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Join Telegram Channel Arte celebrates the American star this Sunday with a powerful documentary on her career and life as a determined woman.
It's a cult film that revealed one of the most famous Hollywood sex symbols on the planet: Sharon Stone. A success due in particular to a particularly daring scene in 1992: at the heart of the erotic thriller Basic Instinctthe actress, without panties, crosses and uncrosses her legs, revealing her anatomy for a moment.
This film by Paul Verhoeven made her a star overnight, during its event screening at the Cannes Film Festival that year, as she recounts in the new documentary programmed on Arte just after this rebroadcast and entitled Sharon Stone, the survival instinct: “I was a simple American actress when I arrived on the Croisette… I was a world-famous star when I left the festival!”
Sharon Stone tried to make a Barbie movie in the 1990s
Already visible in replay, this portrait dwells at length on this sequence, which has become cult all over the world, which perfectly illustrates the paradoxes of its interpreter. Yes, Sharon Stone dreamed of being the star of this erotic thriller. Yes, she posted sexually explicit photos to get the attention of the filmmaker knowing he was preparing this film. Yes, she knew that it would fantasize millions of men. However, she has good reasons for this same sequence to always stick in her throat.
Always showing a striking sense of humor, the 66-year-old actress has multiplied interviews on this subject. We see her here imitating the director or self-parodying her hysterical reaction upon discovering that Paul Verhoeven had used this very explicit shot of her anatomy, even though he had sworn to her that nothing would be seen on the screen.
Under the pretext that her white panties would be too visible, “Verhoeven asked me to remove it. He promised me that we wouldn’t see anything in the end”she admits. Discovering the finished film a few weeks later, in a screening room full of male producers she didn't know, she said:felt betrayed.” This is where she details, without ever losing her humor, having given him a huge soapbox on the phone. Before understanding that he was fundamentally right: this scene was going to mark the history of cinema.
“What shocked me was his betrayal. If I had been in the director's place, I would certainly have kept this scene. But Paul should have warned me. It was a mistake.and respect.”
Paid 500,000 dollars to play the psychopath Catherine Tramell, where her playing partner, Michael Douglas, pocketed 14 million, she reveals to have become so involved in this particularly difficult role that she had nightmares, suffered from sleepwalking… Above all, two decades later, in the middle of a divorce, Basic Instinct participated in causing him to lose custody of his son eldest, Roan, aged 4 in 2008. “The judge asked my child: 'Do you know your mother makes sex films?'”she wrote in her memoirs, mad with rage at this unjust decision.
If she could have been shocked throughout her career as an actress – her famous nervous laughter during an interview on the sidelines of the movement #MeToo says a lot – Sharon Stone plunged into this wave of liberation of women's speech. By confiding intimate traumas (his grandfather was violent with his wife and abusive towards his children and granddaughters), but also by reappropriating his image, by playing with it publicly. Like during this awards ceremony where she makes fun of “nice ass” by her playing partner Michael Douglas, triggering laughter from the audience who thought she was going to evoke the cult panty scene. A sequence that could have escaped her, as it was so parodied, and that she herself did not hesitate to “replay” on TV sets, always with intelligence and humor.
When we talk to her about sexual assault, Sharon Stone bursts out laughing
No hard feelings towards Basic Instinct (“This film changed the course of my career and people still talk to me about it today, the proof”), Sharon Stone found her big role in Casinoby Martin Scorsese, which earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. And once again, she had to impose herself in a very masculine world. She also produced projects that were close to her heart, starting with Dead or Aliveby Sam Raimi, where she was of unfailing support for her director, and for the young actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Over the course of her career, she will also have suffered quite a few flops, starting with that of Basic Instinct 2for which she was finally paid commensurate with her star status. She accepts her failures as much as her successes. Or, as she rapped so well to James Corden in 2016: “I’m Sharon Stone, Bitch!”
Sharon Stone (Ratched): “We have reached a point where television has eaten up cinema”