Sharon Stone has been gracing our screens for over 40 years, first making her mark in Hollywood in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, in which she was simply cast as “Pretty Girl on the Train”.
However, by the 90s she was one of the world’s most famous stars, a sex symbol, and had produced some truly iconic performances, including her role as Ellen in The Quick and the Dead cast. Her career has slowed down in more recent years, but she’s still appearing on our screens, most recently in Billy Crystal’s Here Today.
Over the years she’s been in some excellent movies though, picking up plenty of awards and nominations along the way, but what are her very best movies? We run down our top five…
Basic Instinct
Playing the role of bisexual novelist Catherine Tramell, Basic Instinct is perhaps Stone’s stand-out film, starring alongside Michael Douglas and George Dzunda. The neo-noir thriller was released in the early 1990s and sees Stone become a suspect in the brutal murder of a rock star. Investigated by Michael Douglas’ Nick Curran, he’s seduced into a rather intense relationship, but the plot and the case continues to become complex, in what is a sexy yet thrilling movie. For Stone, it of course significantly boosted her popularity given that scene too.
Casino
It was Casino that earned her an Academy Award nomination a few years later though. The Martin Scorsese directed movie is considered one of the best films of all-time and is based around Las Vegas in the 1970s and 80s when the Mafia controlled the city’s casinos.
Of course, it’s not quite like that anymore, with the high tech systems that run casino games both online and offline reflected in more recent movies, buying into the whole popularity of online games like immersive roulette and blackjack right now. Scorsese takes, well, a more Scorsese approach to this movie and sees Stone star alongside Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, playing the latter’s hustler wife Ginger McKenna.
She lost out on the Oscar to Susan Sarandon for Dead Man Walking, but it’s one of her true standout performances and an excellent movie.
Total Recall
Released in 1990, Total Recall stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a construction worker in 2084. She plays his wife Lori, who tries to discourage Arnie from purchasing a virtual reality holiday to Mars where he learns he was once a secret agent on the planet.
The plot thickens as Stone reveals she in fact is an agent and the real wife of the enemy, but she’s more than capable of taking on the former Mr Universe with some quite exciting martial art skills. It doesn’t end well for Stone though as, spoiler alert, Arnie shoots her in the head.
Antz
Stone joined an all-star cast for DreamWorks’ first ever animated movie. Joining forces with the likes of Woody Allen, Dan Aykroyd, Sylvester Stallone, Gene Hackman and Danny Glover, it followed Woody Allen as a worker ant named Z, who meet’s Bala played by Stone and the pair get on like a house on fire. One problem – Bala has a fascist finance and it’s up to Z to win his woman and save the colony.
Broken Flowers
Broken Flowers is a wonderfully warm and funny movie that sees Bill Murray star as Don, a former lothario who learns that he has a 19-year-old son from a former flame. He has no idea who wrote the letter so must set about trying to find who wrote it and who the mother to his son is.
Sharon Stone plays Laura, the first of the former girlfriends he meets and it’s a brilliant little cameo from the star in a movie that also stars Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton.
