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Sharon Stone holds nothing back.
In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoirs The beauty of living twice shared with Vanity Fair, opens the actress about the role that made her a star and several exploitative #MeToo moments she experienced as a woman in Hollywood.
In one case, she reveals that an unnamed producer brought her to his office to suggest that she sleep with a male coster so they can have more chemistry. “He explained to me why I had to make my costar so we could have chemistry on screen. Why, in his time, he made love with Ava Gardner on screen and it was so sensational! Now the creepy thought thought of him in the same room. with Ava Gardner gave me a break, ‘she wrote.
She says she remembers thinking: ‘You insisted on this actor when he could not get a whole scene in the test. … Now do you think I would become a good actor if I did? No one is so good in bed. I felt like they could just hire a costume with talent, someone who could deliver a scene and remember its rules. I also felt that they could handle him and would leave me out there. It was my job to act and I said it. “Consequently, Stone says she was described as ‘difficult’.
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Stone, who says her former manager told her that no one would hire her because she was not ‘competent’, also recalls working with a director she refers to as a #MeToo candidate. who refused to shoot her. because she does not “sit in his lap and take direction.” According to Stone, the studio did nothing.
The Oscar-nominated actress also gives details about her time working on her asterisk Basic instinct, for which she says she had to fight tooth and nail. Her manager had to break into the cast’s office to get a copy of the screenplay, and called the director, Paul Verhoeven, ‘every day for seven or eight months’ to get a screen test for her. ‘I’m done Total revocation with Paul, but Michael Douglas did not want to test with me, “she wrote. Hey, I was a nobody compared to him, and it was such a risky movie. Therefore, Paul tested with me and kept playing my test according to that of all who tested. ‘
She continued, “Finally, after offering the part to 12 other actresses who turned it down, Michael agreed to test with me.” [Stone says that nowadays she and Douglas are friends, and she says she learned a lot from working with him.]
And of course, there is the most infamous scene from the film in which her character Catherine Tramell is interviewed and she crosses her legs to show that she is not wearing any underwear. In her memoirs, Stone says that the first time she saw her ‘vagina shot’ was in a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the making of the film, after she said “I was saying, ‘We can see nothing – I just have to take off your panties, because the white reflects the light, and we know you’re wearing panties.” She says she slapped her director in the face when she saw it and called her lawyer, who said she could file an order against the film and stop its release.
Stone finally decided against it. “After the show, I let Paul know about the options Marty had set out for me. Of course, he strongly denied that I had any choices. I was just an actress, just a woman; what choices could I have? ? ” she remembered. “But I did have choices. So I thought and thought and I chose to allow this scene into the film. Why? Because it was correct for the film and for the character; and because I was, after all, right did. ” [Verhoeven has denied Stone’s claims, saying that she knew what she was doing in the scene.]
Stone’s memoirs will be available on March 30 via publisher Knopf.
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