From Julia Roberts to Kathleen Turner: the iconic female stars Sharon Stone owes her career to
In the early 1990s, Sharon Stone was convinced her career was over before it had even had a chance to begin. The star had spent most of the ’80s making low-rent action-adventures and thrillers that she didn’t truly care about, while dreaming of a meaty lead role she could sink her teeth into. In fact, her outlook on a continuing acting career was so dim that when she finished shooting her small-but-memorable part in 1990’s Total Recall, she told her agent she’d rather go back to waiting tables than make any more crappy movies. Within two years, though, everything would change, and Stone would become one of the biggest stars in the game – all thanks to several iconic Hollywood women.
Before 1992, few audience members could have picked Stone out of a lineup, which sounds insane given how she became one of the biggest sex symbols the industry had ever seen in the rest of the decade. However, her roles in the Indiana Jones rip-off King Solomon’s Mines, the lamentable Action Jackson, and the questionable Steven Seagal action movie Above the Law did her no favours. She would likely have been best known for her turn as the villainous secret agent pretending to be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife in Total Recall. Still, that role made her want to walk away from the business entirely.
At this time, though, an erotic thriller was coming together at Carolco Pictures. Several big-name stars had turned down the lead role before Michael Douglas agreed to come on board as long as he was paid the exorbitant fee of $14million. Director Paul Verhoeven then began to look around for a female lead to play the sultry-yet-murderous crime novelist Catherine Tramell – but almost every actor approached was put off by the sexual content of the film. Indeed, the script called for many risqué sex scenes and an extensive amount of nudity.
If Hollywood legend is to be believed, 50 stars were approached about playing Tramell in Basic Instinct, and they all said, “No, thanks.” Douglas reportedly recommended Kim Basinger, then riding high on Batman and the similarly sexy 9 1/2 Weeks, but she declined out of fears of being typecast as a femme fatale. He then floated the idea of Julia Roberts, who was fresh off the back of Pretty Woman, but she also said no. Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer, Geena Davis, Ellen Barkin, Mariel Hemingway, Debra Winger, Kathleen Turner, and Greta Scacchi are also known to have run in the other direction, leaving Verhoeven fearing no one would agree to star in the controversial picture.
At this point, though, the Dutch maverick had a brainwave. He’d just directed Total Recall, of course, and felt Stone nailed her small role, which required her to be docile and loving in one moment before immediately flipping to harsh and villainous. Stone was only too happy to field Verhoeven’s call because when she read the Basic Instinct script, she immediately recognised it as just the kind of part she’d been waiting a decade for. She agreed to the sexual content that the movie would require, and Verhoeven organised a screentest with Douglas – which the Wall Street star flat out refused to attend.
You see, Douglas had gotten cold feet about the sex in the movie, too, and felt he needed a big female star alongside him to take some of the heat. “I need someone to share the risks of this movie,” the 47-year-old star said. “I don’t want to be up there all by myself. There’s going to be a lot of shit flying around.”
Douglas, of course, eventually relented to the screen test, and soon realised “we had a fabulous actress in Sharon. She was just perfect for the role.” Stone was paid only $500,000 for her lead role – a mere fraction of Douglas’ $14million – but the part that almost every female star in the game had turned down wound up making her career.
In her memoir, a grateful Stone wrote, “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 ageing out of the business I hadn’t really gotten into yet. I needed a break.” It can’t be denied that an iconic role in the fourth highest-grossing film of 1992 was certainly the break she was looking for.
