SHARON STONE

Sharon Vonne Stone (born March 10, 1958) is an American actress, producer, and former fashion model. She came to international attention for her performance in the 1992 Hollywood blockbuster film Basic Instinct. She has been nominated for an Academy Award and has won Golden Globe and Emmy Awards.Stone was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, located between Pittsburgh and Erie, Pennsylvania. The second of four children, she is the daughter of Joseph Stone, a tool and dye manufacturer, and Dorothy (née Lawson), an accountant and homemaker.[1][2] She has Irish ancestry,[3] with roots in Galway.
She has described herself as "a nerdy, ugly duckling who sat in the back of the closet with a flashlight, and a set of C cell batteries. I was never a kid. I walked and talked at 10 months. I started school in the second grade when I was five, a real weird, academically driven kid, not at all interested in being social. Recess was a drag until I realized I didn't have to play, that I could lean up against a wall and read." Most of the kids disliked her because she was standoffish and did not play children's games. One day on the playground she announced, "I am the new Marilyn Monroe." Her mother once said: "Sharon has been posing from the day she arrived. She came out posing."
As a young woman, reportedly, her IQ was tested and rated at a high level of 154 points.[4] After skipping a grade in school, she was involuntarily transferred from Saegertown High School to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, enrolling at the age of fifteen years. She returned for a visit to her college in March of 2007 for academic purposes, and there to her surprise she received an honorary doctorate from their

[edit] 1970s
Because she was very self-conscious of her looks, to the point that one biographer said she suffered from "a textbook case of body dysmorphic disorder,"[citation needed] her uncle bribed her with US$100 to enter a local beauty contest in order to improve her self-esteem. She entered the contest because she needed the money to help pay her college tuition. She lost the contest, but one of the judges encouraged her to enter the Miss Pennsylvania contest, which she declined. Instead, she entered the county contest and won the title of Miss Crawford County in Meadville. One of the pageant judges said she should quit school and move to New York to become a fashion model. When her mother heard this, she agreed, and, in 1977 Stone left Meadville, moving in with an aunt in New Jersey. Within four days of her arrival in New Jersey, she was signed by Ford Modeling Agency in New York. After signing with Ford, Stone spent a few years modeling, and appeared in TV commercials for Burger King, Clairol and Maybelline, but she did not enjoy her work.

living in Europe she decided to quit modeling and become an actress. "So I packed my bags, moved back to Ne Whilew York, and stood in line to be an extra in a Woody Allen movie," she later recalled. She was cast for a brief but memorable role in Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and then had a speaking part a year later in the horror movie Deadly Blessing (1981), which was a big box-office success. When French director Claude Lelouch saw Stone in Stardust Memories he was so impressed that he cast her in Les Uns et Les Autres (1982), starring James Caan. She was only on screen for two minutes, and did not appear in the credits.
Her next role was in Irreconcilable Differences (1984), starring Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long, and a young Drew Barrymore. Stone plays a starlet who breaks up the marriage of a successful director and his screenwriter wife. The story was based on the real-life experience of director Peter Bogdanovich, his set designer wife Polly Platt, and Cybill Shepherd, who as a young actress starred in Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971). The highlight of her performance is when her cocaine addict character plays Scarlett O'Hara in a musical pitched as a remake of Gone with the Wind. Later that year, she took a part on Magnum, P.I., the highest-rated television show at the time.
Throughout the rest of the 1980s she appeared in King Solomon's Mines (1985), and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987), both of which have become cult classics in recent years. She also played the wife of Steven Seagal's character in Above the Law (1988).

2004–present
Stone attempted a return to the mainstream with a role in the film Catwoman (2004); however, the film was a critical and commercial flop.
After years of litigation, Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction was released on March 31, 2006. By Sunday, April 2, 2006, after earning $3,200,000 in its debut weekend, the movie was declared a bomb.[9] Much of the cause of the delay in releasing the film was Stone's dispute with the filmmakers over the amount of nudity in the movie: she wanted a lot, and they wanted much much less. An orgy scene was cut in order to achieve the R MPAA rating for the U.S. release; the controversial scene remained in the UK version of the film. Stone told an interviewer that "We are in a time of odd repression and if a popcorn movie allows us to create a platform for discussion, wouldn't that be great?"[10] Stone has said that she would love to direct and act in a third Basic Instinct film.
Stone's subsequent film role was in the drama Alpha Dog, playing Olivia Mazursky, the mother of a real-life murder victim; Stone wore a fatsuit for the role.[11] In February 2007, Stone found her role as a clinically depressed woman in her latest film When a Man Falls in the Forest, strangely uplifting, as it challenged what she called "Prozac society." "It was a watershed experience," she said. "I think that we live in a... Prozac society where we're always told we're supposed to have this kind of equilibrium of emotion. We have all these assignments about how we're supposed to feel about something".[12]

Charity work and travels

Stone lives in Beverly Hills, California, and owns a ranch in New Zealand. In March 2006, Stone traveled to Israel to promote peace in the Middle East through a press conference with Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres.[13]
On January 28, 2005, Sharon Stone helped raise $1 million in five minutes for mosquito nets in Tanzania,[14] turning a panel on African poverty into an impromptu fund-raiser at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Many observers, including UNICEF, criticized her actions by claiming that Stone had reacted instinctively to the words of Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa, because she had not done her research on the causes, consequences and methods of preventing malaria; if she had done so, she would have found out that most African governments already distribute free bed nets through public hospitals.
Of the $1 million pledged, only $250,000 was actually raised. In order to fulfill the promise to send $1 million worth of bed nets to Tanzania, UNICEF contributed $750,000. This diverted funds from other UNICEF projects. According to Xavier Sala-i-Martín, officials are largely unaware as to what happened with the bed nets. Some bed nets were delivered to the local airport. These were then reported as stolen, but later resurfaced as wedding dresses on the local black market.
Sala-i-Martín reported that later in 2005 when Stone was travelling in Africa, she was shocked to learn that a majority of African presidents are billionaires themselves.[citation needed] In fact UNICEF officials traveling with her said Mr. Mkapa himself, then Tanzanian president, could have simply written that check if he wanted to.[citation needed] Stone believes that there is no doubt that celebrity involvement in philanthropy can have many positive effects. Stone has vowed to consult with Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, two prominent philantropists, before making another effort to help another African nation. Stone hosted the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Concert.
In 2007, Stone appeared in new television commercial personifying the symptoms of a stroke.