Sharon Stone

Sharon Vonne Stone is an American actress born on March 10, 1958, in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Raised by her parents Dorothy Marie and Joseph William Stone II, she grew up alongside three siblings and demonstrated academic promise as a child, entering the second grade at age five. She graduated from Saegertown High School in 1975 and initially attended Edinboro State College on a creative writing scholarship. After competing in local pageants and winning Miss Crawford County, she left college to pursue a career in fashion modeling in New York City with the Ford Modeling Agency, later living and working in Milan and Paris. Deciding to shift her focus to acting, she eventually returned to complete her degree at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 2016.

Stone made her feature film debut as an extra in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980) and had her first speaking role in Deadly Blessing (1981). Throughout the 1980s, she built her resume with appearances in television series such as Silver Spoons, Remington Steele, and Magnum, P.I., alongside feature films including Irreconcilable Differences (1984), King Solomon's Mines (1985), Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987), Action Jackson (1988), and Above the Law (1988). She also appeared as Janice Henry in the 1987 miniseries War and Remembrance.

Her career reached a major turning point with her role in Paul Verhoeven's science fiction film Total Recall (1990) opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger. She achieved wide international recognition playing novelist Catherine Tramell in Verhoeven's erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992), earning her first Golden Globe Award nomination. During the mid-1990s, she starred in box-office hits and notable projects such as Sliver (1993), The Specialist (1994), and The Quick and the Dead (1995), a Western on which she also served as a producer.

Stone achieved critical acclaim for her role as Ginger McKenna in Martin Scorsese's crime drama Casino (1995). Her performance won her the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. That same year, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her subsequent 1990s projects included Diabolique (1996), Last Dance (1996), Sphere (1998), the animated film Antz (1998), The Mighty (1998)—which earned her another Golden Globe nomination—and The Muse (1999).

In 2000, Stone starred in the HBO film If These Walls Could Talk 2, winning a Lucy Award from Women in Film. Following a health hiatus in 2001 due to a subarachnoid hemorrhage, she returned to acting with a guest role on the series The Practice, which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series in 2004. Her later work includes feature films such as Catwoman (2004), Broken Flowers (2005), Alpha Dog (2006), Bobby (2006), Fading Gigolo (2013), The Disaster Artist (2017), and The Laundromat (2019), as well as television roles in Mosaic (2017) and Ratched (2020). Stone was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2005 and was promoted to Commander in 2021.