Sharon Stone

Sharon Vonne Stone was born on March 10, 1958, in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Dorothy, worked as an accountant, and her father, Joseph, was a tool and die manufacturer. She has three siblings and is primarily of Scots-Irish and English descent, with some Irish ancestry; in 2013, she noted that her Irish forebears came to the U.S. during the Great Famine. Stone has a reported IQ of 154 and was academically advanced, entering second grade at age five. She has said that she and her sister were sexually abused as children by their maternal grandfather, a detail she shared in a 2021 interview promoting her memoir *The Beauty of Living Twice*. At 14, she suffered a serious neck injury while breaking a horse. She graduated from Saegertown High School in 1975 and attended Edinboro State College on a creative writing scholarship at age 15, but left to pursue modeling in New York City. In 2016, inspired by Hillary Clinton, she returned to Edinboro University to complete her degree.

Stone began modeling in commercials and print ads. After winning Miss Crawford County, Pennsylvania, and competing for Miss Pennsylvania in 1976, a pageant judge advised her to move to New York. She signed with Ford Modeling Agency in 1977, then lived in Milan and Paris for a year before deciding to quit modeling and try acting. She returned to New York and stood in line to be an extra in Woody Allen’s *Stardust Memories* (1980), her film debut. Her first speaking role came in Wes Craven’s *Deadly Blessing* (1981). French director Claude Lelouch cast her in *Les Uns et les Autres* (1982), though she appeared for only two minutes and went uncredited. In the 1980s, she landed guest spots on TV shows like *Silver Spoons*, *Bay City Blues*, *Remington Steele*, *Magnum, P.I.*, and *T. J. Hooker*. She played a starlet in *Irreconcilable Differences* (1984), starred in the poorly received *King Solomon’s Mines* (1985) and its sequel *Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold* (1986)—the latter earning her a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Actress—and appeared in *Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol* (1987), *Cold Steel* (1987), *Above the Law* (1988), and *Action Jackson* (1988). She also played Janice Henry in the ABC miniseries *War and Remembrance* (1987).

Her breakthrough came with Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi film *Total Recall* (1990), followed by international fame as Catherine Tramell in Verhoeven’s erotic thriller *Basic Instinct* (1992), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination. She won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her role as a trophy wife in Martin Scorsese’s *Casino* (1995). Other notable films include *Sliver* (1993), *The Specialist* (1994), *The Quick and the Dead* (1995), *Catwoman* (2004), *Broken Flowers* (2005), *Alpha Dog* (2006), *Bobby* (2006), *Fading Gigolo* (2013), *The Disaster Artist* (2017), *Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese* (2019), and *The Laundromat* (2019). On television, she appeared in the HBO film *If These Walls Could Talk 2* (2000), Steven Soderbergh’s *Mosaic* (2017), and Ryan Murphy’s *Ratched* (2020). She won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her guest role on *The Practice* (2004) and also appeared on *Law & Order: Special Victims Unit* (2010).

Stone is known for playing femmes fatales and mysterious women, becoming a major sex symbol of the 1990s. She has received a Primetime Emmy, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2005, France named her an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, elevating her to Commander in 2021.