Biography of Sharon StoneSharon 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 Hollywood blockbuster film Basic Instinct. She has been nominated for an Academy Award and has won Golden Globe and Emmy Awards.
Stone was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, located between Pittsburgh and Erie, Pennsylvania. The second of four children, she is the daughter of Joseph Stone, a tool and die manufacturer, and Dorothy (née Lawson), an accountant and homemaker.[1][2] She has Irish ancestry,[3] with roots in Galway.
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." Tested as a young woman, her IQ was 154 points.[4] After skipping a grade in school, she was involuntarily transferred from Saegertown High School to Edinboro University of 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 university president Frank Pogue.
Her uncle bribed her with US$100 to enter a local beauty contest in order to improve her self-esteem.[citation needed] She entered the contest because she needed the money to help pay her college tuition.[citation needed] 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.
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 Action Jackson (1988), King Solomon's Mines (1985) and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987), movies which have become cult classics in recent years. She also played the wife of Steven Seagal's character in Above the Law (1988).
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."[citation needed] In 1999, she was rated among the 25 sexiest stars of the century by Playboy.
The role that made her a star was that of Catherine Tramell, a brilliant, bisexual serial killer in Basic Instinct (1992). Stone had to wait and actually turned down offers for the mere prospect to play 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[citation needed]. 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.
Stone claimed that, although she agreed to film the flashing scene with no panties, and although she and Verhoeven had discussed the scene from the beginning of production, she was unaware just how explicit the infamous shot would be[5]. Despite having earlier claimed "it was so fun" watching the film for the first time with strangers she later said it was "so disrespectful, and so shocking, so I went into the booth and slapped him (Verhoeven) and left". Director Paul Verhoeven denied the claims that the actress was unaware and said, "as much as I love her, I hate her too, especially after the lies she told the Press about the shot between her legs, which was a straight lie". Later she admitted that the scene helped make the movie the number one box office hit of the year.[citation needed] 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 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 November 1995, Stone received her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located at 6925 Hollywood Blvd. That same year, 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 played a lesbian trying to start a family.
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.
Stone attempted a return to the mainstream with a role in the film Catwoman (2004); however, the film was a critical and commercial flop.
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. 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 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. In February 2007, Stone found her role as a clinically depressed 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," she said. "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". Presently she is being sponsored by Badgley Mischka and Dior.
In 2007, Stone appeared in new television commercial personifying the symptoms of a stroke.
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.
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