by Gill Pringle in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
“There aren’t any movie stars anymore,” announces Sharon Stone theatrically, even though she still boasts a beauty and glamour that screams “movie star”.
Speaking at an exclusive gathering at the second edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, she elaborates, “And it’s because of cell phones that there’s not that mystique anymore,” says the actress who herself made that leap from mere actress to “movie star”, thirty years ago at Cannes when Basic Instinct changed her life forever.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, and co-starring Michael Douglas, Stone’s Catherine Tramell would become the ultimate femme fatale for the ‘90s in a way that both shocked and delighted audiences.
“And I don’t think anyone thought that the movie was going to do what it did,” recalls Stone. “But I went into the theater as one person, and came out of the theater as a superstar.
“I was staying in a regular hotel on the Croisette [in Cannes], and I came back to my room and everything was gone – my contact lenses, my toothbrush, my camera, my film, my underwear. Everything was gone. And I was with two of my girlfriends and it was just mayhem. We realised that I had to be moved … it was frantic.
“We didn’t know how to get out of the hotel. They called all of the busboys and all the cleaners, and they got in a big circle and held hands around us and tried to get me out of the hotel through the lobby, which was such a nightmare. They put me in the car but we couldn’t get into the street so I had to lay in the back on the floor. One friend was on top of me and the other friend who was blonde, sat in the back wearing my glasses pretending to be me. We drove away and went out to the Hotel du Cap where they found a secure room for us. That was my introduction to fame,” she purrs in that commanding slightly husky voice.
Returning to Los Angeles, Stone discovered the insanity of Cannes was only just the beginning, as audiences flocked to the cinema to see what all the fuss was about in the now infamous leg-crossing scene.

“I didn’t know that it was also going to happen when I went home,” she says recalling getting into her car, and driving up Sunset Boulevard where she stopped at a red light. “People climbed all over my car, and I didn’t know what to do, and the light changed, and people were blowing their horns and I thought: ‘Do I drive with these people on my car? Will I get arrested if they fall off and I hurt them? What’s the law about driving with people on the outside of your car? What am I supposed to do?’
“I was so afraid, and I put the car in gear, and I started driving slowly and they start falling off my car. I was so terrified. For a month, this happened everywhere I went.
“I couldn’t leave my house,” she says recalling a variety of weird public encounters which finally prompted her to make an appointment to see a psychiatrist.
“And I said to the psychiatrist: ‘I think I’m agoraphobic’. And she said: ‘Let me ask you something. Is that you on that poster on the corner?’ And I said ‘yeah, I think so’. And she said: ‘Do you have a car and a driver and maybe a bodyguard?’ And I said, ‘No’. And she said: ‘I want to give you a little piece of advice. You have to get a car with a driver. You can’t drive alone anymore. And you’re gonna need a bodyguard’. I said ‘oh my god…’ She said ‘yes, and this session is free. I’ve had other clients like you, you’re not agoraphobic, thank you very much’.
“Clark Gable wasn’t born on Park Avenue. Marilyn Monroe didn’t start out as Marilyn Monroe. She was Norma Jean Baker. No one starts out really famous with people chasing them down the streets or with this kind of adulation and people imagining what is your life like,” she says, pointing out that she received US$500,000 for Basic Instinct while Michael Douglas made US$14 million.
“Michael Douglas could afford the car, the driver, the bodyguard – but I had to move because people were on my roof and breaking my door down. I couldn’t afford all the things I needed for the sudden fame I had – the studio didn’t want to pay me millions of dollars because I was a woman. It was a really big moment, not just for me, but for the film industry.”
Asking for what she was worth and getting what she was worth, she discovered, were two entirely different things, as she went on to star opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero and with Sly Stallone in The Specialist – two actors whose salaries she could never compete with.
“There was also this backlash that I must be like my character. I must be vulgar. I must be killing people and naked and showing my vagina in the supermarket. Yes, killing people all the time. It became personally traumatic in my life,” she says, reaching for a tissue.
“I lost custody of my baby – because the judge decided that I was making sex movies in my divorce. To break down these barriers for women to be powerful in film and for women to be paid; for women to have equal rights, it was very conflicting to the masculine identity, and so I was really punished, greatly punished.
“My dating life ended, my human rights ended and while I became more successful, it destroyed my personal life. It destroyed my personal rights. It destroyed the way people thought about me as a human being. And people went around saying, ‘Oh, she’s like that character. She couldn’t play that, if she wasn’t like that’. And I was never – until probably 20 years later – acknowledged for the quality of my work,” says Stone, 64, whose 1998 marriage to San Francisco newspaper executive Phil Bronstein ended in divorce within six years.
Her health also took a hit, suffering several miscarriages due to an autoimmune disease and endometriosis, rendering her unable to have biological children, while she almost died in 2001 suffering from a vertebral artery dissection.

“I had a nine day brain haemorrhage and a stroke. When I was 41! I had a 1% chance of survival,” recalls the actress who says that ever since her brush with death, she has spoken with ‘spirits’.
But she’s having the last laugh today, having set all her creative energy on painting, preparing for her first exhibition in Los Angeles early next year.
“I had started painting in school, then of course, acting consumes every second. But I started painting again in COVID. And it’s been such a godsend and a wonderful thing, a wonderful place for me, to the point where my kids are like: ‘You get up. You paint. You paint till you fall down. You sleep. We have to bring food to you so you eat’. It’s become all consuming.
“I think that it takes 10,000 hours to master anything. I think that is really genuinely true. I am trying to get those 10,000 hours in because I want to become a master. I don’t believe I’m a master at this point. But I am really working to get those 10,000 hours in,” says the AIDS and human rights activist.
Her greatest joy is reserved for her four adopted sons. “I don’t believe that my boys should suffer the slings and arrows of fame or that my job should interfere with their lives,” she says.
“I shield them from that because I don’t think that’s fair. I really liked when they were little, and they went to school, and the teachers said: ‘Do you know what your mom does?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, she bakes cookies!’ I like to keep it that way.”
Oscar-nominated in 1996 for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, Stone’s not about to close the door on Hollywood – even if it does get increasingly difficult to make truly unique films.
“No one wants you to make something out of the box. They want something that was a success before. I’m an envelope breaker. Just like coming here,” she says alluding to her visit to Jeddah for RSIFF. “Everyone said to me, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ And I said, ‘I’m afraid not to know. So why don’t I go see how it really is and then I’ll tell you’. What I have really learned is that what everybody tells you isn’t always the way it really is. It’s just what everybody’s telling you. You have to go find out for yourself. That’s where truth exists.”
The last of Hollywood’s real old-fashioned movie stars, she’s proud to own the title. “Maybe it’s just me, but I absolutely love movie stars. The Golden Age. To me, ‘movie star’ is a very big deal. And there aren’t movie stars now. I don’t like to throw myself out there in the way that the youngsters do,” she smiles.
“I like to keep that sort of mystery. I really enjoyed being a movie star because I think there’s something special and wonderful and aspirational about it. When I was a kid, the whole movie star thing meant a lot to me. I thought movie stars were absolutely unbelievable. And so, yes, I wanted to be a great actress, but I also really wanted to be a movie star because I thought movie stardom was something special and unique in itself. And I miss that.”