The three movies Martin Scorsese told Sharon Stone to watch to prepare for ‘Casino’
Casino asked a lot of Sharon Stone. Directed by Martin Scorsese, this 1995 features stars Robert De Niro as a lowly mobster who works his way into the upper echelons of the organised crime world. After landing a job as the head of the Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas, Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein winds up making several powerful enemies, including an ex-con artist called Lester Diamon and his hustler wife Ginger.
The film is essentially a retelling of Nicholas Pileggi’s crime memoir Casino: Love and Honor, and many of the characters are based on real people. Sam, for example, was based on renowned gambler Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal, while Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro was based on Anthony John ‘Ant’ Spilotro and Sharon Stone’s Ginger McKenna was based on model Geri McGee, the wife of Lefty.
Geri died in 1982 at the age of 46. Her body was discovered in the lobby of the Beverly Sunset Hotel on Sunset Boulevard on November 6th. She’d been heavily drugged and passed away three days later. According to her sister, McGee was murdered by the mob, which had targetted Rosenthal just weeks earlier. The knock-on effect of this was that Stone could not meet the person her character was based on. That’s where Scorsese stepped in.
The director suggested Stone watch three films. The first was 1967’s Valley of the Dolls, which might sound like a B-movie horror but tells a far darker story. Following three bright women working in the glamour sector – played by Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke and Sharon Tate – it traces their successes, failures, heartbreaks and their slow but unstoppable slide into addiction. Scorsese also recommended 1948’s A Woman’s Vengeance, which was written by Aldous Huxley and stars Ann Blyth as the mistress of a man caring for his invalid wife.
The third and final film Scorsese recommended was 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, which, as the title suggests, follows the final hours of the medieval French martyr. These three films have several thematic parallels, but perhaps the most apparent is that all feature women who, like McGee, are punished for their ambition.
Stone was warned not to take on the role of Ginger, but she went for it anyway. Even after she landed the part, she was so desperate to impress Scorsese that she starved herself for a week before filming one of her most crucial scenes. Recalling her preparation, Stone explained that she “nearly actually physically killed myself making Casino“.
Adding: “We did the death scene on the last day because Scorsese knew I wanted to get just so completely skinny and out of it. In the final week I didn’t eat, I didn’t do anything, I just made myself a complete wreck so that I could get skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny and down to nothing. I lost so much weight.”
You can revisit a clip from Casino below.
