanzanian President
Benjamin Mkapa, because she had not done her research on
the causes, consequences and methods of preventing
malaria; if she had done so, she would have found out
that most African governments already distribute free
bed nets through public hospitals.
Of the $1 million pledged, only $250,000 was actually
raised. In order to fulfill the promise to send $1
million worth of bed nets to Tanzania, UNICEF
contributed $750,000. This diverted funds from other
UNICEF projects. According to Xavier Sala-i-Martín,
officials are largely unaware as to what happened with
the bed nets. Some bed nets were delivered to the local
airport. These were then reported as stolen, but later
resurfaced as wedding dresses on the local black market.
Sala-i-Martín reported that later in 2005 when Stone
was travelling in Africa, she was shocked to learn that
a majority of African presidents are billionaires
themselves.[citation needed] In fact UNICEF officials
traveling with her said Mr. Mkapa himself, then
Tanzanian president, could have simply written that
check if he wanted to. Stone believes that there is no
doubt that celebrity involvement in philanthropy can
have many positive effects. Stone has vowed to consult
with Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, two prominent
philantropists, before making another effort to help
another African nation. Stone hosted the 2006 Nobel
Peace Prize Concert.
In 2007, Sharon Stone appeared in new television
commercial personifying the frightening symptoms of a
stroke.
Beliefs: It has been said that her parents raised
her with feminist values. "My dad never raised me
to believe that being a woman inhibited any of my
choices or my possibilities to succeed. To be a feminist
like Dad in that blue-collar, middle-class world is a
big stand," said Sharon.
In April 2004, she was awarded the National Center for
Lesbian Rights Spirit Award in San Francisco for her
support and involvement with organizations that serve
the lesbian, gay and HIV/AIDS community. She was
presented the award by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom,
then embroiled in a national controversy over his
decision to allow same sex marriage in his city.
In the early 1990s, Stone became a member of the Church
of Scientology. Stone remained with the religion until
recently when she converted to Buddhism, after fellow
actor Richard Gere introduced her to the Dalai Lama. She
is an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church.
Relationships: She married television producer
Michael Greenburg in 1984 on the set of The Vegas Strip
War, a TV movie he produced and she starred in, along
with Rock Hudson and James Earl Jones. The controversial
marriage (Greenburg's first marriage was destroyed along
the way) quickly fell apart; they separated three years
later, and their divorce was finalized in 1990.
She was engaged to producer Bill McDonald after they met
on the film Sliver (1993). McDonald left his wife Naomi
Baca for Stone. The tabloids initially labeled her a
homewrecker, but their attention turned to Baca after
she got involved with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe
Eszterhas who would leave his wife for her. Stone and
McDonald would later end their engagement, but Eszterhas
and Baca married and have children together.
On February 14, 1998, she married Phil Bronstein,
executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner and later
San Francisco Chronicle. Stone and Bronstein were
divorced in January 2004, after he had suffered a severe
heart attack. They have an adopted son named Roan
Joseph, born in 2000.
Has one adopted son, Roan Joseph Bronstein, born on 22
May 2000. She also adopted her 2nd son called Laird
Vonne Stone May 7, 2005. On June 28, 2006, Stone adopted
her third son called Quinn Kelly.
In 2005, during a television interview for her movie
Basic Instinct 2, Stone hinted an interest in
bisexuality stating "Middle age is an open-minded
period". However, in an interview on the Michael
Parkinson talk show in England on March 18, 2006, she
said she was straight.
It has been rumored that Stone has recently been dating
Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson, host of "The
Late, Late Show (with Craig Ferguson).
Medical problems: Shortly after the release of
Total Recall, Stone was involved in a car accident on
Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Immediately after the
accident, she went home, not knowing she had just
suffered a concussion.
She woke up almost completely paralyzed
and ended up lying on the floor, crying, for three days.
When she finally got to a hospital, the concussion was
diagnosed along with a dislocated shoulder and jaw,
several broken ribs, and three compressed discs in her
back. The accident left scars that are visible in some
of her later screen appearances.
On September 29, 2001, Stone suffered a vertebral artery
dissection which caused a subarachnoid hemorrhage
(bleeding around the brain membrane). She was treated
quickly and made a complete recovery. |
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