Decades after her culture-shaking performance in Basic Instinct, the actress is as daring as ever - and not just on film.
As soon as Sharon Stone was ready, she walked out of her art studio, past her swimming pool, to a spot on the terrace where photographer Eric Michael Roy was waiting. She wore a black top covering barely more territory than a bra, a short skirt and sunglasses.
Doechii played over a loudspeaker as Roy snapped and offered a steady stream of fashion photog patter.
“Beautiful, Shar!”
“Absolutely nailed it!”
“Love!!!”
She needed no encouragement. Watching Sharon Stone model – these images are destined for a European edition of Harper’s Bazaar – is like watching Steph Curry hoist a three. No matter what she’s wearing, it looks effortless. She slips into a pose, and then another, slightly shifting her weight or arching her back, laughing or straight-faced.
In a way, this is one of Stone’s great tricks. She has a daunting intellect, top diplomats in her phone contacts, and a deep, abiding desire to make good trouble. Not long ago, she nudged her new pal Tiffany Haddish, after a day of filming and a few puffs, to go to Washington and get arrested with her and Jane Fonda at a climate protest.
“Who gets arrested on purpose?” an exasperated Haddish replied.
And yet modelling, for Stone, is easily her most dependable source of income. It’s certainly more reliable than acting, which says more about Hollywood – and its attitude toward women and age – than her own formidable screen skills. (Need proof? This month, go see Nobody 2, in which she convincingly throws knives and barks kill orders as the villain to Bob Odenkirk’s suburban-dad assassin, or call up any variety of roles she has taken on over the past decade.)
Modelling, in fact, was Stone’s original career path at age 19, when she left rural Pennsylvania for New York City. The logic now is as obvious as it was back in 1977.
“Where else am I going to get a job where they pay me $5000 a day and where I get into rooms of important people where they underestimate me and I don’t do anything but look fantastic?” she says.
It’s also, frankly, a flex. To say that Stone looks “great” for her age almost misses the point. At 67, she has opted for gentler forms of maintenance than many of her industry peers – and remains instantly recognisable as herself. In 2025, modelling may be more lucrative than acting, but not everyone can pull it off.
After Nobody 2, Stone has her stage debut in either London’s West End or Broadway next year – she’s waiting to finalise one of the deals – and a role alongside Sydney Sweeney in the new season of HBO’s Euphoria to look forward to. Her painting career has been buzzing, including a well-received exhibition in San Francisco last year and plans for a pop-up gallery in London.
Still, Stone’s most famous role remains that one from 1992, Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, a disturbing window into the gender politics of 1990s Hollywood and the mind of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. The movie has not aged well. Back in the day, it made headlines for the famous interrogation scene, in which Tramell uncrosses her legs and offers a glimpse you’re not supposed to see in a film rated R.
The overt sexuality of the role reportedly led to no fewer than 12 other actresses – Julia Roberts, Demi Moore, Kim Basinger, Kelly Lynch, Debra Winger and Ellen Barkin, among others – turning it down before Stone signed on and put on a performance for the ages as a mysterious mood-shifter who can’t be intimidated.
What helps make her character so dynamic and unexpected is her appearance.
A curvy throwback to the days of Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren, Stone can still remember how legendary modelling agency chief Eileen Ford greeted her in the Studio 54 era of lean, leggy clothes hangers. (“I’d like to throw you down the flight of stairs and bounce that fat off your ass.”)
As statuesque as she was, Stone’s most stunning feature may have been her face, her flashing eyes and high cheekbones on par with Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly. But as an actor, Stone hardly fit the ingenue or rom-com type. (Try to imagine Kelly smiling in one frame and reaching for an ice pick in the next.)
“It was brave,” says Oscar winner Faye Dunaway, who became Stone’s friend and mentor as she gravitated to acting. “I mean, a lot of people are careful and self-protective, but she just went for it. It’s not a quality one often finds.”
Stone was 22 when she made her 1980 screen debut with a wordless, glammed-up cameo (Pretty Girl on Train was her credit) in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories.
Around that time, Stone had her first meeting with a studio chief. She wore her one good outfit – a Ralph Lauren jacket and a denim skirt and cowboy boots – and sat primly upright on the low couch as he approached and told her, “It’s true what they say about you. You’re the most beautiful one in town, but first… ”
And then, she said, he unzipped his fly and took out his penis.
Stone did not sleep with this mogul, whom she won’t name, nor did she run screaming from the room. Instead, she burst into nervous laughter, then nervous tears, and he fled, embarrassed, into the executive washroom behind his desk and did not return.
After that, Stone received a steady supply of scripts for schlock action films (King Solomon’s Mines, Above the Law) and opportunities to take off her shirt (Irreconcilable Differences).
Nobody seemed to know – or care – what to do with her. Was she a B-grade Kathleen Turner? Competition for Heathers Locklear and Thomas? Or just a hottie destined to die in the first reel of the next James Bond movie?
The path shifted when she met Paul Verhoeven. Two years before they reteamed for Basic Instinct, he cast her in Total Recall.
Yes, it was an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick, but Stone knew the Dutch director’s previous work, which included RoboCop and acclaimed European films, transcended the genre.
Though he didn’t realise it, Verhoeven was signing Stone for the moment she was built for. Hollywood had embraced the psychosexual thriller, teeing up edgy roles for such women as Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction), Ellen Barkin (Sea of Love) and Sean Young (No Way Out). Stone, with her own kind of seductive energy, could shape-shift in ways seldom seen in Hollywood.
Verhoeven saw that behind Stone’s beauty was a certain darkness, suited to the role of Lori, a secret agent assigned to impersonate the wife of Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger), a former Martian agent who has been brainwashed to forget his previous identity.
When Quaid’s character begins to remember his past, it is up to Lori, in pink bandeau and spandex, to transform into a killer.
For Verhoeven, the key to the performance is a scene in which Stone, cornered at the climax of a brutal fight sequence, sweetly tries to disarm her pseudo-husband (“You wouldn’t hurt me, would you, sweetheart? … After all, we’re married!”) while reaching for the gun tucked behind her back. In the split second before she tries to fire, her expression shifts from softness to fury.
“That shot – you basically see the demon seizing the angel,” Verhoeven says today. “That split second, for me, was the reason to take her for Basic Instinct, to know she can do that. And I was right.”
Even now, more than three decades on, Basic Instinct remains a snapshot of the complicated sexual era of the early ’90s, when a fully nude Madonna straddled Naomi Campbell for an artsy coffee table book and Aids became a leading cause of death for young people. It’s still disturbing to watch. A man is killed with an ice pick mid-coitus. The police detective played by Michael Douglas, ostensibly the hero, assaults his colleague/sometime-girlfriend. There’s a lot of dance floor leering and writhing, bedroom bondage, and a needless lesbian side plot that seems designed only to entertain Eszterhas. Into this milieu comes Stone as the icy Catherine, a swaggering, norms-mocking heiress and crime novelist, whose latest book features a murder that mirrors the one Douglas is investigating.
Basic Instinct changed Stone’s life. Dating became more complicated as potential partners somehow expected her to share Tramell’s bedroom habits. Controversy over the film’s presentation of same-sex relationships led to protesters interrupting her monologue on Saturday Night Live. Stone could no longer walk down the street and, after dealing with stalkers, had to move to a more protected house.
Donna Chavous, a close friend and former Hollywood agent, remembers going to a theatre with Stone in Santa Monica to see a movie around that time and coming outside.
“And then we hear this noise,” Chavous says. “We look back and it’s all these press people with cameras racing, chasing us. We start running, take off, go into a restaurant, dive under the table, and the guy says, ‘Are you okay? Let me get you a couple of drinks.’ Life was never the same anymore after that.”
Three years after Basic Instinct made her a star, Casino marked what remains the artistic peak of her acting career. Martin Scorsese cast Stone as Ginger McKenna, the con artist who gets involved with Robert De Niro’s casino manager and Joe Pesci’s mob enforcer. The part earned her an Oscar nomination – she lost out to Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking – and it’s the first thing Odenkirk mentions when asked about her acting chops. He has watched that movie repeatedly.
“She’s toe-to-toe with the best actors we have in America, and she’s as good as anyone in that movie,” he says. “It’s a weird thing knowing when you’re willing to be that, knowing that you are okay letting your subconscious out, letting subconscious feelings of rage, of sorrow, of whatever out and letting the world see them. And she’s got that.”
But what did Casino lead to?
“Nothing,” she says.
Of her next dozen or so films, none offered the prestige of a Scorsese flick or a shot at a trophy.
Sometimes, Stone will just throw on some baggy pants and a loose T-shirt and stand back from the canvas.
“Alexa, play Leon Bridges,” she said on one of these days, and the young R&B artist’s soulful throwback voice filled the room: “Baby, baby, baby …”
She slapped a thick, brownish paint on the canvas, which stretched six feet across the wall. It was so thick she compared the process to “slinging hash”.
“Everybody’s like, ‘You’ve got to get better paint,’” Stone says. “I’m like, ‘I’ll get better paint when I earn better paint.’ And every time we get better paint, I’m super excited. This - … It’s like good chocolate.”
She has always painted. Back in the 1970s during her stint at what was then Pennsylvania’s Edinboro State College, she studied art and creative writing. Art would become one of the ways she would cope with what came after her commercial peak. Missteps such as Sliver and Gloria, struggles in her personal life, and a near-death experience that would shape her second act.
In 2001, at 43, Stone suffered a stroke that left her hospitalised for days and recovering for months. Her motor skills were shot for a while, including balance and speech, and she wasn’t able to stop having small seizures until Quincy Jones referred her to the doctor who treated his brain aneurysm.
By 2004, Stone’s marriage to San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein had ended in divorce, after which she would lose custody of their adopted son, Roan.
She eventually recovered and moved back into her house in Beverly Hills, once owned by Montgomery Clift and in disrepair when she bought it with her Basic Instinct money. Roan re-entered her life – he now lives with her – and she adopted Laird and Quinn soon after.
Her career, as she rebuilt it, would be on her own terms. She played a porn star’s mother in Lovelace, a murdered children’s book writer in Steven Soderbergh’s HBO series Mosaic, and a hilariously phony version of herself in Scorsese’s film about Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour.
Some of the work would be all-consuming. Some would be jobs that started off as a favour. Take how she signed on for a small part in Marc Maron’s upcoming film, In Memoriam. Stone and Maron bonded when she appeared on his WTF podcast in 2018. Legendary publisher Sonny Mehta heard the episode and signed her to write her 2021 best-selling memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice. She kept in touch with Maron, reaching out after the sudden death of his girlfriend, the director Lynn Shelton, in 2020.
Maron asked Stone to do a day on In Memoriam in which he plays a once-promising actor who never quite made it and now has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His goal is to ensure that when he dies, he’ll make the cut for the In Memoriam segment of the Oscars. Stone plays his ex, also an actor, whose career path diverged from his, to a Streepian level of acclaim. The scene they filmed required tears.
Maron says he watched Stone rehearsing her part, crying and laughing as a kind of acting exercise. Less experienced as an actor, he felt intimidated.
“I go back to my trailer at lunch and just melt down,” he says. “I’m yelling at my manager. I can’t do this. It’s f---ing Sharon Stone. I’ve got to get out of this movie, and I’m the star of the movie. And then I go back to Sharon and she goes, ‘I think you can cry.’”
Stone says she knew that Maron’s life changed, forever, when he lost Shelton. “What if you were telling Lynn these things?” she told him. “I want you to know I can hold her energy for you. It won’t be offensive to me. … I’m present with you, and I’m gonna hold that space for you.”
“It made a huge difference,” director Rob Burnett says. “They nailed the scene, and … her impact on him that day actually affected his performance for the entire rest of the movie.”
Nobody 2 will not be Stone’s Jamie Lee Curtis moment; this is not the project for which the Academy will finally recognise her acting chops. She is Lendina, a casino boss with a small army and a smaller conscience.
“A lot of actors – they say, I want to show how subtle I can be,” Odenkirk says. “That’s not what we needed here. We needed a big bad villain, and we needed to elevate the movie to that mythical place.”
Stone was up for it – with her own customising tweaks. The film-makers wanted a basic Russian villain with a thick accent. Stone saw layers of nihilistic evil. In one of her key scenes, Lendina rallies herself for a violent showdown with a wordless, jagged dance over a pulsing, German rap beat.
“I just thought it had to have this primal undertone, but also clubby and groovy, like I’m getting the ground beat down to my warriors,” she says. “That I’m coming.”
A few months before the premiere, Stone decided to take care of a nagging problem that had bothered her for decades.
At 14, Stone was disfigured in a riding accident when her horse started charging and drove her directly into a plastic clothesline. Up close, you can still see the horizontal scar under her chin. It tautened her neck but bunched the skin on the left side, leading to constant jaw pain.
A few months ago, a plastic surgeon offered to do a loosening procedure that would alleviate it – with a discount, in exchange for Stone publicising her work. But then, only days before the scheduled procedure in late July, she said, the terms of the deal changed: the doctor wanted her to tell everyone she had a facelift.
Stone says she gazed in a mirror, at skin that is less perfect than when she competed for Miss Pennsylvania. The next morning, she snapped a no-makeup, bed-head selfie and posted it as an Instagram story.
Thousands of people clicked like. A Harper’s Bazaar editor called to compliment it.
She still would love to find somebody to help with the migraines and jaw pain.
But her face? She was older. There are some wrinkles. Sharon Stone was fine staying just the way she was.