The New Stone Age

It is 30 years this spring since Basic Instinct changed Sharon Stone’s life. She takes us back to those crazy days, and tells Tom Chamberlin how she overcame sexism and adversity to forge a life on her own terms. Warning: truth bombs ahead…
Sweater, Brunello Cucinelli.

Sharon Stone and I have never met, but she greeted me as though I were an old friend. There were no ‘How do you dos’, no small talk, but I was straight into her wardrobe — via her laptop and a Zoom call — to look at a leaky roof, and from there to the kitchen, where she made a cup of tea. She was in her office at her Beverly Hills home, the former home of Montgomery Clift. Important matters, such as our children, were discussed, and before I knew it we were almost an hour into an hour-long interview and I had yet to ask any of the questions on my list. Fortunately, the famously charitable Stone gave me another 90 minutes of her time. The truth is, her appearance on The Rake’s cover is one of those moments when we see an alignment of the material and the metaphysical. There are few people in the world — not just women — who personify the values of the magazine more than Sharon Stone, for she is a boundary breaker, a humanitarian (garlanded by a Nobel peace laureate, no less), roguish, uncompromising, talented and dedicated to her craft. The Basic Instinct avatar people assign to Stone may beguile, but the bigger picture is something far more poetic and less superficial (even if she is someone who doesn’t pull her punches), and I was fortunate enough to spend enough time with her to come under that spell.

    Published

    February 2022

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