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| Sharon Stone (born Sharon Vonne Stone
on March 10, 1958), is an American actress, model and producer. She
came to international attention for her performance in the 1992
blockbuster film "Basic Instinct", which caused controversy for its
erotic content. She was one of the highest paid actresses in
Hollywood in the 1990s, until she moved to San Francisco to live
with her husband and raise their adopted son. When that marriage
dissolved, Stone returned to Los Angeles and resumed her film career. |
Stone was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, USA, a town in which
the number-one occupation is milking cows. The second of four
children, she is the daughter of Joe and Dorothy Stone, who were
blue collar workers. It has been said that her parents raised her
with feminist values. "My dad never raised me to believe that being
a woman inhibited any of my choices or my possibilities to succeed.
To be a feminist like Dad in that blue-collar, middle-class world is
a big stand," said Sharon.
She was 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 and read. 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 standoffsh and didn't play children's
games. One day on the playground she announced, "I am the new
Marilyn Monroe." Her mother 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. After skipping a grade in school, she was involuntarily
transferred from Saegertown High to Edinboro University in
Pennsylvania, enrolling at the young age of 15.
Because she was very self-conscious of her looks, to the point that
one biographer said she suffered from "a textbook case of dysmorphic
body image, 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.
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 didn't 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
didn't 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 sucessful 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 muscal
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.
She married television producer Michael Greenburg in 1984 on the set
of The Vegas Strip War, a TV movie he produced and she starred in,
along with Rock Hudson and James Earl Jones. The marriage quickly
fell apart; they split up three years later, and their divorce was
finalized in 1990.
Throughout the rest of the 1980s she appeared in seven movies of
poor quality, such as King Solomon's Mines (1985), and Allan
Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987).
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."
Shortly after the release of Total Recall, Stone had a bad car
accident on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Immediately after the
acident, she went home, not knowing she had just suffered a
concussion. She woke up almost completely paralyzed, and ended up
laying on the floor, crying, for three days. When she finally got to
the hospital, she was diagnosed with the concussion, a dislocated
shoulder and jaw, several broken ribs, and three compressed disks in
her back. The accident left scars that are visible in some of her
later screen appearances.
While her memorable role in the Schwarzenegger movie should have
lead 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. It wasn't until she took the role as a
coke-snorting bisexual serial killer in the sexually-charged Basic
Instinct (1992) that Sharon Stone became a true star. It was 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 1996, she received an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination
for her role as Ginger in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995), a role
for which she won a Golden Globe award. In October 1997, she was
ranked among the top 100 movie stars of all time by Empire magazine.
On February 14, 1998, she married Phil Bronstein, editor of the San
Francisco Chronicle. In 1999, she was rated among the 25 sexiest
stars of the century by Playboy.
Stone and Bronstein got a divorce in January 2004, after he had
suffered a severe heart attack. They have an adopted son named Roan,
born in 2000. Stone herself was hospitalized following a brain
aneurysm in October 2001, but has since recovered.
In 2005 during a television interview for her movie Basic Instinct
2, Sharon came out as bisexual stating "Middle age is an open-minded
period." [1]
In April of 2004, she was awarded the National Center for Lesbian
Rights Spirit Award in San Francisco for her support and involvement
with organizations that serve the lesbian, gay and HIV/AIDS
community. She was presented the award by San Francisco Mayor Gavin
Newsom, then embroiled in a national controversy over his decision
to allow same sex marriage in his city.
She lives in Beverly Hills, California, and owns a ranch in New
Zealand.
On Saturday, May 7, 2005, Stone, at the age of 47, adopted a baby
boy who was born in Texas to a surrogate mother. She has named the
baby Laird Vonne Stone. |
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