Sharon Stone

After more than a decade playing small but noteworthy roles in action thrillers and comedies, American actress Sharon Stone became a bona fide movie star and a major sex symbol in the early 1990s. The film that propelled her to stardom is also her best known, the erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992). Fans and critics hailed Stone’s glamorous style, although some detracted her films for their depictions of women, violence, and sexuality. Stone eventually took on a wider variety of roles, earning accolades for her performances in the crime drama Casino (1995) as well as quieter, quirky films such as Broken Flowers (2005).

Background

Stone was born on March 10, 1958, and grew up in the small Pennsylvania town of Meadville, the second of four children. Her father, Joe Stone, was a factory worker, and her mother, Dorothy Stone (née Lawson), was an accountant and a homemaker. Stone grew up “hangin’ with the guys,” as she recalled in her 2021 memoir, and she was often outdoors playing in her tree house. Her childhood had a dark side, however. She and her sister were sexually abused by their grandfather from a young age. In high school she was sexually harassed by a teacher and by her manager at her job at a McDonald’s restaurant.

When Stone was 15 she received a scholarship to the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, where she studied creative writing and fine arts. When she was 17, she won a county beauty contest, and she left the university to pursue a modeling career. In 1977 she moved to New Jersey to live with her aunt and immediately signed with the Ford Modeling Agency in New York City, which led to appearances in national print and television ads.

Early roles

Stone’s first movie role was as “Pretty Girl on Train” in the Woody Allen film Stardust Memories (1980). Although she had no lines and was onscreen for only a few seconds, her performance was a charming debut. (Stone’s memorable scene shows her planting a kiss on the train window as Allen admires her from another train.) Her first speaking role was in the horror movie Deadly Blessing (1981), followed by several TV roles and appearances in a range of other movies, such as the comedy Irreconcilable Differences (1984), alongside child star Drew Barrymore; the Indiana Jones knockoffs King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986); and the action flicks Above the Law and Action Jackson (both 1988).

Total Recall

In 1990 she landed a significant supporting role in the Paul Verhoeven-directed blockbuster Total Recall, playing the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character. The movie’s box-office success gave Stone her first taste of stardom. To promote the movie, and in hopes of securing the lead role in Verhoeven’s next project, she posed nude for the July 1990 issue of Playboy. In 2020 Stone recalled on The Drew Barrymore Show, “I’m more of a logic person and a strategy person. Even when I wanted Basic Instinct, I decided I was going to do a Playboy article, specifically because I wanted to get this film.”

Basic Instinct

Basic Instinct, starring Stone and Michael Douglas, was released in 1992. Almost overnight, the sensationalistic thriller turned Stone into an international sex symbol. Playing an icy, bisexual femme fatale suspected of murder, she had a memorable—and highly controversial—scene in which she uncrosses her legs during a police interrogation, revealing to the room full of male detectives that she is wearing nothing beneath her white minidress. The movie was a sleeper hit, but a number of groups objected to its portrayal of women and bisexuals. The National Organization for Women condemned it as one of the “most blatantly misogynistic film[s] in recent memory.” Some prominent feminist authors disagreed; Camille Paglia praised Stone for having given “one of the great performances by a woman in screen history,” and Naomi Wolf argued that Stone’s character was “not a cartoon villainess…not a misogynist two-dimensional nightmare—but a complex, compelling Nietzschean Uberfraulein who owns everything about her own power.”

From Sliver to Casino

After her career breakthrough, Stone starred in another erotic thriller, Sliver (1993); the romance drama Intersection (1994) opposite Richard Gere; The Specialist (1994) with Sylvester Stallone; and the revisionist western The Quick and the Dead (1995) with Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, and a teenaged Leonardo DiCaprio. Stone’s no-holds-barred performance in Martin Scorsese’s mob drama Casino (1995), as Ginger McKenna, the beautiful but troubled call-girl wife of Robert De Niro’s Mafia flunkie, earned Stone a Golden Globe Award for best actress and an Academy Award nomination.

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Other films and TV work

Stone’s subsequent films include the mystery thriller Diabolique, with French actress Isabelle Adjani; the death-row drama Last Dance (both 1996); and the coming-of-age comedy The Mighty (1998). In 1999 she took on a comedy role in The Muse and in Sidney Lumet’s crime thriller Gloria. Stone also had occasional roles in TV movies and series, such as If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), The Practice (2003; winning an Emmy Award for her guest role), Agent X (2015), and Ratched (2020). Among her notable later films are Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers (2005), Basic Instinct 2 and the ensemble period drama Bobby (both 2006), James Franco’s The Disaster Artist (2017), and What About Love (2024).

Life as a Hollywood sex symbol

In 2021 Stone published her memoir The Beauty of Living Twice, in which she discusses such life events as a stroke and subarachnoid hemorrhage she suffered in 2001 that bled into her brain, head, and spine. Her doctors gave her a 1 percent chance of survival. “There is something that happens when you start over, live again,” she wrote. “A kind of mystery unraveling.” Stone also wrote that she had been tricked by a production crew member into not wearing underwear during her infamous scene in Basic Instinct and that she did not know how much the scene revealed until a screening at the end of production. She threatened Verhoeven with legal action but ultimately “chose to allow this scene in the film. Why? Because it was correct for the film and for the character; and because, after all, I did it.”

While promoting the book, Stone did an interview with The New York Times in which she reflected on her onscreen persona. She told the Times, “I have had a unique opportunity in my career to play the bad guy.…People keep coming to me for those parts because they think I’m good at it, and I think they think I like doing it. I actually don’t like doing it, and I don’t really want to do it, purposelessly, anymore. If I’m going to play something dark now, I need a reason other than just, it’s funny.”

Stone has remained outspoken about sexism in Hollywood. In 2024 she told The Louis Theroux Podcast that movie producer Robert Evans suggested she have sex with her costar William Baldwin during the making of Sliver to improve their chemistry and performances onscreen. Stone had earlier referenced the alleged incident in her memoir without identifying the specific film or the people involved, writing that after she told the producer off she was castigated as “difficult.”

Personal life and activism

Stone has been married twice and has three sons. She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1995.

Stone has been involved in many charitable causes, especially HIV/AIDS activism. In 2007 she received the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for her activism related to Parkinson disease, and in 2013 she received the Peace Summit Award. She has also worked on behalf of unhoused people in Los Angeles and founded (with her sister) a charity for children and families in need called Planet Hope. In 2023 she was named Global Citizen of the Year by the United Nations Correspondents Association.