Hollywood icons: Sharon Stone

Sharon Vonne Stone (born March 10, 1958) is an American actress, film producer, and former fashion model. She achieved international recognition for her role in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her performance in Casino.

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Stone won the title of Miss Crawford County in Meadville. One of the pageant judges said she should quit school and move to New York City to become a fashion model. In 1977 Stone left Meadville, moving in with an aunt in New Jersey. Within four days of her arrival in New Jersey, she was signed by Ford Modeling Agency in New York.

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While living in Europe, she decided to quit modeling and become an actress. "So I packed my bags, moved back to New York, and stood in line to be an extra in a Woody Allen movie," she later recalled.

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Her appearance in Total Recall (1990) with Arnold Schwarzenegger gave Stone's career a jolt. To coincide with the movie's release, she posed nude for Playboy, showing off the muscles she developed in preparation for the movie (she lifted weights and learned taekwondo). In 1999, she was rated among the 25 sexiest stars of the century by Playboy.

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The role that made her a star was that of Catherine Tramell, a brilliant, bisexual alleged serial killer, in Basic Instinct (1992). Stone had to wait and actually turned down other offers for the mere prospect to play Tramell (the part was offered to 13 other actresses and considered to 150 women before being offered to Stone)

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Several better known actresses of the time turned down the part mostly because of the nudity required. In the movie's most notorious scene, Tramell is being questioned by the police and she crosses and uncrosses her legs, revealing the fact she is not wearing any underwear. According to Stone, upon seeing her own vulva in the leg-crossing scene during a screening of the film, she went into the projection booth and slapped director Paul Verhoeven.

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Stone claimed that although she agreed to film the flashing scene with no panties, and although she and Verhoeven had discussed the scene from the beginning of production, she was unaware just how explicit the infamous shot would be. She said, "I knew that we were going to do this leg-crossing thing and I knew that we were going to allude to the concept that I was nude, but I did not think that you would see my vagina in the scene. Later, when I saw it in the screening I was shocked. I think seeing it in a room full of strangers was so disrespectful and so shocking, so I went into the booth and slapped him and left."

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Despite this, she claimed in an earlier interview that "it was so fun" watching the film for the first time with strangers. Verhoeven has denied all claims of trickery and said, "As much as I love her, I hate her too, especially after the lies she told the press about the shot between her legs, which was a straight lie". Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who later befriended the actress, also claimed the actress was fully aware of the level of nudity involved in his memoir, Hollywood Animal.

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In 1995, she received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Dramatic Motion Picture for her role as "Ginger" in Martin Scorsese's Casino opposite Robert De Niro. She also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for the role. The same year she starred opposite Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Sam Raimi western The Quick And The Dead. That same year, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award

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After years of litigation, Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction was released on March 31, 2006. A reason for a long delay in releasing the film was reportedly Stone's dispute with the filmmakers over the nudity in the movie; she wanted more, while they wanted less. A group sex scene was cut in order to achieve an R rating from the MPAA for the U.S. release; the controversial scene remained in the U.K. version of the London-based film. Stone told an interviewer, "We are in a time of odd repression and if a popcorn movie allows us to create a platform for discussion, wouldn't that be great?"

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She appeared in the 2006 drama Alpha Dog opposite Bruce Willis, playing Olivia Mazursky, the mother of a real-life murder victim. Stone wore a fatsuit for the role. In February 2007, Stone found her role as a clinically depressed woman in her latest film, When a Man Falls in the Forest, uplifting, as it challenged what she called "Prozac society." "It was a watershed experience," she said. "I think that we live in a... Prozac society where we're always told we're supposed to have this kind of equilibrium of emotion. We have all these assignments about how we're supposed to feel about something."

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Stone lives in Beverly Hills, California, and owns a farm in New Zealand. Stone suffers from diabetes and asthma. In March 2006, Stone traveled to Israel to promote peace in the Middle East through a press conference with Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres

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Stone became a Buddhist, after fellow actor Richard Gere introduced her to the Dalai Lama. She believes in God and is religious by self-description. She is an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church

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Stone married television producer Michael Greenburg in 1984 on the set of The Vegas Strip War, a TV movie he produced and she starred in. The couple separated three years later, and their divorce was finalized in 1990. On February 14, 1998, Stone married Phil Bronstein, executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner and later San Francisco Chronicle. Stone and Bronstein were divorced in January 2004. They have an adopted son named Roan Joseph Bronstein, born on May 22, 2000. Stone adopted her second son, Laird Vonne Stone on May 7, 2005. On June 28, 2006, Stone adopted her third son, Quinn Kelly Stone.

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In 2005, during a television interview for her movie Basic Instinct 2, Stone hinted at an interest in bisexuality, stating "Middle age is an open-minded period". Stone also has said that in the past she's "dated" girls. Furthermore, in, Naked Instinct, an unauthorized biography of Stone, author Frank Sanello details a sexual liaison between Stone and a woman in the bathroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel. In an interview on the Michael Parkinson talk show in Britain on March 18, 2006, she said she was straight. However, in January 2008, she was quoted as saying, "Everybody is bisexual to an extent. Now men act like women and it's difficult to have a relationship because I like men in that old-fashioned way. I like masculinity and, in truth, only women do that now"

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