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When I ask Sharon Stone what she would tell her younger self about resilience, her reaction surprises us both. We have talked through politics, painting, and Hollywood, but she suddenly puts her hand over her eyes, pauses for a long time, and then starts crying.
“You’re going to make it,” the 66-year-old Hollywood actress says, the message would be. The actor, humanitarian, author, producer – and, most recently, painter – recounts the moments when a brain haemorrhage nearly ended her life 23 years ago. “You don’t know it, but you’re going to make it, I would have it tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.”
I would have wanted to have known it so many times,” she says. “When I was on the floor and couldn’t get an ambulance. When I went home and I read in People magazine that we wouldn’t know for 30 days if I was going to live or die.”
An artery had ruptured, causing a bleed on her brain and a stroke. She says she was given a 1% chance of survival and had to relearn basics like walking and talking.
She goes on to list the challenges she has faced since, including financial troubles and a custody battle with her ex-husband Phil Bronstein over their adopted son Roan.
Until my question, Stone explains, she had not fully recognised she had come through it all. “It’s been that long and it’s OK… it’s over… everybody made it to shore.”
Resilience is the theme of this year’s BBC World Service 100 Women season, and she beams as I tell her she is on our list of inspiring and influential women.
Stone was propelled to superstardom by her performance in the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct. It saw her branded a sex symbol, and she has spoken about being typecast as a result.
Her artworks are bold and impressionistic, and – in her own words – “very large”. This, she explains, is partly because she was inspired by an aunt who painted murals on the walls of her house – and partly because she can’t see well enough to paint small.
The film industry too, has changed. In the past, Stone says, “women were playing the fantasy of men” – who, she notes, wrote, directed, produced, edited and distributed the films.
She says she wasn’t convinced by the actions of some of the characters she played. But now, she says: “I think we’re getting to a place where women are just playing how a woman would actually behave in the circumstance.”
And finally, she says:
“… Stay present. You fell down. Get up. Someone pushed you down. Now they want to help you up. Let them.”
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