Category: Sharon Stone

Sharon Stone was invited to the Torino Film Festival this week. They gave her a Stella della Mole lifetime achievement award (just like Angelina Jolie). Sharon goes to these kinds of film festivals and international film events all the time – she shows up to the opening of an envelope, especially if that envelope is in Europe. As part of her award, Sharon did a press conference at the festival, and she was asked specifically about the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. I repeat: she was not asked directly about Donald Trump, she was asked specifically about violence against women. It just so happens that Trump is an adjudicated rapist and that a half-dozen of his cabinet-level nominees are predators, rapists, degenerates and whatever Matt Gaetz is. As you can imagine, Sharon’s thoughts on the issue of “violence against women” are influenced by the realities of the incoming Trump administration.

“This question about the question of violence against women is– is a big one. And I think we have to really stop and think about things. And we have to stop and think about who we choose for government. And if, in fact, we are actually choosing our government or if the government is choosing itself.

You know, Italy has seen fascism. Italy has seen these things. You guys. And you understand what happens. You have seen this before. My country is in the midst of adolescence. Adolescence is very arrogant. Adolescence thinks it knows everything. Adolescence is naive and ignorant and arrogant. And we are in our ignorant, arrogant adolescence.

We haven’t seen this before in our country. So Americans who don’t travel, who 80% don’t have a passport, who are uneducated, are in their extraordinary naivete. What I would say is that the only way that we can help with these issues is to help each other.

Now, we can’t just say women should help women because that’s the only way we have survived so far. We must say that good men must help good men and those good men must be very aware that a lot of their friends are not good men. And we can’t continue to pretend that your friends are good men when they’re not good men. And you must be very clear minded and understand that your friends who are not not good men are dangerous violent men. And you have to keep them away from your daughters, your wives and your girlfriends, because this is the time when we can no longer look away, when bad men are bad.

I was watching a comedian the other night and he said, I asked a woman to dinner and she said yes. And it was such a brave thing for her to do because the only real thing, the number one killer of. In the world today is men. For men, the number one killer is heart disease. The number one killer for women is men! It is very important to remember that. It’s very important to remember that. Thank you.

[From Mediaite]

On a scale of zero to Dixie Chicks, this is pretty middle-of-the-road to me? She doesn’t even say Trump’s name, but yeah, she makes not-so-oblique references to the arrogance and ignorance of millions of Americans who voted for Trump. MAGAts are crying because they think Sharon called them dumb, uneducated losers who never travel. But… she’s right? One of the big postmortems on the election was the dumbest people in America voted for Trump and they all cited some of the dumbest reasons why they voted that way.

The whole section about “good men have to look out for women”… men had their chance to look out for women and they voted for Trump in large numbers. The majority of white women also chose this violent fascism. So it is what it is. What’s also interesting is that in 2022, Stone made some interesting comments post-Dobbs, in which she basically said that Trump, Dobbs, and the sort of new cultural acceptance of violent misogyny was all a backlash to Me Too. I don’t believe that, but I think her 2022 comments were more interesting than whatever this was.

Sharon Stone says Trump won because Americans ‘don’t travel & are uneducated.’

“Keep them away from your daughters, your wives, & your girlfriends.” pic.twitter.com/GyTvoiisi8

— AlexandruC4 (@AlexandruC4) November 26, 2024

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

Sharon Stone covers the latest issue of InStyle, mostly to promote herself and let everyone know that she’d like to keep working. She looks great, honestly, and I wouldn’t mind seeing her in more movies and TV shows. Certainly, there should be a place for a 65-year-old Sharon Stone. Her InStyle profile leans heavily into the mythos of Sharon Stone, with vivid descriptions of just how famous she was in the 1990s following Basic Instinct. What sort of goes unsaid is how much fun she had during that time, how much she loved being famous. In retrospect for Stone, she makes it sound like a huge drag, but she really did love it back then. Some highlights from InStyle:

The LAPD came to her house & put her in lockdown during the OJ Simpson/white Bronco chase: “He’s dangerous,” Stone remembers an officer telling her. “And we don’t know how dangerous, and we don’t know what this is.” You—a non-famous person—would perhaps wonder what could compel officers to draw a connection between a manhunt and an unrelated celebrity. Stone didn’t question it. Her life had spun so wildly out of her own control. They said she needed to go. She went. At the hotel, one officer stood near reception and another kept watch at Stone’s door “while O.J. was driving up and down the f–king freeway,” Stone says. Returning to her old place was out of the question. “[The police] were like, ‘Find a secure house behind a gate.’” So she did. It was an unrenovated shell, and the lone home on the market she could afford.

It’s expensive to be famous: “It’s very expensive to be famous,” Stone tells me now. The house she closed on from the nondescript hotel, the staff she hired to keep her safe, the publicists, the makeup artists, the managers—it added up. “You go out to dinner, and there’s 15 people at the table, and who gets the check? You get the $3,000 dinner check every single time.”

She always kept her eye on the money: “I was living in a house that didn’t have floors,” Stone says. People wanted her to be grateful. She wanted to be smart. When critics ravaged her, “it was like, ‘Oh, welcome to fame. I’m pulling the pin on the grenade. Run, motherf–ker.’’”

What fame looks like now: “At least now [people] understand that Jennifer Lawrence can’t just skip onto an airplane. Nicole Kidman can’t jump onto Delta. Sharon Stone can’t do it either, whether or not she’s doing a lot of movies. [People] think, ‘What have you been in?’ And it’s like, Dude, they know me in the Amazon rainforest. It’s tampons, Q-tips, and Sharon Stone.”

She survived the tsunami of fame: “I think that I lived is more than many of my predecessors did, and that really pissed off a lot of people,” she says now. She means that insta-icons have not always fared so well (not just the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, but Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland), and the public and the media have never been particularly sympathetic to their struggles. “We’re supposed to go crazy or we’re supposed to be drug addicts, but surprise, motherf–kers.”

Moving on after her divorce: “I made an altar, and I sat at that altar, and I worked with many people to teach me forgiveness. You can’t bite into the seed of bitterness. Once you bite it, you can’t spit it out anymore. I found limits. There’s a limit to me. For so long, everybody wanted me to be all things to all people because I was the limitless Sharon Stone. F–k that bullsh-t.”

The end of Roe v. Wade: “Not to have bodily autonomy is just primitive. It’s caveman time, and I just find it laughable. It’s a lot of chest pounding over things that don’t belong to people pounding their chests.”

She pitched a Barbie movie, years ago: The pitch did not go over well. This was “back in the white hot days, back when Jesus lived. They took us out of the studio like we were on fire.” She was thrilled to see Gerwig and Robbie—whom she lovingly calls her “movie daughter” — triumph where she had been thwarted. “It makes me want to cry, actually,” Stone says, “because I think of all the times I sat at my kitchen table, thinking, This is f–king torture. I was banging my head against this supposedly glass ceiling, but it felt like it was made of f–king concrete.”

[From InStyle]

While I haven’t been around as long as Stone, I remember the fights she and Julia Roberts had about getting paid seven figures per movie, then eight figures. Demi Moore was in that mix too, fighting to get paid what she felt she was worth. It was a huge deal in the ‘90s, that actresses were standing on business and fighting the studios for bigger paychecks. This was also a time before every actress had a lucrative side gig – like, Sharon wasn’t feathering her nest with brand ambassadorships and beauty contracts during the ‘90s either. Anyway, I always enjoy when women talk about money because I do wonder who gets paid what. For all of the freebies given to celebrities, it’s worth remembering that they really do have to pay for their teams (and security).

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of InStyle.