Sharon Stone left the spotlight, encountered white light and now sees life in a new light altogether. Here she talks about her return to the screen and the strange changes she's been through in the last few years - everything from miraculous healing and communicating with the beyond to restarting her career and ending her marriage.
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Sharon Stone is walking among racks of clothing, as many as 200 different outfits from name designers, trying to decide how she wants to reveal herself on the cover of this magazine. There are those slinky, see-through dresses of Elie Saab, an elegant strapless dress by Monique Lhuillier, a hip Matthew Williamson aquamarine corduroy pantsuit, an oversized black cashmere sweater, a tank top, an army fatigue jacket. Then, for the next six hours, she goes into the mode of a movie star playing a model. Sharon Stone doesn't wear these clothes, she uses them as props. She hides behind them, opens herself up with them, laughs, pouts, burns her eyes into the camera's lens. And after a full day posing, she's still got plenty of energy. She may have suffered a near-fatal brain hemorrhage two years ago, but it doesn't show on this day. Her five-year marriage to San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein is on the rocks, but her health is much improved. The challenges of raising her three-year-old adopted son Roan obviously agree with her--she looks ten years younger than her 45 years. A lot has happened to Sharon Stone since we last spoke with her in September of '99, so when we move from the shoot to a cafe, there's plenty to catch up on.
Lawrence Grobel: Tell me about Cold Creek Manor. Isn't this story about you and Dennis Quaid going to live on a farm and then being threatened by its previous owner, played by Stephen Dorff, who is just out of prison?
Sharon Stone: Right, we bought his house in foreclosure, and he comes and asks for a job to help us fix up the house with no hard feelings. And then he goes berserk. My character is a mom with two kids who's a business woman from New York and thinks she's pretty tough stuff, but is totally out of her element. Her New York lippiness and her Botox and nail polish and black outfits don't carry any weight.
Q: How was Dennis Quaid as your husband?
A: Dennis and I just go together. It's like they should do The Thin Man series again for us. It just felt like that William Powell/Myrna Loy kind of thing. He bobs, I weave.
Q: Anything like working with James Woods?
A: No, Jimmy's and my chemistry is different. He's so intense and smart, it's like two thoroughbreds running down the track. Dennis is like a real old-fashioned gentleman, elegant, thoughtful. He gets the girl in me.
Q: You also made a pretty serious film, A Different Loyalty, about the English spy Kim Philby.
A: Right--one of the most notorious double agents of all time, during the Cold War. I play his wife. It's a romantic story that starts on the day he defects to Russia. Rupert Everett is brilliant. It's fantastic to work with an actor who knows how to wear a fedora and understands the Hitchcock technique or the way Bertolucci might look at a scene or what the Lubitsch touch was. And he genuinely understands the meaning of treason. Because we were at war [with Iraq] when we made that movie, I really started to think about the possibility of expressing myself as an artist through my work instead of just flapping around my opinions.
Q: Why exclude your opinions?
A: Part of what I learned from taking time off is that people can really live without my opinion.
Q: Sure they can, but you know you have a lot to say. You always have.
A: What I have to say is that I've always been a spiritual person. The one thing that has remained very consistent in my life during this time off is my faith. It's clear to me that God has a plan and a purpose for me. I walk in the joy and the ease of that.
Q: Are you relaxed with the fact that the script you liked for Basic Instinct 2 may never make it to the screen?
A: We're still in litigation on that.
Q: Did you have a pay-or-play signed contract with them?
A: Yeah, I did.
Q: They owe you $15 million?
A: It's $14 million plus interest.
Q: Was it because they couldn't find a suitable male lead?
A: I'm not at liberty to discuss it. But I don't really believe there were any major problems.
Q: Is it now a dead issue, or might there be a revival?
A: I don't think it's dead. It's a wonderful script, but it's owned by a studio. They can keep it and make it under a different name.
Q: In September 2001, you were rushed to the hospital and treated for a brain hemorrhage. What happened?
A: It was almost as if I was shot. I had two unbelievably painful shots in the left side of my head that went across the back of my head and physically knocked me over onto the couch. I called Phil and said, "I think I've had a stroke." Phil didn't think so, because I'm a person who also thinks I've had a brain tumor for years. But I knew something was terribly wrong. Then I got a terrible headache. I didn't go to the hospital for three days. I was delirious. This was the week after September 11, so the whole country was out of its mind, and they thought I was just crazed, too. I was saying things to people; it's a wonder they didn't put me in an asylum. Phil called my doctor, who told him to take my blood pressure. It was just off the map.
Q: Did you have surgery?
A: Oh yeah. First they went in through my femoral artery up to my brain, but they missed it. Days went by and they thought I was okay, like I might have had a ruptured vessel that had bled itself out. But I began hallucinating. Nine days later they agreed to go in again, and thank God they found it. My artery had torn to a thread, just pumping blood into my brain. They put these platinum coils in and shut the artery down permanently.
Q: Did your brain hemorrhage change you profoundly as far as belief goes?
A: I just had to surrender the remainder of my resistance. I'm so clear that I didn't live for nothing. I passed through such a narrow corridor to arrive here in safety that I just have to give it up. It's not that it changed me as much as it relieved the remainder of my fears.
Q: You don't have fear anymore?
A: When fear comes up for me, it's a very short-lived thing. What's that song, "Just a Closer Walk with Thee"? I have a closer walk.
Q: You told Katie Couric in a special that you crossed over to the other side and saw people you knew who had passed away.
A: That was in that initial period in the hospital when I was hemorrhaging, and I blew into that white light thing.
Q: Did that experience change the way you think about death?
A: Yes. The sadness one feels is about your loss, but you don't need to miss them because they're only just an inch away, and they're not really away from you, they're near you. They know you, see you, care for you. All the time. You shouldn't feel distant from them, because there is no distance.
Q: So there is no doubt in your mind anymore that there's an afterlife?
A: No, no, no, no, no. Or that it's divine. Or that it's fabulous. Or that it's a gift.
Q: Why do you think you came back?
A: My little boy is a powerful part of that. I have a lot to work out with Phil. We have a marvelous time together raising our son. I'm sure that will continue.
Q: How did you explain to Roan that you and Phil are not going to be together?
A: We haven't worked that out yet.
Q: How exactly did that incident with Phil and the Komodo dragon happen?
A: Phil is calm in pressure situations. That thing was trying to pull him off his feet. It had his foot in its mouth. Phil stepped down on its jaw to pin it to the ground, but in order to do that he had to put its teeth through his foot, which took courage. Then he pulled himself together, reached down and grabbed this thing's jaws, pulled them apart and threw it off him. Then he kicked his feet through the door. I pulled him through and threw him on the ground and tourniquetted his foot. And I looked him in the eye, and said, "You are not going to have a heart attack! Look at me! I need you to breathe with me." I couldn't get my cell phone to work, and they wouldn't help me get an ambulance--they didn't want an incident. But I finally got him to a trauma center. And he was in the hospital for a long time, because those dragons have deadly bacteria. They bite a buffalo and follow it for ten days until it dies.
Q: Looking back today, can either of you ever joke about what happened?
A: You know, we don't think it's that funny. He had to be in intensive care for a long time. But when he had the cast on his leg, we got him a kimono that said, "Kimono Not Komodo."
Q: Before either of these events, you became a mother, adopting Roan Joseph, who's now three. Did you have to wait long before you could adopt?
A: The adoption happened quickly, almost like a spiritual dance. We don't talk about details because it was a closed adoption, but it appeared from God. We were on the phone with the doctor in the delivery room when he was born. From the time he was born until the time he was in my arms was nine hours.
Q: What was your reaction when you first saw him?
A: I thought about the miracle of his feet--that God could make feet. How could one person be mean to another person when feet can come like that?
Q: Did you feel like a mother immediately?
A: I worried that I wouldn't have a maternal instinct, because I wasn't going to give birth to him. But it's not like that. It comes from them. Adoption is just another of God's great big birth canals. I know more people with adopted children than I do with birth children, and their children look more like them than many people's birth children do. It's uncanny. Roan looks exactly like my dad. His walk is exactly like Phil's.
Q: What have you learned about yourself since becoming a mother that you didn't know before?
A: The best thing I think about being a mom is that I always try to be more like him rather than try to get him to be like me. If you listen to children, the very wisdom that they arrive with will reignite your connection to your own wisdom.
Q: Your marriage has been in the news because Phil filed for divorce. Was it a mutual parting?
A: It's not something I want to get into. When God closes a door, he opens a window. My job is not to jump out.
Q: A tabloid story about Phil claimed that his publisher ordered him into anger-management therapy, apparently because some of the staff of the Chronicle were alarmed by his tantrums. Was that true?
A: No. But I'm not going to discuss my husband's life. If you want to talk to him, you can.
Q: Was there ever an issue of his wanting you to be more of a stay-at-home mom?
A: I don't think so. My feeling is that to answer to gossip is ridiculous.
Q: So who gave you a black eye in January of last year?
A: [Laughs] Roan was learning to walk. I was laying on the floor, and he fell over me and landed on my head.
Q: I read that you saved someone's life by performing a reiki healing technique on him. The person--Greg Henson--said you did it in the store where you met. Have you become a healer during your hiatus from Hollywood?
A: I was freaked out that he put it in the paper. I don't know if I saved his life or he just got better. He had cancer in his face. I won't disrespect his privacy by discussing the intimacies of the situation with you. But I will say that I did healing work with him. He believes that this is the reason that his cancer went away. I am incredibly grateful that his cancer is in remission. I'm a person who doesn't just believe in miracles, I count on them as a way of life.
Q: Do you lay your hands on many people?
A: When it comes up. I'm learning a lot about healing. I'm more of an intern than a doctor.
Q: Okay, so what's with your having a drink until 2 a.m. at the Four Seasons Hotel with Adrien Brody?
A: Good question, because my friends from Montreal were in town staying at the Four Seasons, so I swung by at 7:30 to pick them up and Adrien was having a drink with John Madden. I know Adrien and his folks, so I went over to say hello. We talked for three minutes, then I returned to my friends, and we went out to eat. I was in bed by 11.
Q: Do you pay attention to the gossip of Hollywood?
A: I'm a TV Guide subscriber, yeah.
Q: What do you think of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher?
A: Maybe I've been out of it a long time and I'm just an older citizen, but I suspect it was just for fun to open the movie, and it was just a joke.
Q: You received a lot of press from remarks you made in our last interview about Gwyneth Paltrow: "She's very young and lives in rarefied air that's a little thin. It's like she's not quite getting enough oxygen." Any contact with Paltrow after that?
A: Since then she and I have had a delightful occasion to get together and have a wonderful conversation and work out these differences that occurred by the very fact of our not meeting. She's gone through a lot of things in her life and has become an elegant young lady.
Q: What did you think of Michael Moore's acceptance speech at the Oscars?
A: What he said was very interesting. If he had said it in a quieter tone of voice, he probably could have gotten all the way through his speech.
Q: Is there any actor's work you've seen in the last few years that you admired?
A: I'm a gigantic Javier Bardem fan. He is The Man. The way I was obsessed about Russell Crowe and Leo DiCaprio, I am obsessed about Bardem. He is the talent for which there is no comparison.
Q: What films have you liked lately?
A: The Matrix is it. It's big and deep and brilliant and spiritual. It leaves a subliminal message on the mind of the unknowing. I just love it. I also think that Keanu Reeves has the most exquisite face and proportion of body. It's blissful to watch him as this character, he's The Guy.
Q: Is he God?
A: I think God is love. And God exists in all of us.
Q: Martin Scorsese said that you reminded him of Susan Hayward, Joan Crawford and Grace Kelly. Do you see the connection?
A: I think it's innately who I am. It's part of my beingness. I was going to be a star if I lived under a hay pile in Idaho. It was part of my destiny. I don't feel a sense of entitlement because of it, or a sense of shame. It just is.
Q: By the time this interview appears, will we have seen you on "The Practice"?
A: Yes, in episode 2 in September. I'm playing a lawyer who believes that God talks to her. Her firm lets her go, and she hires the firm in "The Practice" to represent her.
Q: What books are you reading?
A: I read constantly. I just read a detective thing I liked and am trying to option. And I just finished Alice Munro's story collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. I also liked Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which was enchanting. It's about a boy in a Chinese work camp who reads Balzac, and his world changes.
Q: Have you ever read Lao Tzu?
A: His teachings have been in my main study for many years. The Tao Te Ching, I've carried with me for 12 years. I have it in my bag; I read it constantly.
Q: What was it like to throw out the first pitch at an Oakland A's baseball game?
A: I made it to the plate! Ninety feet! I called them and asked to take pitching practice, and I did. It was the game after September 11. They had a sniper in the audience covering me. So I was like: "Shoot me if I don't make it to the plate." [Laughs.]
Q: Have you ever thought about what your life would be like if you weren't a star?
A: It's my destiny, and I'm comfortable with it.
Q: You're 45 now. Do you think a lot about 50?
A: Only about where I'll have the party, New York or Paris? And which 50 people will I invite? I'm not one of those women who lies about her age. I don't get being ashamed of your age.
Q: So, has Sharon Stone mellowed?
A: Yeah baby, like a great Bordeaux. I just keep getting better. I'm one of those people for whom shelf life is a good thing.
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