Mar 10, 1958

Meadville, Pennsylvania

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 th... ... (read more...) e 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 joining the Ford Modeling Agency, Stone spent a few years modeling, and appeared in TV commercials for Burger King, Clairol and Maybelline, but she did not enjoy her work.<br/><br/>

While living in Europe she decided to quit modeling and become an actress. "So I packed my bags, moved back to New 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 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 several movies of poor quality, such as King Solomon's Mines (1985), and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987).
She also played the wife of Steven Seagal's character in Above the Law (1988).<br/><br/>

Her appearance in Total Recall (1990) with Arnold Schwarzenegger gave her career a much needed jolt. To coincide with the movie's release, she posed nude for Playboy magazine, showing off the buff body she developed in preparation for the movie (she pumped iron and learned Tae Kwon Do). She said she posed for the magazine because she needed the money. "I had just remodeled my house. I was broke. I needed the bread." In 1999, she was rated among the 25 sexiest stars of the century by Playboy.
While her memorable role in the Schwarzenegger movie should have led to other important job offers, her career took a considerable dip for the next two years. She worked often and worked hard (five movies in two years), but the movies were low budget productions that few people saw.


Stone in Basic Instinct
The role that made her a star was that of Catherine Tramell, a brilliant, coke-snorting, bisexual, mind-game playing serial killer in the sexually-charged Basic Instinct (1992). Stone went to considerable trouble to obtain the part for which she was far from first choice. Stone had to wait and actually turned down offers for the mere prospect to play Catherine Tramell (the part was offered to 13 other actresses before being offered to Stone). Several better known actresses of the time such as Geena Davis turned down the part mostly because of the nudity required. In the movie’s most notorious scene, Tramell is being questioned by the police and she crosses and uncrosses her legs revealing the fact she was not wearing any underwear. When seeing her own vulva in the leg-crossing scene[2] during a screening of the film, she went into the projection booth and slapped director Paul Verhoeven. "I knew that we were going to do this leg crossing thing and I knew that we were going to allude to the concept that I was nude, but I did not think that you would see my vagina in the scene," she said. "Later, when I saw it in the screening I was shocked. I think seeing it in a room full of strangers was so disrespectful and so shocking, so I went into the booth and slapped him and left." Stone claims to have been tricked into the stunt and considered a lawsuit.<br/><br/>

Director Paul Verhoeven reportedly told her to take her panties off because they were visible through her dress, when in fact he had a camera filming between her legs and did not tell her.[5] Later she admitted that the bold act helped make the movie the number one box office hit of the year. That year, she was rated by People magazine as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world.<br/><br/>

In 1995, Empire magazine chose her as one of the 100 sexiest stars in film history. In October 1997, she was ranked among the top 100 movie stars of all time by Empire magazine.<br/><br/>

In 1996, she received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Dramatic Motion Picture for her role as "Ginger" in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995). Later that year, she also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for the role.<br/><br/>

Stone attempted a return to the mainstream with a role in the film Catwoman (2004); however, the film was a commercial and critical flop.<br/><br/>

Her striking resemblance to actress Joanna Cassidy, who played Margaret Chenowith on HBO's hit Six Feet Under, led some viewers to think that Stone made frequent cameo appearances on the show.<br/><br/>

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. 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 felt that she is performing the duties of an "artist", and 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?"