But Stone, 63, as outspoken as she is, has a few things she’s mostly kept to herself. Following her hospitalization, she found herself soul searching through a spectrum of traumas, including the childhood sexual abuse she and her sister suffered at the hand of their maternal grandfather, her strained relationship with her mom, the industry’s attempts to stereotype her in hypersexual roles after her breakout in Basic Instinct and her three miscarriages, second divorce and custody battle. She decided it was time to tell her story in her new memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, out March 30.
‘Be Like a Dude’
Stone feels as if so much of her life has already been discussed by other people—“and most of it incorrectly,” she says. When it was time to put her life into a book, she challenged herself to dive into the parts lesser known, like her origin story. Raised in Meadville, Pennsylvania, she paints a picture of life with her parents—dad Joseph and mom Dorothy—in Amish country as one of four children living in a household that didn’t adhere to gender norms. She grew up mowing the lawn, shoveling snow and pouring concrete, as well as tussling with her two brothers, climbing trees and playing golf. Writing the book, she says, helped her explore the parts of herself she was not fully understanding. And much of that had to do with embracing her femininity. Thriving in a male-dominated industry all these years, Stone says, “I had to be like a dude to survive.” She’s worked primarily with men since her earliest jobs, at fast-food restaurants, modeling or running a pool hall. “And then the men complain that I’m too tough, that I’m intimidating,” she says, noting that she sometimes had to act the part to stay safe and “not get rolled right over and flattened.” And being an attractive woman, she’s also received a lifetime of male attention—sometimes unwanted. She had a boss look up her skirt while flipping burgers, a high school teacher flirt with her and, as she discloses in her book, grossly inappropriate interactions with her grandfather. “Abuse is something that is in every industry, in rich families and poor families—and we have to start talking about it,” she says. Stone, her mom (who suffered her own childhood trauma) and sister mutually decided it was time to share their story. Her memoir, Stone hopes, will also help people to see her beyond the characters that she’s portrayed. She says that since she has often played complex roles with such ferocity, people don’t always think she’s acting. “They’re literally afraid of me—or intimidated by me.” But there’s a softer and more approachable side to Stone, and she’s eager for the public to get to know it.
A Star Is Born
She’s always been a performer. As a child, she directed plays in her driveway, wrangling her siblings and neighbors as the cast and cladding her stars in homemade kitchen-towel costumes. “I love movies!” she says. “If I haven’t seen a movie, or a great TV show, I don’t feel like my day is done.” She moved to New York City to pursue modeling, which brought her to Milan and Paris, until agents and photographers grew to dislike the scar on her neck from a horse-riding accident in her youth. So she set her sights on acting. In 1980, she received a call from a casting director friend, who secured her as an extra in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. When another actress failed to show up, she was told she was “a natural” and given a larger part. A few minor movies and TV-series roles followed throughout the ’80s, until she got a chance to spar with one of the decade’s biggest stars. In 1990, she played Lori, the wife-with-a-secret of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, in Total Recall, putting on 17 pounds of muscle for the role and doing three hours of daily karate to train for her scenes with the Terminator superstar. That led to her big break in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct, the 1992 role that catapulted her to fame. It also involved her infamous panty-less crotch shot, which she has revealed was filmed without discussion with her—but after much deliberation, she decided to let the filmmakers leave it in, because, as she writes in the book, “it was correct for the film and for the character.” On the Friday before the film opened, she was one person; by Tuesday she was the most buzzed-about star in Hollywood. “It’s very hard to explain how it is to go from being a regular person struggling in the business to becoming like the Beatles over a weekend,” she says, recalling how people swarmed her car or congregated around her front door. A couple crazed fans even broke into her house when she was on location. “They made breakfast for two, set off the alarm and had two cups of coffee before the police came.” Stone went on to dazzle critics and was nominated for an Oscar for her role as mobster moll Ginger McKenna in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, in which her goal was to “sit down opposite Robert De Niro and hold my own.” She went on to star in films such as The Mighty and The Muse before having a brain hemorrhage and stroke in 2001. The recovery, she says, wasn’t easy. She was hospitalized and had to argue with (and then fire) a doctor ready to send her in for experimental brain surgery. She lost a tremendous amount of weight, her ability to speak and some of her hearing, and spent seven years recouping. After a several-year break from Hollywood, she says the industry was not exactly receptive. “I got shoved to the back of the line and did episodes of Law & Order.” But she became the face of Dior’s Capture skin-care line in 2005 and went on to appear in Lovelace, The Disaster Artist, Mosaic and The Laundromat, where she shared the screen with Meryl Streep. She recently played Lenore Osgood, a fabulously wealthy villain, in Ratched, the Netflix prequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Her Activism Inspiration
While lying low in her Beverly Hills home during the pandemic, Stone has been posting emotional “mask-up” videos on Instagram after her sister was infected with the coronavirus. The activist in her won’t just sit by and do nothing. She was inspired by her parents, especially her father, who died in 2009. “My dad always wanted to make sure people were cared for,” she says. With that in mind, she has devoted herself to a life of activism and advocacy, using the platform of her celebrity and fame for causes that speak to her heart. Years ago, she went to South Africa to work to end apartheid; she has teamed with the Italian jewelry company Damiani to raise funds for clean-drinking-water wells in parched sub-Saharan villages and schools; she’s helped raise countless millions of dollars through her decades of participation in numerous fundraising and charitable for AIDS research, returning U.S. military veterans, education and, through her and her sister’s Planet Hope Foundation, outreach to homeless, terminally ill and abused children and families. “I get up and I have a light on me,” she says. “And it’s telling me, ‘Sharon, get out of bed and don’t shut that mouth of yours. Figure out how kids are going to get presents for Christmas this year when they’re in a shelter, or how they’re going to get drugs for HIV/AIDS.’”
A Beautiful Life
At home, she’s also been enjoying quality time with her three adopted sons—Roan, 20; Laird, 15; and Quinn, 14—and jokes that things have been a bit chaotic with everyone holed up together. She’s embracing the technology of being a modern mom—like consulting the online Urban Dictionary to look up some of the slang jargon one of her young teens might “import” home from school. “I’m the most square mom,” she says. “I used to be the wild one. I feel like the grandma who says, ‘In my day, I was pretty crazy…’ I have become that person, which really is funny.” Stone, who has been married twice—to TV producer Michael Greenburg and journalist Phil Bronstein (she also had a lengthy relationship with film producer William MacDonald, whom she met on the set of Sliver)—is open to finding love again. She even spent a recent stint on the dating app Bumble, which reportedly kept shutting down her profile because they thought she was a Sharon Stone impersonator. “I had some interesting relationships on there,” she says, including befriending several men with whom she had lengthy discussions, offering them dating advice. One of the fellows even wrote a script called Dating Sharon in which he chronicled his conversations with Stone, which allowed him to have a relationship with another woman. “He never ended up dating me, but he wrote this beautiful script that I think we are going to make into a movie.” At the height of her career, her schedule made self-care difficult, which is something she’s taking more seriously these days. She practices Buddhism, does yoga and will throw in an occasional plank. “I read an article that if you do 30 squats a day, that keeps the whole body together, so I try to do somewhere between 30 and 100 squats,” she says. Writing her memoir combined with years of therapy, Al-Anon and reconnecting with her mother, with whom her relationship was strained, has opened up a new side of life for Stone. “Love means something very different to me now. I have found deeper parts of myself. And I’ve experienced myself differently in relationships than I ever have before,” she says. As far as what’s next, she honestly doesn’t know. “I don’t have an agent. I don’t have a manager. I don’t have a job. And I don’t care,” she says. If she does return to the screen, she’d like the chance to work with more women. “The one day that I worked with Meryl, the little recent moments I’ve had to work with other women, have been completely different than anything in my career,” she says. “I would really love the opportunity to understand my own femininity in a safe environment. I’ve never had that.” One thing’s for sure, she’s happy to be living again—whatever happens. “When [someone asks], ‘What kind of roles do you want to play?’—I just want to be happy,” she says. “And my kids are like, ‘We just want to be happy.’ “When the kids were little, they would ask, ‘What kind of family are we?’ And I would say, ‘We’re the happy family.’ And now, they’re like, ‘Yeah—we’re the happy family. We’re the happy family.’”
Get to Know Sharon
Reading: “The School of Life by Alain de Botton. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. I’m also rereading for the 11 millionth time Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, which I always carried in my script when I was young artist, and I want to go back to my core about why I’m doing this. I open Warrior of the Light by Paulo Coelho and Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön daily for a lesson.” Movie I’d like to remake: “My Man Godfrey. I want to play the maid.” Go-to karaoke song: “Ray Charles songs. I’m not a good singer, but I just did get four more singing lessons for Christmas, which I’m very excited about.” Bingeing: “Bridgerton because it’s beautiful and sexy and fun. And Good Witch—very thought-provoking.” First movie crush: “My first, last and biggest movie crush is Humphrey Bogart.” Toy I still have: “I got spinal meningitis when I was in my early 20s. My boyfriend got me a bear in a tracksuit that I still have. He’s traveled all over the world with me.” Movie souvenir you’ve kept: “One of my white dresses from Basic Instinct, a Pucci shirt I wore while I did Casino, my pajamas from If These Walls Could Talk 2. I also have a couple of things I bought at auctions, like the belt Marlon Brando’s crew gave him from when he directed One-Eyed Jacks. And I live in Montgomery Clift’s house.” Best advice ever received: “In Hollywood, the bottom line has a trapdoor.” Dogs or cats: “Both”—especially her dogs Bandit and Joe. My hero: “My dad.” Hidden talent never used in a movie: “I can shoot a sniper rifle from 100 yards. I can ride a horse and shoot a bow and arrow. I can play the harmonica, which I did with Aerosmith at Steven Tyler’s Janie’s Fund Gala. I’m double jointed. I can cook, and swear in quite a few languages.”
