MY LIFE IN 10 PICTURES

GROWING UP in small-town Pennsylvania, Sharon Vonne Stone admitted that her mother “wasn’t very nice [and] never really told me she loved me. She said, ‘I taught you to stand on your own two goddamn feet.’ I felt bad about that, until I realized what it must have been like [for her] to be a 9-year-old maid.” After modeling in Europe, Sharon used that upbringing to survive 12 years in Hollywood before her breakthrough

in Basic Instinct, and brought her steely exterior to roles that made her a movie star and overcome some bombs along the way. “If you act like you know what you’re doing, you can do anything you want —

except neurosurgery,” she quipped. Sharon, who turned 62 on March 10, found that out the hard way after a near-fatal 2001 stroke. “I spent two years learning to walk and talk again. People treated me in a way that was brutally unkind — it took me about seven years [to recover].” But that same determination helped her fight back, with the love of her adopted sons Roan, Quinn and Laird. “I’m grateful my kids

chose me,” she said. “I am a lucky mom.”

1

1980 MEMORY LANE Sharon made her film debut as a beauty Woody Allen spots in Stardust Memories. “I was cast as an extra, and [a crew member] said, ‘The person who was supposed to play this part didn’t come today. Would you like [it]?’ I said, ‘Sure, when?’ and he was like, ‘Now. Woody’s going to come down and talk to you about it.’” It was like those stories where you get discovered in a drugstore, an astonishingly wonderful thing, and they were so kind to me.”

“It’s my experience that you really can’t lose when you try the truth.” — Sharon

2

1984 TOP

HEAVY She had a steamy scene with Tom Selleck on the season premiere of Magnum, P.I., but unlike later in her career, she felt a bit shy on set. “I didn’t have the nerve to go topless,” she confessed, after filming in the nude for 1984’s Irreconcilable Differences opposite Ryan O’Neal. “It took me three months to get over doing that scene. When I dropped my top my heart was in my feet.”

3

1990 SUM TOTAL “Working with Arnold [Schwarzenegger] is great because he’s very disciplined,” Sharon said of playing his duplicitous wife in Total Recall. But years later, she admitted the role had her fed up with Hollywood. “I went, that’s it. I’m not gonna work until I get a job I care about. If I have to do theater in my garage and wait tables, that’s it for me.”

4

1992 BAD INSTINCT

“When Basic Instinct came out on Friday, I had one life, and by Tuesday I had another,” she said of the thriller. But when filming her legcrossing scene, “the director said, ‘We’re seeing underwear, I need you to take them off.’ ” He added that no one would see anything, so when she saw the film, “I had a complete apoplectic breakdown.”

5

1995 BOB AND WEAVE Playing the wife of a mobster (Robert De Niro) in Casino earned her an Oscar nod and a Golden Globe. “That was my dream, to work with Bob. And I can say that I was not disappointed for a second…. For a long time people did not know what to do with me, and [Martin Scorsese and De Niro said] ‘Let’s see what you can do.’”

6

1998 A SMALL ROLE Being the voice of Princess Bala in Antz “was incredible fun. I kept hounding [studio heads] Jeff Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg: When you do an animated movie, I want to do it!’ It’s more work than you hink. And there’s no money in it. So you have to really love the project.”

7

2004 MAKES

PERFECT She got to play an eccentric lawyer who “believes God speaks to her” in a 2003 guest role on The Practice, and won an Emmy for her work. “You don’t get writing like that too often,” she said. “When David [E. Kelley] called me and said, ‘I’ll write a character for you,’ I mean, gosh, why not?

It takes a lot of stamina, [but I’d] do it again.”

8

2005 IN CHARACTER Sharon played one of four ex-lovers that a man (Bill Murray) revisits, a small role in indie auteur Jim Jarmusch’s dramedy Broken Flowers. “I started my family at 40 and did character parts so that I wouldn’t be gone for more than two, two-and-a-half weeks. So I did all these movies [like Flowers] and worked with tremendously cool directors.”

9

2010 A TALL ORDER After surviving a 2001 brain aneurysm, Sharon admitted having a hard time remembering her lines when guest-starring on Law & Order: SVU. “That was humiliating,” she said, as was doing a TV procedural. “I thought, I got thrown off the bullet train, and now I have to work my way [back]. I better get humble. Because if I can’t do this, I’m not going to be able to do anything else.”

10

2017 IN HER ELEMENT Despite the demands of TV, she was thrilled to come back with a starring role in the interactive HBO prestige drama show Mosaic (with Paul Reubens). “When Steven Soderbergh writes something for you, once you get done screaming and get back up off the floor, I think it’s time to say yes!”