Sharon Stone: ‘Sometimes I just had to follow the shadows until I found the light’

An expectant audience gathers as Sharon Stone sits down. It’s exactly like a film set. But she isn’t about to act. She thinks and pauses, before taking out a blank piece of paper and smoothing it out in front of her. Then she takes out a brush and dips it into a little paint and gets to work.

Sharon Stone, the Hollywood star, is now Sharon Stone, artist. She can do this. She has the exhibitions and write-ups in serious arts and cultural journals to prove it.

It was in lockdown that Stone unearthed her own artistic talent. Living in Beverly Hills in the home she bought with her money from Basic Instinct that had “proper gates” to keep out the stalkers, she was given a paint-by-numbers by her friend. It reignited a passion for art that had started when she was a girl after her aunt Vonne had taught her how to paint.

Once she picked up her brushes again, she could barely stop. And if you happened to drop into her home today, that’s exactly what you would find her doing: standing in front of a large canvas – working.

“We were going through Covid and I was not working as an actress,” she says. “I was shedding a lot of emotional things. It seemed like every painting was about an emotional experience; I was leaving it all on the canvas.”

While Sharon Stone, the Hollywood star, may have been resting, Sharon Stone, the artist, was busy exhibiting her work on the west and east coast, with Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz becoming a vocal supporter of her work. While abstract and expressionist art dominated her first exhibition in LA, “Shedding” was its highly personal title.

Though it would be a mistake to assume she has completely abandoned acting – she recently optioned Woman on Fire, a thriller set, appropriately, in the art world – it was a wise move for someone in an industry that isn’t known for its kindness to older women. Yet, at 65 years old, Stone looks great. With minimal make-up and piercing grey-blue eyes, three decades on from playing Catherine Tramell – the icy sociopath in a turtleneck sweater – her vibe is now more of a senior partner in a Stockholm architecture practice. It’s a look that suits her more serious side – that of a humanitarian worker who now travels the world meeting physicians and statesmen as part of her decades-long commitment to Aids research.

She’s under no illusion this sometimes comes as a surprise to many. “That’s the thing about being me. People want to freeze me in a moment when they liked me.”

Before Basic Instinct came along, she thought she’d cracked it when she landed a part as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife in Total Recall – all tousled hair, Madonna-like attitude and, already, a talent for making the men on the cast and in the audience nervous.

“There are beautiful women and hot women,” she says. “We know what to do with hot women. Beautiful women are mysterious and threatening, and men don’t know what to do with them.”

That she’s a woman in her sixties means that this statement has become even more poignant. “They don’t know how to cast you or know what you’re right for,” she says. “I tell them, ‘Imagine I am Gene Hackman and cast me like that’. I can play a judge, I can play a federal officer, a comedian, a politician. Don’t think of me as a gender, and you can cast me quite easily.”

An ageist Hollywood, however, isn’t the only reason life became more difficult for Stone. In September 2001, aged 43, she suffered a near-fatal bleed on the brain which she describes in graphic detail in her frank autobiography, The Beauty of Living Twice. For nine days, her life was in the balance. Rebuilding that life would take years. She lost primary custody of her adopted son Roan, now 23, to her newspaper editor husband, Phil Bronstein. And she found herself “at the back of the line” for roles as she struggled to walk, talk, and learn lines.

The way she sees it today is that there is the Sharon Stone before the stroke, and the one after. During her hardest times, it was her friends who got her through. One of those friends was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whom she had met while working in Zimbabwe and South Africa towards the end of the apartheid era.

“Tutu and I became pen pals,” she says. “I wrote and told him things sometimes get so dark you don’t know which way you’re going. Then I realised that shadows are cast by the light. Sometimes I just had to follow the shadows until I found the light. He thought there was a sermon in that.”

It certainly has been a time of light and dark for Stone, who has had to cope with a succession of health problems. The stroke was caused by a ruptured vertebral artery, its root cause was almost certainly hereditary, like the endometriosis that prevented her from having children. There was also reconstructive jaw surgery after root canal treatment, a burst ovarian cyst, a pin on her shoulder, and 120 stitches after being hit by an uninsured motorist driving the wrong way up Sunset Boulevard.

It is testament to the valuable lessons she learnt during this period that, instead of “sitting around waiting for a great part because there weren’t any”, she found new purpose in humanitarian work. “I loved my [acting] work,” she says, “but it didn’t love me back.” Instead, she “got to work” in developing countries and became global campaign chair of the American Foundation for Aids Research. In 2005, she received the Harvard Foundation award for Humanitarian of the Year and got the kind of recognition that sometimes eluded her as an actor.

“People don’t know the depth and breadth of my global work,” she says. Matter-of-factly, she adds, “I’m about to receive a UN global citizen award. I’m a WHO global health ambassador. I’ve got a Nobel Peace Summit Award.”

But she’s also still learning, as are the women who crowd around her as she gets to work on her painting today.

We are in a place called the Madrasat Addeera in the old town of AlUla in northwest Saudi Arabia. This whitewashed, somewhat sparse-looking building has always been a place of learning – it was a girls’ school until 1970 when it closed down. Families were moving their businesses to newer and more modern houses miles away, and Old AlUla became a ghost town.

But over the past three or four years, something remarkable has happened here. Architects, planners and builders have moved in. Dusty streets and semi-derelict buildings have been turned into a hub of shops, art galleries and cafes. AlUla began to attract wealthy overnight guests from Riyadh, Dubai and beyond. And with the new interest came a demand for local handicrafts and art, which is why someone had the idea to take the old girls’ school and make it a college for mostly local women to learn traditional crafts and make their living by selling them in the now renamed AlJadidah Arts District.

One important visitor from the UK was struck by the ambition and vision of the project. The then Prince of Wales offered his help, and today the courses are run by the King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts at Madrasat Adeera and their visiting squad of British experts. The ceramics and jewellery, the bags and hats, stone carvings, leather goods, and feltwork are then marketed and sold by the institute’s commercial arm, Turquoise Mountain.

Stone discovered the project after attending the Red Sea Film Festival over four hundred miles down the coast in Jeddah. Inspired by the stories of women creating and earning their own income, she wanted to visit. So, here she is today unpacking her paintbrushes and going from studio to studio meeting the women working here. “Beautiful….” she says, tracing her fingers around a silver bracelet. A perfect terracotta vase attracts her attention. “Mine always goes like this,” she says, making a gloppy sideways movement with her hand. She’s visibly moved by this vibrant community and is tearfully embraced by Fayza, a grandmother who’s lived all her life in AlUla, who has made the blue hat the actress picks out as one she’d like.

While the Sharon Stone of the big screen was very much a creature of plush penthouses, high-end restaurants, and swanky bars, her more humble origins give hints as to why she is so passionate about helping others today.

She grew up in rural Pennsylvania to parents who were married when they were 16 and 17. “My father’s family lost everything, and he was given away and worked on a farm and did chores. My mother was given away when she was nine and worked as a housekeeper, laundress, and maid.

“I had four siblings and there was no privilege, other than that of family and safety. We ate the things my father hunted: the deer, rabbit, and the fish he caught. My mother planted a huge garden, like, a hectare. We had to do everything ourselves”.

So it’s with more than polite interest that she examines the work of the Madrasat artisans today. “In my generation, we had to learn everything: embroidery, sewing, driving a tractor,” she says.

Stone was always a fast learner and with an IQ of 154 combined with striking looks and an impressive work ethic, Hollywood had a formidable proposition on its hands. Basic Instinct would make her name, but it was Casino three years later that brought her a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. Some people in the audience laughed when her name came up, assuming, wrongly, that a brief knickerless scene, which she has since revealed being tricked into, would define her forever.

“I was just the sex symbol who could sometimes get the key part if she also happened to be sexy,” she writes in her autobiography. “Then I did my best to make it count.”

The ways she makes it count today is through her charity work and missions to places like AlUla. After her first visit to Saudi Arabia in 2022, she produced a work simply called Desert. It’s one of her best, most luminous, and confident works. Deserts, she wrote, “ignite a sense of mystery in me”. It pleases her too that deserts are also inspiring a new generation of filmmakers and as part of its expansion into the creative arts, this is a region where you will also find the new AlUla studios – some of the most ambitious, expensive, and hi-tech facilities in the world.

Kandahar, starring Gerard Butler and released earlier this year, was the first Western movie to be filmed there, with many more to follow. The hope is that they will be able to recreate the tourist success that Jordan and Tunisia enjoyed after being used as locations for Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars. Looking at the site with a Hollywood eye, Stone describes the studios today as “stunning”. “There are giant sophisticated film stages which are just gorgeous.”

Heading out to the epic Nabatean city of Hegra, the southern sister of Petra, she stands up on the back seat of her jeep, taking photograph after photograph in appreciation of the dramatic landscape that frames her.

“The vistas here are just incredible,” she says. “It is an unbelievably beautiful location.” She’s right. You can imagine Indiana Jones location scouts already adding this place to their lists. Maybe one day Sharon will return to make her own movie?

She stops for a moment and shares with me the advice that Schwarzenegger gave her as a young actress. “He said: ‘Always answer the question they should have asked’.”

OK, then, I say, what should I have asked? She reflects for a second or two. “You’ve travelled the world. What’s the example you’re setting?”

She thinks about the experience she’s had here, then gives me her answer.

“Curiosity is better than judgement.”

A strong statement and one that has a powerful resonance for a woman who has been more judged than most in her career. But like almost everything else in her life, it is something she has found her peace with.