Sharon Stone on the breathtaking inspiration of Elizabeth Taylor: “She knew how to use her body to tell a story”
In the 1990s, Sharon Stone was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Having acted steadily throughout the ‘80s, she didn’t break through until 1992’s Basic Instinct, but when that film was released, she became an instant A-lister. Paul Verhoeven’s erotic thriller starred Michael Douglas as a detective who begins a torrid affair with the prime suspect of a murder investigation, played by Stone. It could have been a trashy, boilerplate thriller that was quickly forgotten, but Stone made sure that didn’t happen.
In the most famous scene in the movie (and Stone’s career), a group of male detectives interrogates her character about the case. Instead of succumbing to the pressure, she changes the balance of power by casually uncrossing her legs and briefly revealing that she isn’t wearing underwear. The men are momentarily stupified and struggle to regain the momentum of their questioning.
Stone has since said that Verhoeven hadn’t told her that he would be filming up her skirt when the moment took place and had explained that she needed to take her underwear off because it was reflecting light onto the camera lens. Like it or not, however, the moment became iconic and controversial, and typecast Stone as one of the most dangerous femme fatales in Hollywood history. She wasn’t boiling bunnies like Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction, but what she did was arguably scarier, at least for male audiences. She was using her sexuality as a weapon, and her male co-stars were powerless against it.
Stone continued to play sexually assertive women throughout the ‘90s, including in Sliver and Martin Scorsese’s Casino, and struggled to find success outside this limited archetype. Even decades later, her career is still defined by these characters, largely because she portrayed them so flawlessly.
During an interview with the American Film Institute, she talked about her appreciation for another actor who was known for bringing sexuality to the screen in a way that threatened her male co-stars – the icon Elizabeth Taylor. “She had an unbelievable use of her body, particularly in BUtterfield 8,” Stone said, adding, “She knew how to use her body to tell a story, whether she was standing in a doorway in BUtterfield 8, or standing behind Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof… She had a way of using her body that was just magnificent.”
Taylor was one of the great sex symbols of the 1950s and ‘60s, a label that is objectifying and patriarchal but which she flipped the script on by taking ownership of her body to inhabit her characters. In 1960’s Butterfield 8, for which she won an Oscar, she played a New York sex worker who falls for a married man. In 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she played a character whose love was similarly unrequited and who also used her sexuality to try to attract the man who continues to reject her.
For Stone, Taylor’s ability to transform that sexuality based on the role she was playing was even more remarkable. As an illustration, she pointed to the 1966 drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a film in which Taylor and her real-life husband Richard Burton played constantly warring spouses who are locked in a death spiral of toxic interdependence.
“She took that same movement and bastardised it into the violence of what happens when that need [for love] is never met,” she said. “It’s just breathtaking to me.”
