Sharon Vonne Stone (born March 10, 1958) is an American actress, model, and producer. She came to international attention for her performance in the 1992 blockbuster film Basic Instinct, which caused controversy for its erotic content.
She was one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood in the 1990s, until she moved to San Francisco to live with her husband, Phil Bronstein, and raise their adopted son, Roan Joseph. When that marriage dissolved, Stone returned to Los Angeles and resumed her film career.
Personal Life
Stone was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, between Pittsburgh and Erie, Pennsylvania. The second of four children, she is the daughter of Joe and Dorothy Stone, blue collar workers with ancestral roots in Galway, Ireland. Her brother, Michael, a convicted drug dealer, was linked with British heiress and photographer, Tamara Beckwith, until Beckwith's wealthy parents threatened to disinherit her.
She lives in Beverly Hills, California, and owns a ranch in New Zealand.
Education
Sharon was said to be a smart and ambitious child. She has described herself as "a nerdy, ugly duckling who sat in the back of the closet with a flashlight, reading. 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 didn't 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, 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 to Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, enrolling at the young age of 15.
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 of 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.
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 split up three years later, and their divorce was finalized in 1990.
On February 14, 1998, she married Phil Bronstein, editor of the 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.
On May 7, 2005, Stone, aged 47, adopted a baby boy who had been born in Texas to a surrogate mother. She named the baby boy Laird Vonne Stone.
In 2005 during a television interview for her movie Basic Instinct 2, Sharon arguably came out as bisexual stating "Middle age is an open-minded period." (see [1]). Though in an interview on the Parkinson talk show in England on March 18, 2006, she said she was straight.
Religion
In the early 1990's, Stone became a member of the controversial Church of Scientology. The religion, often considered a 'cult', is infamous due to many Hollywood followers. Stone remained with the religion until recently when fellow actor Richard Gere introduced her to the Dalai Lama. Since then she converted to Buddhism.
Medical Problems
Shortly after the release of Total Recall, Stone had a bad 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 the hospital, the concussion was diagnosed along with a dislocated shoulder and jaw, several broken ribs, and three compressed disks in her back. The accident left scars that are visible in some of her later screen appearances.
On Sep. 29, 2001, Stone suffered a vertebral artery dissection which caused a subarachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding around the brain membrane); this was initially misreported as a stroke. Fortunately, she was treated quickly enough and made a complete recovery [2].
Entertainment career
Modelling Career
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 $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 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 the elite Ford modeling agency in New York. Her height is 1.70m (5ft 7in).
1980 - 1990
After joining the Ford Modeling Agency, Stone spent a few years modeling, and appeared in TV commercials for Burger King, Clairol and Maybelline, but she did not enjoy her work. 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 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 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 seven movies of poor quality, such as King Solomon's Mines (1985), and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987).
1990 - 2004
The infamous scene in
Basic Instinct, which arguably reveals Sharone Stone's pubic region.
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, 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 true star, arguably the Faye Dunaway of her generation, was that of Catherine Tramell, a brilliant, coke-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. Several better known actresses of the time such as Geena Davis turned down the part mostly because of the nudity required. In the movie’s most notorious scene Ms. Tramell is being questioned by the police and she crosses and uncrosses her legs revealing the fact she was not wearing any underwear. Nothing was left to the imagination. When seeing her own privates 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." [3] 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 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 an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination for her role as Ginger in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995), a role for which she won a Golden Globe award.
2004 - present
Her striking resemblance to actress Joanna Cassidy, who plays the loveable Margaret Chenowich on HBO's hit Six Feet Under, has led some to suggest that Stone has been making frequent cameo appearances on the show. (E News Daily 6/3/05).
After years of litigation, Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction is due to be released on March 31, 2006. Much of the cause of the delay was Stone's disputes with the filmmakers over the amount of nudity in the movie: she wanted a lot, and they wanted much less. An orgy scene was cut in order to achieve the R MPAA rating for the US 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?" [4]
In March 2006, Stone traveled to Israel to promote peace in the Middle East through a press conference with Nobel Peace Prize winner Simon Peres, during which she acted strangly and made several moderately offensive remarks. [5]
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"People just are sitting there going, like, 'I don't care what she's saying, I don't care what she's saying, I just want to know, does she get naked in the movie? Is she naked? Nude nude nude naked Do I see her boobies? I don't care what she's saying, I don't care, I don't care, is she naked?' So let's just get through to that...YES!
[...]
I said I was going to Israel, and a lot of people went, 'YOU CAN'T GO THERE! YOU CAN'T GO TO ISRAEL! YOU CAN'T! {unintelligable excited noises} WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO ISRAEL FOR!? {unintelligable excited noises} WAR!
[...]
And I called my publicist, who's this great, Jewish woman..."
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She was publicly lampooned on The Daily Show by host Jon Stewart for her outbursts and apparent use of a peace conference to promote her new film. [6]
Partial filmography
External links
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