Sharon Stone’s bombshell revelations
The Hollywood star has made shocking revelations about her childhood and career in her new memoir
SHE’S one of those stars who brings old-school glamour back to Hollywood – she’s eternally beautiful, sizzlingly sexy and has an aura of serenity few younger stars can match.
She’s also famous for a certain flashing scene in Basic Instinct, a move that both scandalised and titillated early ’90s cinemagoers and three decades later remains one of the mosttalkedabout scenes in Tinseltown history.
But there’s a whole lot more to Sharon Stone. She’s the ultimate survivor – and her jaw- dropping new memoir drives that home with a ser ious punch.
‘I’M FINALLY ABLE TO NOT ONLY RECEIVE LOVE FROM MY MOTHER BUT TO LOVE HER IN RETURN’
The Beauty of Living Twice reveals the shocking incest and abuse she suffered as a child, her experience of Hollywood’s often toxic and misogynistic culture and her harrowing stroke that left her on the brink of death. The book is delivered with Sharon’s trademark sardonic wit and no-holdsbarred honesty and has received a coveted endorsement from Oprah Winfrey, who’s capable of making a bestseller out of anything she gives a shoutout to. Sharon (63) was recently asked by The New York Times why she’s decided to share her life story now. “If you don’t people will make it all up for you,” she said. “There’s been pretty much an adult lifetime of people making up my life for me. Now I’m going to go out in the most menacing, disruptive, psychologically aggressive period that our world has been in since the ’60s and be vulnerable and open.” She acknowledges the book is darkly funny because “that’s my personality”. “We’re meant to meet life with a certain amount of grace, and humour helps that happen.”
CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
Sharon grew up in Meadville, Pennsylvania, with her older brother Michael, younger brother Patrick, younger sister Kelly, and parents Dorothy and Joseph Stone. The blue-collar town was where she won her first beauty contest, which led to her signing with Ford Models Agency at the age of 19 then going on to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood. But behind Sharon’s dazzling beauty lay a childhood of appalling abuse. Her dad – who died in 2009 – abused both her and her sister when they were kids. “He’d yank me down with him or throw me down in front of him,” she says. Other times he’d drag her through the kitchen to the basement to “get the crap strapped out of me with a belt”. “It continued until I was so sure I didn’t do what I was being punished for, that I lost all fear,” she says. “I simply saw him as weak.” She also reveals how she and Kelly were molested by their maternal grandfather, Clarence Lawson. Her grandmother would lock them in a room when they visited their home – a place filled with nearly a dozen cats her gran chained to the leg of a tub in the middle of the kitchen.
“Even in winter the smell of their house just hit me in the face,” she says. “And even before I could see anything, the sound: the squalling and scratching, the clawing and trying to get out. It should’ve been warning enough for someone to know that something was wrong, just wrong.”
The abuse started when she and Kelly were toddlers and ended when Clarence eventually died of a heart attack. The relief when she saw his body in a casket at his funeral was overwhelming, she says.
“I was 14 at the time. I poked him and the bizarre satisfaction that he was at last dead hit me like a ton of ice. I looked at Kelly and she understood: she was 11 and it was over.”
RECONCILING WITH HER MOTHER
For years Sharon and her mother had a fractious relationship. She battled to separate her mom from her childhood experiences and it would be decades before she felt able to “meet my mother as a person”. “I’m finally able to not only receive love from my mother but to love my mother in return. We’re at the beginning at our relationship, even though she entered my life when I was in my sixties and she was in her mid-eighties.” Sharon was asked by The New York Times if she’d discussed any of the abuse claims with her surviving relatives before publishing the book. “My sister and I made this decision together to tell our story,”
she says. “We spoke to my mom and at first she wrote me a letter about how disconcerting all this information was. The whole pious horrified I-don’t-really-wantto-talk-about-it-directly kind of thing.
“Then my sister got loaded when my mom was staying with her and really went for it with my mom and my mom had a major breakthrough.
“When I finished the book, I read it to my mom over a three-day period and I recorded her talking. And then I rewrote a lot of the book. That’s when I dedicated the book to her.”
And it’s a dedication that speaks volumes. “I dedicate this memoir to my mother, not because it was easy for either of us, but because she taught me the exact things I needed to know to live in this world at this time,” she writes.
“I’m grateful for this growth opportunity, grateful to be able to humble myself to learn more about relationships.”
Sharon gave the first copy of her memoir to her mom and in a heartfelt Instagram video documented the moment Dorothy read out the dedication before realising it was for her.
“I’m not bitter,” Sharon told her. “I’m not sad or angry, I’m not here to punish you. I’m pure in my heart and in my soul.”
THE BUSINESS OF BASIC INSTINCT
Playing Catherine Tramell in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct was Sharon’s last hope of making it big in Tinseltown.
She’d come to Los Angeles years before and, although she’d been in 18 movies and a number of TV shows, they were all “crap”, she admits.
“I was 32 when I got that job,” she says. “I knew this was my last chance – I was ageing out of the business I hadn’t really gotten into yet. I needed a break.”
She says her manager even broke into the casting director’s office to get a copy of the script because she was that desperate for the part. But there were plenty of problems – for one, Michael Douglas, the leading man, didn’t want to test alongside her.
She wasn’t a big enough star, she says. “I was a nobody compared to him.”
Sharon was only offered the job after it was turned down by 12 other actresses. Suffice to say she nailed it, going on to call it the role that “most stretched me into considering the dark side of myself ”.
It also stretched her into flashing the most intimate part of her body. But Sharon claims she was tricked into it: she knew the scene called for no underwear but she wanted to keep hers on and rely on camera work to give the illusion of nudity.
However, during filming she was told to remove her undies as “the white was reflecting the light so we know you have panties on”, she was told.
She only realised it when she was invited to the film’s screening. “That was how I saw my vagina shot for the first time.”
Shocked, she went up to the projection room “slapped Paul [Verhoeven, the director] across the face” and called her lawyer, who told her it was illegal and they couldn’t release the movie.
“Of course, Paul vehemently denied I had any choices at all. I was just an actress, just a woman; what choices could I have?
“But I did have choices. So I thought and thought and I chose to allow this scene in the film. Why? Because it was correct for the film and for the character. And because, after all, I did it.”
Paul later claimed Sharon lied about not realising her privates would be on display.
“Any actress knows what you’re going to see if you ask her to take off her underwear and there with the camera. I’m Dutch so we act with total normality towards nudity,” he said. “And Sharon was carried away by this relaxed attitude. But when she saw the scene surrounded by other people, she went crazy.”
A STAR WAS BORN
Basic Instinct went on to be one of the highest-grossing movies of 1992 and, although it was criticised in part for its graphic sex and violence, the two lead actors’ performances were praised – Sharon’s in particular.
“Sharon Stone has enough come-on carnality to singe the screen,” is how one critic put it.
Another said the film “did more for
‘I CHOSE TO ALLOW THIS SCENE. WHY? BECAUSE IT WAS CORRECT FOR THE FILM’
female empowerment than any feminist rally. Stone, in her star-making performance, is as hot and sexy as she is ice-pick cold”.
As for Michael Douglas, friends admit he saw Sharon as a “second-rate actress” at first and wanted a big-name ticket such as Geena Davis or Ellen Barkin.
However, both women passed on the nudity. According to Sharon, she and Michael became friends in the end. They still see each other from time to time.
THE STROKE THAT NEARLY DESTROYED HER
In 2001 at the age of 43 Sharon had suffered a near-fatal brain haemorrhage.
“It began with a numbness in my leg and a terrible pain in my head,” she writes in her book.
She lay on her floor at home for three days before she realised the trouble she was in and was taken to hospital. There she experienced a white-light moment that featured three friends who’d “crossed over before”.
“The light was so luminous, it was so mystical.”
The next moment however she felt “like I’d been kicked in the middle of my chest by a mule” and she made a choice to survive.
Things were dire. Doctors gave her a 1% chance of surviving but after a complex seven-hour surgery her chances increased. Her recovery was anything but easy, though.
“I was walking, a ragged, tilted walk; my right leg dragging a bit; the left side of my face distorted; and no feeling from the knee up in my left leg.
“I was stuttering, I’d lost hearing in my right ear and so much weight I was a whopping size two.”
She also lost her short-term memory and wasn’t able to read for two years or “remember where I’d put my teacup down”.
She questioned whether she’d ever work again, but eventually decided she had to get in there.
It was incredibly hard, though. In an interview with Variety in 2019, Sharon said her career took about seven years to recover.
“I lost everything. I had to mortgage my house, I lost my place in the business, I was like the hottest movie star, you know? I was so famous and then I had a stroke. And I was forgotten.”
Things improved when her friend, record producer Quincy Jones, referred her to a doctor who diagnosed her with a brain seizure condition and got her on the correct medication.
LEADING HER BEST LIFE NOW
These days the Los Angeles-based star says she’s happy to lead her “second life” and stays busy with acting, modelling, painting and spending time with her adopted sons, Roan (20), Laird (15) and Quinn (14).
Sharon has been married twice – to screenwriter Michael Greenburg from 1984 to 1987 and journalist and editor Phil Bronstein from 1998 to 2004 – but she doesn’t talk about her romantic life in her book.
She appears to be happily single but not averse to looking for romance.
In an interview with Vogue Germany last year, she admitted she’d tried online dating but said she’d had “the worst luck” with men.
“It was so dismal I now want to write a book of short stories about my online dating experiences.
“Dating sites are not a successful thing because real chemistry, that frisson, isn’t on a site.
“When you’re single at this age, there’s usually a reason for that. I count myself in there.”
She has a slew of projects coming up, including the drama What About Love, co-starring Andy Garcia, and The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife which sees her teaming up with Bette Midler as her on-screen bestie.
She can also be seen in the Netflix drama Ratched, playing a wealthy heiress who hires a hitman to kill a doctor who disfigured her son.
Sharon is enjoying the acting world more than ever, she says, because she feels more comfortable doing it now and it’s “a lot easier to do”.
“I feel less pressured because it’s not my entire world anymore,” she says. “When the workday is over, good or bad – and it’s mostly always good – I go home to a house full of love, so no big deal.”
In an interview with Sunday Today she says she’s “in a really grateful place”.
“When I was a kid, I always wanted a house full of kids running and screaming and dogs, and I got it.
“And I feel very blessed and happy about the life I got.
“We’re happy together and what’s better than that?”