‘Basic Instinct’: How Sharon Stone seized her last chance and launched a career
It’s no secret that cinema has a long history of subordinating women and treating them rather differently from their male counterparts. Even though it was actually a woman, Alice Guy-Blaché, who made the first narrative film, there has always been a shortage of female filmmakers, not for lack of talent, but rather due to a lack of opportunities. Women have always been more likely to be found in front of the camera, but even then, the industry has strict rules regarding who can become a leading star.
The easiest way for a female actor to make it in the industry is to start out young, perhaps before you’ve even reached adulthood, but even then, that doesn’t guarantee your success in such a cutthroat industry. Sharon Stone might have become a huge star in the 1990s, but she was close to giving up, having spent many years modelling and acting before receiving her big break.
Stone rose to widespread prominence with her iconic performance in Basic Instinct, which came at the height of the erotic thriller trend. It cemented itself as one of the most essential movies of the genre, with Stone playing the villainous Catherine Tramell. In the film’s most memorable scene, Stone opens her legs, revealing her lack of underwear, which has since been widely parodied, going down in cinema history as an incredibly indelible image.
However, before Stone landed the part, she was struggling to find her place in Hollywood. After an early career as a model, which saw her appear in many advertisements throughout the 1980s, she found small roles in movies like Irreconcilable Differences, Above the Law, Total Recall, and Where Sleeping Dogs Lie. She didn’t feel as though any of these were particularly impressive performances, though, and she knew that the older she got, the less ‘desirable’ she would become to Hollywood.
The actor told Vanity Fair: “Basic Instinct was my 18th movie. For years, I had been getting pummeled doing a bunch of crap movies and so-so television, back in the day when TV wasn’t king. I was 32 years old when I got that job. I told my agent that if they got me in that door, I would get the job. I knew this was the last chance—I was aging out of the business I hadn’t really gotten into yet. I needed a break.”
Stone admitted that she wasn’t ready for the fame that would come with her part in the movie, adding: “It wasn’t until we took the movie to Cannes that Michael [Douglas] found out I had already done all those other shit movies. He stood up and made a beautiful toast to me. That moment was so amazing; I was wearing my beach cover-up as an evening gown; people had broken into my room to steal Sharon Stone’s belongings.”
“I was a star and one with no money to buy new clothes,” she said. “Welcome to Hollywood, honey bun. I went upstairs at this hotel/restaurant and had the dry heaves in the toilet. My friend Shep put my feet in a bathtub of cold water and told me the new rules of what it meant to be famous and gave me a Valium.”
Following the success of Basic Instinct, Stone went on to co-star alongside Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She also led the thriller Diabolique, appeared alongside Gene Hackman in The Quick and the Dead, and even won an Emmy for 2004’s The Practice.
