Sharon
Stone
Born on March 10th, 1958 in Meadville, Pennsylvania,
Sharon
Stone was still in school when she started acting.
After college Sharon Stone began a modeling career
and was signed to represent Clairol, Diet Coke, and Revlon. Her
modeling allowed her acting career to blossom, and she has appeared
in such films as Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Sliver, Casino, Sphere,
and The Muse.
This former beauty pageant contestant and
Ford model made her film debut with a non-speaking part as a beautiful
woman fleetingly glimpsed from a moving train in Woody Allen's Stardust
Memories (1980), and thereafter clawed her way to a stardom that
has brought back an old-fashioned, high-octane glamour to the role
of ''movie star.'' Sharon Stone, who grew up a
bookworm in a large family in Northwest Pennsylvania, worked her
way up from McDonald's counter-girl to successful Ford model (both
in print ads and TV commercials) by the late 1970s.
Through the 1980s, Sharon Stone
appeared as a stereotypical blonde in mostly forgettable roles:
in Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing (1981); as a down-and-out waitress
turned petulant movie star in Irreconcilable Differences (1984);
an archaeologist's daughter in King Solomon's Mines (1985) and its
sequel, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987). Other
unmemorable early credits include Police Academy 4: Citizens on
Patrol (1987), Action Jackson (1988) and the umpteenth remake of
Blood and Sand (1989).
Sharon Stone also struggled
in TV, beginning with a tiny part in ''Not Just Another Affair''
(CBS, 1982), the short-lived series Bay City Blues (NBC, 1983) and
gradually bigger (though not better) roles in the TV movies ''Calendar
Girl Murders'' (ABC, 1984), ''The Vegas Strip War'' (NBC, 1984),
the failed cop-show pilot ''Hollywood Starr'' (ABC, 1985), ''Mr.
and Mrs. Ryan'' (ABC, 1986), ''Badlands 2005'' (ABC, 1988) and ''Tears
in the Rain'' (Showtime, 1988). Probably her only TV success was
a supporting role as Robert Mitchum's daughter-in-law in the epic
miniseries War and Remembrance (ABC, 1988-89).
Sharon Stone first real
break was playing Arnold Schwarzenegger's kick-boxing, secret agent
''wife'' in Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi actioner Total Recall (1990).
After five more forgettable thrillers and comedies, she finally
achieved the proverbial ''overnight'' stardom as a sexually voracious
crime writer opposite Michael Douglas in Verhoeven's controversial
and popular erotic thriller, Basic Instinct (1992). Her pantieless
leg-crossing scene brought Sharon Stone much-needed
notoriety, but has haunted her ever since.
In a more conventionally sympathetic role,
Sharon Stone followed up with another sizzling
sex melodrama, Sliver (1993), which did middling business stateside
but proved a solid success overseas. Trying to escape the sex-bomb
trap, she begged for the frigid wife role in Intersection (1994),
which met with limited success. She again flexed her international
box-office clout paired with Sylvester Stallone in the explosive
actioner The Specialist (1994) but fared much less well commercially
with her next project, The Quick and the Dead (1995), which marked
her producing debut. Sharon Stone looked terrific
in Western duds playing something of a distaff version of a Clint
Eastwood-like gunfighter. Her directorial choice, Sam Raimi, helmed
the smartly derivative tale with style to spare but the critical
reception was uneven and the public stayed away. She rebounded with
her widely acclaimed performance as Ginger, the Vegas hustler who
wins the heart of Robert De Niro, in Martin Scorsese's Casino (also
1995), a film that earned her a long sought-after Academy Award
nomination.
The highly-paid, much-in-demand star (she has her own production
company, Chaos, and has signed a first-look deal with Miramax) next
filmed a remake of the Henri-Georges Clouzot's noir classic Diabolique
with Isabelle Adjani and Chazz Palmentieri and played a death-row
inmate whose lawyer (Rob Morrow) works to save her from execution
in Last Dance (both 1996).
Sharon Stone, a diva who
thoroughly enjoys her hard-won stardom, is a clever manipulator
of her public image—on heavy press days, she reportedly changes
outfits between each interview and photo session, a practice unheard
of since the days of Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer. She lives,
fittingly enough, in a gated French chateau in Beverly Hills.
