Sharon Stone is one of the most familiar faces of Hollywood, but her journey to get to this point has not always been smooth sailing.
The actress, now 65, rose to fame after the release of 1992 hit film Basic Instinct which earned her a Chicago Film Critics Association Award, Golden Globe Award, and Saturn Award nominations.
Stone played a well renowned character named Catherine Tramell, known for flashing cops during an interrogation scene.
While in conversation with CNN‘s Chris Wallace, Stone opened up about the mass fandom that she gained after the film took off.
“I didn’t now on Friday when that movie came out that I would be basically a nobody, and on Tuesday I would go to get my eye glasses picked up in Sunset plaza and I would come out in my little 325 BMW and I would stop at the stop light and everybody would climb all over my car,” she said.
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During the encounter, Stone noted her panicked attempt to figure out what the road rules were in the situation.
“The light would turn green and cars would start beeping and I wouldn’t know is it legal to drive when people are all over the top of your car,” she said.
In Stone’s 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, the actress spoke further to feeling like a “nobody” in Hollywood before the film’s release, and explained how hard she fought to get the role.
“Basic Instinct was my 18th movie,” Stone wrote.
“For years, I had been getting pummelled doing a bunch of crap movies… I was 32 years old… aging out of the business I hadn’t really gotten into yet. I needed a break.”
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The star recalled her manager breaking into the office of a casting director working with director Paul Verhoeven to steal the script of the classic film for her.
“I had already done Total Recall with Paul, but Michael Douglas didn’t want to test with me,” she said. “Hey, I was a nobody compared to him, and this was such a risky movie.”
Stone added: “Eventually, after they had offered the part to 12 other actresses who had turned it down, Michael agreed to test with me.”
Even after fighting to get the part an amassing huge success as a result, Stone wasn’t exaggerating about the difference between the day before and after the film’s release.
“When I first got invited to the Oscars right before Basic Instinct, the movie hadn’t come out, so no one would lend me a dress,” Stone said during a March interview on the Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi podcast.
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When arriving to the event the star recalled showing up in her Betsey Johnson polyester jumpsuit while being surrounded by stunning gowns costing up to $50,000.
“That was the best I could do,” she said, adding that aside from her outfit, she was also responsible for her own glam.
“I’m doing my own hair and makeup and I was just like, ‘Wow, this is awful. Like, how am I going to do this, right?'” she recalled.
While interacting with other actors and actresses however, the star soon knew that something great was about to happen.
“… I got there and I was like in the fourth or fifth row back which was really good,” she said.
“And I was on the aisle, and I was seated right behind Anthony Hopkins, and when I walked by, he put his hands together and put them over his head like a champion and held them up to me when I passed him. I was like, ‘Oh my God, he saw my movie.'”
After Basic Instinct
Although the actress was desperate for a break after all her hard work, the fame the came after Basic Instinct didn’t do Stone a world of good.
”In the olden days, what we were doing was very new,” she said. “This was a feature film for a major studio, and we had nudity, sex, homosexuality, all these things that, in my era, were breaking norms.”
The public attention that came from the film earned her a firm lecture from a friend who gave her advice to help her cope with the change.
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As for dealing with all the public attention, Stone told USA Today that a friend had to educate her about the “new rules” of fame.
“I was on my knees, dry heaving. And he took me to his room, sat me on the side of the tub, ran some cold water, told me to put my feet in there and gave me a Valium,” Stone told USA Today of the emotional incident after the film’s Cannes premiere.
“He handled a lot of big stars in his time and he was like, ‘Look, from now on, life is going to change. You need Sharon-Stone-the-movie-star clothes, and then you need your clothes.’ You need to start separating out your life so that you have a sane existence.”
Stone continued, recalling his bizarre advice about autographs.
“He actually told me to pay for anything under a hundred dollars with a check because people won’t cash the check. They’ll want your autograph. Which is something I didn’t do. But it was sound advice.”
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The repercussions also affected her family with the star losing custody of her son after a judge had apparently asked her “tiny little tiny boy ‘do you know your mother makes sex movies?'”
She described it as an “abuse by the system,” noting that the scene was just “maybe a 16th of a second of possible nudity.”
The actress was so heartbroken that it took a toll on her health.
“I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in my upper and lower chamber of my heart,” she recounted. “It broke my heart.”
These days you can find the star posting regular updates about her life on social media, particularly Instagram.
In regards to projects, Stone reportedly optioned the right to Lisa Barr’s novel Woman on Fire, and is set to produce a film adaptation in which she will star.
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