She was struck by lightning, throttled by a clothesline, and suffered a stroke which left her struggling for years to get her normal life back.
Who can forget the famous leg-crossing scene from the 1992 thriller, Basic Instinct, which left the audience shocked by the boldness of the character and also the gorgeousness of the actresses playing the role.
Golden Globe winner actress Sharon Stone's life wasn't one we would call "easy." She has had a fair share of near-death experiences which she revealed recently while talking to The Sun. But she's survived all of them to tell her tale.
We almost missed our chance to see her on the screen when she faced her first brush with death. She grew up on a smallholding in the US state of Pennsylvania and was just 14-years-old when she throttled her neck with a clothesline. “I’ve had a lot of things, it’s crazy. I had my neck cut to a sixteenth of an inch from my jugular vein when I was 14 on a clothesline." That was just the beginning.
The actress had another near-death experience. “I’ve been hit by lightning and, wow, that was really intense," she said. “I was at home, we had our own well. I was filling up the iron with water and I had my hand on the tap. The well got hit by lightning and it came up through the water. I was indoors and I got picked up and thrown across the kitchen and hit the refrigerator." Thanking her mom for being the superhero and saving her she said, “Thankfully my mum belted me round the face and brought me to," reported The Daily Mail.
The actress who's ready to hit the screens again with the Netflix series Ratched, a prequel to 1962 novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, wonders what her future experience would be like. “It’s like, ‘How am I going to die next time?’ Probably something super dramatic and nuts,” she said.
The Casino actress revealed that she feels she's "tremendously lucky" to be alive to tell her tales of survival after she suffered a massive stroke back in 2001. The stroke was so bad that she endured a hemorrhage for nine days as well with a survival expectancy of just one percent.
“I felt like I had been shot in the head. I remember laying there thinking, ‘I’m having a stroke.’” Married to her second husband, American journalist Phil Bronstein at the time, she also had an adopted son Roan, 20. She kept coming in and out of a coma while the doctors conducted their tests.
After undergoing a seven-hour surgery, 22 platinum coils were inserted into the actress's brain in order to stop the bleeding and stabilize her artery. Even though the extremely professional doctors and surgeons saved her life, her struggle was just beginning. “My speech, my hearing, walking . . . everything. My whole life was wiped out," she said and added, “I thought I was dying for a long time, even after I came home.” She had to survive another few years of grueling therapy to help her get her life back.
She recalled, “I had to re-mortgage my house. I lost everything I had. From trying to keep custody of my son to just functioning — to be able to work at all. I lost my place in the business. I was forgotten.”
But the actress must have made a massive impression on Michael Douglas after they worked opposite each other on Basic Instinct because Douglas is the executive producer of the Netflix coming up series Ratched. Though Stone has time and again proved her acting skills, becoming an actor was never her first choice. The country girl from Meadville with a population of less than 14,000 was the second eldest of four children.
The 62-year-old actress's father Joseph worked triple shifts in a factory and her mum Dorothy worked as a secretary to keep the family well-fed. “Coming from my small town, becoming an actress was something akin to, ‘I want to be an astronaut,’” she said. She did enroll herself in college but her dreams of becoming an actress and a model were greater than graduating, so she dropped out to “go to New York.”
Stone has worked for 22 years as an AIDS activist to raise awareness of the deadly disease and find a cure. She was awarded the Legacy Award by The Foundation For Aids Research for her work.
Other than being an activist, the Total Recall actress is a doting mom to adopted sons Roan, Laird, 15, and 14-year-old Quinn. She's having the time of her life with them ever since the beginning of the lockdown. “I’m a big deal in my kitchen right now. My kids are rating my dinners one through ten," she revealed.
She added, “The youngest are like twins and they do everything together . . . they sit at the table and do school together and they play computer games all day. So unless I’m putting food in front of them they couldn’t care less if I’m around.” The actress adopted son Quinn at the chateau-inspired West Hollywood home 27 years ago after the smashing success of Basic Instinct.
Despite being one of the sexiest women in the world, the actress is single. According to her, she's “still meeting and talking to people” online. Last year the actress made the headlines for the most bizarre thing possible: her account on the dating app Bumble was blocked as the users thought her account was fake, reported CNN. Jumping on the opportunity to show her humorous side, she wrote on Twitter, “Hey Bumble, is being me exclusionary? Don’t shut me out of the hive.”
Yes Bumble, let the woman find a partner. After all cheating death thrice is not a small thing.
References:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/12350573/sharon-stone-cheated-death-three-times/
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/30/entertainment/sharon-stone-bumble-intl-scli/index.html
