Sharon Stone: 'When I was younger, everybody was telling me what was wrong with my body'
While the cliché of the unhappy, over-40 woman would have you believe otherwise, Sharon Stone is quite content with life at 61.
“I like my body so much more,” the actress told Allure for the November 2019 issue. “I’m so grateful to my body. When I was younger, everybody was telling me what was wrong with my body — too this, too that. When I got on ‘Basic Instinct,’ they hired a makeup artist that put on pounds of makeup every day, and every day I went to my trailer and took the makeup off. But I wasn’t allowed to choose my makeup artist, nor was my name [above the title] on the poster.”
Stone said her appreciation for her body isn’t just about looks, though. It’s also about how she feels and what she thinks — particularly after her long recovery from experiencing a stroke in 2001.
“I started to understand that I was going to go for being more like a European woman who got more beautiful with age and who could understand that women are more beautiful than girls because they know something,” she said.
Stone recalled her early days in Hollywood, when she took that career-making role in “Basic Instinct” or her parts in “Casino” and “The Quick and the Dead,” and how women, including Shirley MacLaine and Faye Dunaway, were kind to her. She’s tried to do the same for the younger generation.
“I do when I see a talent like Margot Robbie — she is just the cat’s pajamas. I am nuts about her,” Stone said. “When I was going in to the Golden Globes, [Tonya Harding] was in front of me and didn’t know how to go through the press line. She was discombobulated. I’m like, ‘Let me show you what to do. Put your purse under the arm that you’re going to pick up your skirt with, then go up the stairs.”
While sharing the wisdom that she’s gained over the years, Stone named her favorite age so far.
“My 40s were so beautiful. I couldn’t work because women, once they got to be 40, were not given jobs in Hollywood,” Stone said. “I was a mom with three beautiful little boys. I was recovering from a massive brain injury, and I was in custody court constantly over my oldest child. But there was something wonderful in that period of all those challenges. And even though no one wanted to date me — no one would want a woman that had little children — it was a period of reconciliation and change, and understanding myself. It was my period of the biggest change, but the period where I thought I was the most beautiful.”
The November issue of Allure is on newsstands now.
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