Sharon Vonne Stone (born March 10, 1958) is an American actress, producer, and former fashion model. She came to international attention for her performance in the 1992 blockbuster film Basic Instinct.
Early 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, reportedly, ancestral roots in Galway, Ireland.
She lives in Beverly Hills, California, and owns a ranch in New Zealand.
Education
Sharon Stone attended Saegertown High School in Saegertown, Pennsylvania. She is said to have been 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.[1]
After skipping a grade in school, she was involuntarily transferred from Saegertown High School to Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, enrolling at the young age of 15.
Entertainment career
Modeling 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 170 cm (5 ft 7 in).
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 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 several movies of poor quality, such as King Solomon's Mines (1985), and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987).
She also played the part of 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, 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 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 (the part was offered to 13 other actresses before being offered to Stone). 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. When seeing her own privates in the leg-crossing scene[2] 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 nomination for Best Actress for her role as Ginger in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995).