Sharon Stone: ‘Sex symbol? I think that’s funny’
AT the height of her fame, Hollywood — and the world — saw the iconic actress as a sex bomb. But as her career ascends once again, she’d rather be known as philanthropist and mother.
Stellar
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SHARON Stone conducts business meetings from her bedroom. Well, at least she did that one time in 2016, when the actor beckoned director Susan Walter to her palatial Bel-Air mansion to discuss a project. The place was a mess. Tarps everywhere, no place to sit... no clear surface on which to spread out a film script or a legal pad to take notes. They would have to improvise.
The spread was undergoing renovations; Stone has lived in the house, one-time residence of actor Montgomery Clift, for 25 years. She has a passion for interior design, and delights in rolling up her sleeves to ensure her visions are achieved — right down to the topiary, which includes a striking angel’s trumpet tree that holds pride of place poolside, and under which Stone sits when she wants a moment to reflect. “My house wasn’t finished when I bought it,” Stone tells Stellar. “And I did everything — right down to planting all the foliage. I finished the project completely.”
Stone has a knack for getting the job done, and by the time she welcomed Walter into her home, she had already flipped the script — quite literally. Walter wrote her romantic comedy A Little Something For Your Birthday for a much younger lead actress — age 25 — to play the role of Senna Berges, a flighty LA fashion designer struggling to find love, much less her purpose in life. She had initially approached Stone, who is now 60, to play her mother. But Stone had a different idea.
As Walter recalls it, “She said to me, ‘I can’t get the script out of my head. I had a vision that I could play the lead. We should make it something fresher, something more relevant. So many women my age had failed careers, got married, got divorced. They’re at this age where they just want to breathe new life into who they are.’”
After nearly 40 years in film and on TV, and on the heels of a milestone birthday, the woman who set Hollywood ablaze in the ’90s is back in the spotlight. But the optics have changed since Stone became a household name with one revealing cross of her legs in 1992’s Basic Instinct. A raft of powerful men and former collaborators are now exiled from the business. Her female peers are landing some of their best projects in years. And Stone, who battled a brain haemorrhage that nearly killed her and pressed pause on her career in the early 2000s, is only too happy to bask in the renewed attention, secure in the knowledge she is still building her legacy without compromising for anyone.
Glamour was in short supply when Sharon Stone was growing up in the sparsely populated, far northwestern corner of Pennsylvania. Her late father Joseph worked around the clock to support his wife and four children, and his perceptive young daughter took note of the toll it took. But, Stone tells Stellar, she also came to inherit his fierce work ethic. “My dad worked in a factory an hour away from home. That’s just really, really tough — to be driving in brutal weather, to be exhausted and fried all the time and making so little money in a job where, when you leave, you get a brass lighter as your goodbye present. This is not a gold watch situation.”
Her mother Dorothy did not have it much better. At the age of nine, Stone says, “She was given away to be a live-in housekeeper. My mother had a terrible childhood. She came from abject poverty — rickets-and-scurvy level poverty. The thought was that would be a better life for her. It wasn’t, of course. It was a terrible life. So she wasn’t really equipped to parent. But she made our house lovely, and did the best she could.”
Last year, Stone fought back tears as she told the crowd at a Hollywood awards ceremony that her mother “never really told me she loved me. I said, ‘Mum, you never really let me lean on you.’ And she said, ‘That’s right, I taught you to stand on your own two goddamn feet.’”
Stone has carried her parents’ hard-won wisdom with her since she moved to New York City at age 17 to pursue a modelling career that then took her to Europe. But she had her sights set on a different kind of performance. On the set of Woody Allen’s 1980 film Stardust Memories, she was plucked from a crowd of extras when the actor cast to play “Pretty Girl On Train” failed to show. There was no dialogue: Stone just had to smile and kiss a window. The result eats up less than 15 seconds of film, but still bears the hallmarks of what would become Sharon Stone’s brand: sexy, beguiling and impossible to ignore. As she later said, “I gave it my best shot to melt the sucker.”
She knocked around film sets and TV studios before breaking through in the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller Total Recall; two years later, she would rejoin its director, Paul Verhoeven, for Basic Instinct. That movie made her a celebrity the world over, kicking off a run that relied heavily on her sexuality. In films like Sliver and Casino (for which she won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nod) and Diabolique, Stone was suddenly, like it or not, the industry’s go-to vamp.
Reflecting on those years, Stone says, “I’m proud of the work I did. I thought it was competent. I think because the parts were shiny, people wanted to assume that this was who I was — not just how my work was. It’s very difficult, even for people within the business, to see your work as your work.”
To this day, the femme fatale image trails her. The media release for A Little Something For Your Birthday blares: Sharon Stone... sex symbol, celebrity, fashion icon, movie star. Asked how she feels about that running order, Stone replies, “Well, I think it’s funny, given that my life in these last 20 years has been more like rights activist, philanthropist, mother, part-time actress. Sex symbol? This is always something that eludes me, but OK. Fashion icon? I don’t know what kind of fashion icon I am if I’ve never been invited to the Met Ball.”
As to her political activism, although she was a supporter of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US presidential election, Stone’s bid to court voters in her home state was not to be. “I offered to campaign for Hillary there,” she says. “But they didn’t return my call, so I don’t really know what to say about that.”
A massive bleed into her brain from a vertebral artery dissection sent Sharon Stone to hospital in September 2001, left her unable to walk and talk — and came close to taking her life. She ultimately staged a full recovery; other than a one-year gap in her CV, she has continued to work steadily, albeit in far more intimate projects. People seem keen on calling her recent output (which also includes an acclaimed turn in the TV series Mosaic) a comeback. But the truth is Sharon Stone never really went away.
And when she stepped out at the Golden Globes ceremony in January with her 17-year-old son Roan, there was a sense that finally, a star — not an influencer, celebrity or reality-TV hanger-on, but a bona-fide star — had arrived. “There’s one or two in every generation,” Walter tells Stellar. “Sharon is incredibly fierce, and she comes at you with an intensity. It initially scared me a little bit. She’s so committed and so direct — and I think that’s part of her star quality. That’s what makes her so exciting.”
Yet early in her career, Stone says, she ran up against “a tremendous amount of resistance and not a lot of support, not a lot of agent loyalty. It wasn’t like the studios thought, ‘Oh, we’ve got a star. Let’s keep rolling with her.’ They didn’t help you build a career. It was more like squeezing you for all you’ve got, and that’s it.” Walter backs up this recollection of events. “She would tell me stories that would raise the hair on my arms... She’s just not buying into that behaviour anymore. I think there was a time in her life when she had to, to survive. But now she’s calling bullsh*t.”
But in Hollywood, fake smiles and broken promises are as common as celebrity divorces. And, Stone says, “People take a lot of advantage of that. We’re all in it together. This business is a team sport. It’s when you start throwing fits and acting ridiculous that it goes badly, or when you start blaming others and passing the buck. At the height of my stardom, I treated my team as well as I could — that produces quality, and it is what really creates stardom. It’s not all just about me.”
A few weeks before speaking with Stellar, Stone marked a milestone: her 60th birthday. Along with Roan, who she and ex-husband Phil Bronstein adopted in 2000, she also has adopted sons Laird, 13, and Quinn, 11, at home. Seventy of her closest friends from around the world flew in, as did her family. Her sons’ godfathers served as hosts. An emcee sang ‘Hallelujah’ as an opening prayer while everybody held hands. “It was so beautiful,” Stone says. “We ate and danced and hung out... everyone said it was the best party they’d ever been to. I certainly thought it was.”
At 60, Stone could pass for somebody 10 to 15 years younger. She rarely drinks; instead, she says, “I’ve got a whole tea situation going on... probably 20 cups of herbal tea a day.” She dances, does yoga, swims and hits the beach, does Pilates and, until recently, had a rowing machine at home. (She has since loaned it to a friend.) “I’m not a sedentary individual,” Stone says. “I don’t like fat on my body. I’m a physical performer — I like to be able to use my body in my work.” Raising three sons also keeps her on her toes, although, Stone adds, “My boys are very kind to me. I’ve got two in puberty and a lot of times I have to work through the supposedly ‘dad’ aspects of things. We sit and we talk openly. They can ask me anything, they can tell me anything. I’m an open-minded person.”
But as a single mother, Stone reveals, “I have pretty immovable boundaries. And they know they’ll bounce up against them and get their noses scratched — and then they’re going to get mad at me and I’m going to get mad at them when they do. But they’re going to have to get through it, because my boundaries won’t change. There’s not a lot of fighting with me. It’s just the way it is.”
A Little Something For Your Birthday is out now on DVD and digital.
Originally published as Sharon Stone: ‘Sex symbol? I think that’s funny’
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