Was Sharon Stone’s career derailed because she was “too good”?
When Sharon Stone first got big in Hollywood, it was like she came out of nowhere. In reality, the star had spent years toiling in low budget, low quality fare before she burst onto the scene in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall.
After that, she was off to the races. Verhoeven gave her arguably her most famous role with his next film, Basic Instinct, and she starred in a number of other acclaimed films, picking up award nominations and critical acclaim. However, the good times weren’t to last.
Things really began to take a turn for the worse with the western The Quick and the Dead. Despite Stone basically being responsible for discovering Leonardo DiCaprio, the offers dried up pretty quickly following this project. She could only find herself cast in flops like Catwoman or the god awful Basic Instinct 2, a remarkable fall from grace for the former ‘it’ girl.
The star herself has been incredibly vocal in interviews about the various things she attributes to her downturn in fortune. In one conversation with The Guardian, she traced her career crossroads back to the night she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Martin Scorsese’s Casino.
“We were in this very small room,” she said of a pre-Oscars party. “Francis Coppola came up to me and he put a hand on my shoulder, like my dad used to when something really serious was about to happen. And he said: ‘I need to tell you something and it’s really hard.’ He said: ‘You’re not going to win the Oscar.’ And I said: ‘What?’ And he said: ‘You’re not going to win the Oscar, Sharon.’ I went: ‘Why?’ And he went: ‘I didn’t win it for The Godfather and Marty didn’t win it for Raging Bull and you’re not going to win it for Casino.”
According to Stone’s theory, she believed that the powers that be in Hollywood were unhappy that she had been nominated, but Robert De Niro, her co-star, had not. “Sometimes I think when you get nominated for an Academy Award,” she said. “And the greatest living actor on the planet doesn’t, that’s an imbalance in the male-female dynamic that is not great.”
Some of Coppola’s logic holds up, although a lot of it doesn’t. It’s true that he would have been viewed as a bit of a disruptor when he made The Godfather, as he lost the ‘Best Director’ prize to Bob Fosse, an establishment figure from the old days of Hollywood. As for Scorsese, however, he was an establishment figure when he was nominated for Raging Bull. Although, he did lose to Robert Redford, the epitome of the old guard.
Almost every interview Stone gives features some claim that she was screwed by the higher-ups or held down because of her talent, so it’s hard to know what to believe sometimes. While she does make very relevant points about the way women were and continue to be treated by the movie business, some of her stories come off like a bitter ex-star who can’t let go of the fact that her glory days are over. She occupies a very unique space in the modern discourse, one that she’s not likely to give up any time soon.
