Sharon Stone

Sharon Vonne Stone was born on 10 March 1958 in Meadville, a small town in north-western Pennsylvania. Her mother, Dorothy, was an accountant and her father, Joseph, made tools and dies; she is one of four children. At five she skipped a grade, and she later went to Edinboro on a creative writing scholarship, which she abandoned to model. In 2016 she went back and finished the degree.

Ford signed her in 1977 and she worked in Milan and Paris. A first time on film came as an extra, the pretty girl on the train in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980). A first speaking part came the following year in 'Deadly Blessing', a horror film by Wes Craven.

The eighties went on minor work: the adventurer in 'King Solomon's Mines' (1985) and its sequel, a part in the fourth 'Police Academy' and two action pictures in 1988. Eight episodes of the miniseries 'War and Remembrance' were the most substantial thing she did in those years.

Catherine Tramell

Total Recall (1990) lifted her out of the crowd. For Paul Verhoeven she played Lori, the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger's character who turns out not to be his wife at all.

Two years later Verhoeven called her back for Basic Instinct (1992). She is Catherine Tramell, the rich novelist suspected of murder and interrogated by Michael Douglas's detective. That made her a star at 34: a worldwide hit and her first Golden Globe nomination.

Of the interrogation scene she wrote in her memoir that she had not been warned what would be visible, and that she first saw it in a screening room. Verhoeven denies it. He said in 2021 that his memory is "radically different" from hers and that she knew exactly what they were shooting.

What came next was a run of badly received films: 'Sliver' (1993), 'Intersection' and The Specialist (1994) with Sylvester Stallone; the last two together won her the Razzie for worst actress. Catherine Tramell turned up again, briefly, in Last Action Hero.

With The Quick and the Dead (1995) she started producing as well. Getting Sam Raimi hired to direct took a fight; Gene Hackman took top billing; and she pushed Russell Crowe and a twenty-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio into the cast. The studio would not have DiCaprio, so she paid his salary out of her own. He has said so publicly and thanked her for it more than once.

Ginger McKenna

Casino (1995) gave her the best part she has had. She is Ginger, the former Las Vegas hustler who marries Robert De Niro's character and comes apart across three hours, in the Martin Scorsese film that also has Joe Pesci in it. That won her the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama and a nomination for the Oscar, which went to Susan Sarandon for 'Dead Man Walking'.

After that came the remake of 'Les Diaboliques', Diabolique (1996), with Isabelle Adjani; the bottom of the ocean in Barry Levinson's Sphere (1998) with Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson; and the voice of Princess Bala in Antz. Two more Golden Globe nominations followed, for 'The Mighty' and 'The Muse', making four in all.

September 2001

On 29 September 2001 she had a brain haemorrhage caused by a ruptured vertebral artery. It bled for nine days, and she spent eight months in bed and about seven years recovering. In her own summary: "I had lost my memory. I couldn't talk. I couldn't walk. I couldn't see straight."

The career she had went with it. Her husband, the journalist Phil Bronstein, filed for divorce in 2003, and in 2008 a judge gave him primary custody of Roan, the boy they had adopted in 2000. As she has explained it, she lost the ruling because she had suffered a brain haemorrhage and was "an actress who had made sexy movies". Laird came in 2005 and Quinn in 2006, and she raised all three alone.

In 2004 she won the Emmy for outstanding guest actress in a drama series, for three episodes of 'The Practice'. That same year brought Catwoman, with Halle Berry and Benjamin Bratt, and 2006 brought Basic Instinct 2. One Oscar nomination and three Razzie wins sit side by side in her record.

Independent cinema is what rebuilt her reviews. She is one of the old girlfriends Bill Murray's character visits in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (2005), alongside Julie Delpy, Tilda Swinton and Chloë Sevigny. Then came Bobby (2006), directed by Emilio Estevez with Anthony Hopkins and Demi Moore, and Nick Cassavetes's Alpha Dog.

Painting

Television has given her the best parts of the last decade: the children's book author in Steven Soderbergh's Mosaic (2018), which won her a Satellite Award; the heiress in Ratched (2020), Ryan Murphy's series with Sarah Paulson; and parts in The Flight Attendant with Kaley Cuoco and in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, plus an appearance as herself in Paolo Sorrentino's The New Pope.

Film work has stayed in supporting territory: the mother of the porn actress played by Amanda Seyfried in Lovelace (2013); a part in John Turturro's Fading Gigolo; the talent agent in The Disaster Artist (2017) with James Franco; The Laundromat (2019), another Soderbergh, with Meryl Streep and Gary Oldman; and the villain in Nobody 2 (2025) opposite Bob Odenkirk. Producing and starring came together on Susan Walter's All I Wish, and she shares a cast with her son Roan in What About Love.

An aunt taught her to paint as a child. It lapsed in the nineties for lack of time and came back in lockdown, to "process the impact of what had happened to me". Los Angeles got the first solo show in 2023, and she has hung work in Connecticut, Berlin and San Francisco since.

This year put her back in a big series. The third season of Euphoria arrived on 12 April 2026 with Stone as Patty Lance, a Hollywood showrunner whose assistant is the character played by Maude Apatow, in Sam Levinson's cast alongside Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney.

August brought the announcement that she will lead 'Martha & Muhammad', the feature directing debut of Ramy Youssef for A24, in which she plays a wealthy New York widow who takes up with a much younger man. Amanda Seyfried joined the cast in October and shooting was due to start in New York this autumn.

Her memoir, 'The Beauty of Living Twice', came out in 2021. France made her an Officer of Arts and Letters in 2005 and a Commander in 2021, and she has spent decades raising money for Aids research with amfAR; remarks she made about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake cost her a boycott in China and her Dior campaigns there. Marriage came twice: to the producer Michael Greenburg from 1984 to 1990, and to Bronstein from 1998 to 2004.

At 68 she says she would like to do Broadway and "bring a little glamour back".

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Sharon Stone is Stardust Memories (1980); in all, 29 films and 7 TV shows over 46 years. They have worked as actress in 36 and producer in 2. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Euphoria (2019), with 805 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 16 titles. The person they have worked with most is Sylvester Stallone, on 4 films, among them Antz and The Specialist.