“I’m the invisible actress”: the Oscars snub that derailed Sharon Stone’s career
It’s a cliché at this point to say that Hollywood is a fickle place, but for some actors, it rings painfully true. There are the ones who were chewed up and spat out by the system, like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, the ones who gave the business everything they had and never broke through, and the ones, like Sharon Stone, who enjoyed a brief period in the sun, only to be abandoned without fanfare shortly thereafter.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Stone’s career faltered. In the 1990s, she was everywhere. It was the flip side of Meg Ryan’s career. As rom-coms were enjoying their heyday, neo-noir and erotic thrillers were in vogue as well. Her breakthrough role, and the one for which she is still most famous, was as an author and murder suspect in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct. Released in 1992, it was a steamy, borderline campy thriller that launched her as a modern-day femme fatale. She was a throwback to Hitchcock’s famous ‘ice blondes’, a dead ringer for Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren with the authority and agency for the modern era.
Basic Instinct catapulted her to fame, but Martin Scorsese’s Casino earned her respect as an actor. Playing a chip hustler and con artist who marries a casino operator with Mafia ties (Robert De Niro), she achieved something that few other female stars have: a memorable performance in a Scorsese movie. It earned her an Oscar nomination, but as far as Stone is concerned, it was the beginning of the end.
Apparently, Francis Ford Coppola was the first to break it to her that she wasn’t going to win that night. Speaking to Louis Theroux on his podcast in 2024, the actor recalled that the director told her in advance in order to cushion the blow. “I didn’t win for The Godfather and Marty didn’t win for Raging Bull, and you’re not going to win for Casino,” he said. “And it’s because this room can’t hear opera.”
Whether that little vote of confidence did anything to ease the sting of losing is unlikely. For Stone, sitting in the theatre and knowing that she was about to lose was pretty lonely, and things just got worse from there. “You have to pretend it’s fantastic and it’s not fantastic,” she said. “And then I didn’t get any good parts ever again for the rest of my entire life.”
That wasn’t strictly true. Although she spent the next few years starring in weak erotic thrillers and another handful of years sidelined by health issues, Stone did enjoy a brief comeback with critically acclaimed movies like Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers and the drama Lovelace. Still, major roles seemed to be a thing of the past.
Stone is refreshingly candid about it, making no effort to hide her frustration. “Did anybody notice me in Lovelace?” she responded when Theroux asked if there were any roles she had been satisfied with after Casino. “That was a performance you could sharpen your knives on. Did anybody notice that? Nope… I’m the invisible actress.” She added, “I hate it. I could play Hamlet in the nude. I hate it. There’s just nothing.”
For whatever reason, Stone’s career stalled in the late ’90s and has never recovered. However, with fellow ’90s erotic thriller star Demi Moore roaring back onto the screen in The Substance, it’s clear that there is an appetite for female stars to have Hollywood comebacks, even when they reach the supposedly un-castable age of 50.
