NINE years ago Sharon Stone's struggling movie career was faring so poorly that she was reduced to appearing in the ultra tacky Police Academy 4. Now she's earning a minimum of $7 million for each movie she makes; she has her own production company in Los Angeles and, most important in terms of the upward curve in her career, she has achieved the ultimate in Hollywood peer recognition - an Oscar nomination for her performance in Martin Scorsese's Casino. And even though the competition for the best actress Oscar is formidable this year, she is a hot favourite to receive the award next month.
If it is Sharon Stone's name which is announced when Tom Hanks opens the envelope for that award on Oscar night, Stone can be expected to be regal and uncommonly modest in her acceptance speech. What she will not express will be the inevitable satisfaction she will feel after years of being consigned to Hollywood's junk movie heap and derided by the media. Few actors have paid their dues as fully as Sharon Stone has done, and even fewer have been as underestimated down the years. Remember, for example, all the sneering when the French minister for culture made her a Chevalier of Arts and Letters last year?
"She enjoys the chance to be dangerous on screen," observes the critic, David Thomson, "and she is one of the best interviews Hollywood has ever had. Talking smart, tough and funny isn't necessarily intelligence, yet it makes a threat out of the actress's loveliness. Not that Stone is anyone's victim. And she is so funny, so smart, and so quick that one laments the lack of a Howard Hawks (to direct her) today."
Martin Scorsese, who had the insight to cast her as the insecure, hard drinking hustler, Ginger McKenna, in Casino, notes: "When the lens is on her, the audience is looking at nothing but her, and she resonates with that intangible thing - that very intangible and very mysterious thing. Some have it and some don't. Some of our greatest actors don't have it - wonderful actors, but ultimately they lack something. It's real special. It's really part of her. She reminds me in that sense of Susan Hayward, Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly: all of those people had that command."
Sharon Stone was born on March 10th, 1958, in the small town of Meadville in Pennsylvania. Her father worked in a tool and die factory and Sharon was the second of four children. Growing up, she says she was afraid of dating and felt like a misfit. "My dad was among those who thought I was an alien," she recalls.
At 19 she moved to Manhattan and began to find work as a model, and in 1980 made her film debut in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories - a brief, silent appearance as a dream girl kissing the window of a train. With the exception of the 1984 Irreconcilable Differences, in which she got a chance to show her flair for comedy, her film work in the 1980s consisted mostly of forgettable action and adventure movies, and the nadir - the wretched Police Academy 4.
She was 32 - an age at which most actors with a c.v. like that might have thrown in the towel - when the Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, cast her as Arnold Schwarzenegger's aggressive, kick boxing wife in the futuristic Total Recall, which became a big hit. When that film was in post production, she became aware of Verhoeven's next project, Basic Instinct, and when she was due to meet Verhoeven for a session to loop some dialogue, she turned up dressed like Grace Kelly. He gave her a screen test and five months later - after many better known actresses were put off by the nudity the role involved - gave Stone the part of the icepick wielding Catherine Tramell who famously uncrossed her legs in a police station.
Basic Instinct was a tawdry exercise in sensationalism, but Sharon Stone lit up the screen with an ice cool performance that radiated star quality. This was the opportunity she had waited patiently to land, and she seized on all its possibilities. Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter of Basic Instinct, commented: "Sharon has crawled the hill of broken glass in this town and she has a really tough and realistic attitude."
The downside of Basic Instinct is that producers quickly typecast her and only wanted her for sexually explicit movies, such as the convoluted Sliver, also scripted by Eszterhas, in which Stone and her co star, William Baldwin, clearly lacked any on screen chemistry; "Billy's 29 and seems so young," she said of Baldwin. "My vote's out on Billy. I never really got his trip."
Robert Evans, the producer of Sliver, said that despite all the problems on the set of the movie, every close up Sharon Stone did was great. "A switch goes on, lights go on," he said. "She's selfish, maybe. Charm? Like a barracuda. I wouldn't want to live with her. But I'd sure as hell want to work with her again."
Sliver failed at the US box office but made substantial profits internationally despite scathing reviews, proving that Stone - rather than the film itself was the attraction. Stone didn't miss the chance to capitalise on her pulling power and she set up her own production company, Chaos Productions, to have more control over her career.
"I see now what incredible greed screen nudity creates," she says. "People think if I'm naked in a movie it will make money. We've all missed the point there. There have been a few movies where other girls have been naked and they're not making millions and those girls have better figures than me, so, like, hello?"
Recently, while starring in an American remake of the French thriller, Diabolique, the producer pressed Stone to do the obligatory nude scene and she threatened him with sexual harassment charges and threw him out of her trailer. Interviewed in Vanity Fair this month, she joked: "I think I'll do a movie about the manager of a nudist colony so I can get paid $20 million.