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Daily Mail journalists select and curate the products that feature on our site. If you make a purchase via links on this page we will earn commission - learn more Yes, of course, Sharon Stone is glamorous. It’s just a different kind of glamour than I expected. A fearless, make-up-free, pyjamas-unbuttoned-much-lower-than-I-thought-pyjamas-could-go, ‘sure, I’ll go on a Zoom right now’ Sharon Stone. It is a Sharon Stone I enjoyed very much. We’re speaking because Stone has been photographed by the British light artist Chris Levine. (The same Chris Levine who famously photographed Queen Elizabeth II with her eyes closed – as well as the likes of Elton John, Kate Moss and Grace Jones.) Levine and Stone have been friends for years but have never worked together before (read more about the shoot below). As I try to remember from the Covid days how to record on Zoom, Stone orders a $15.50 (£11.50) vegan potato lovers’ salad from Los Angeles delivery service Better Salads. Which she then berates herself for. ‘I was just talking to my business manager about this,’ she says about the food delivery, which she somehow thinks is her biggest monthly expense. ‘I order out a lot. It seems like such a silly thing to do.’ While she waits for the salad, she makes herself a cup of decaf PG Tips and adds a glug of Lucky Bee Ranch lavender honey, which is produced in Malibu. ‘If you eat a spoonful of local honey in the morning, you won’t have many allergies,’ she says. ‘Bees, obviously, are pollinating everything. So if you eat their honey, you’re not as reactive to the pollen.’ Her sister, she explains, has lupus, and her whole family has a propensity for inflammatory issues. So she avoids alcohol and gluten. And goes big on the honey. Her hair is tied back with a bandana because she’d been painting before we meet. Her gallery show in San Francisco received excellent reviews last year, and she’s planning one in London soon. Lately, she’s been painting characters who appear fully formed in her imagination. ‘This one girl is a geisha from the 1700s. I have another guy who is from 1983 New York, and another who’s from the late 1700s in France. They just sort of come to life. I suppose it’s like a writer writing a character,’ she explains. Stone is also a writer who is writing characters. She’s working on her first novel, which is about nuns. ‘I was a candy striper [a volunteer] in a Catholic hospital when I was a kid. The nuns don’t talk to you. They just yell at you. And because they don’t talk to you, I made up stories about who they were and where they came from. And I decided, “You know what? That should be a book.”’ She called some convents for research, but it did not go well. ‘They hung up on me,’ she says. She was hoping they would be as friendly as her favourite nun of all time, Sister Wendy, the late art historian who hosted BBC shows. ‘Most people watch the Super Bowl. I was like, “Oh my god, Sister Wendy [is on TV]! Get the snacks!”’ In 2021, Stone wrote her first book, the New York Times bestselling memoir The Beauty Of Living Twice, without a ghostwriter. The book begins in a hospital 20 years earlier, after she nearly died of a stroke and a subarachnoid haemorrhage. In the emergency room, she worried that she had made all the wrong choices in an effort to escape fame and establish deeper connections. As she wrote, ‘The facts were just that: I was not loved, not wanted; I was less than.’ Or, as she told her best friend, unsure if she’d ever be able to speak again after surgery, ‘There is a very good-looking doctor here, and sadly I might not be able to flirt with him.’ The book also reveals that she and her sister were sexually abused by their grandfather as children (he died when Stone was 14). She grew up in rural Meadville, Pennsylvania, where her family didn’t have nearly enough money to buy her the Encyclopedia Britannica set that she coveted. No one there told her she was good-looking. ‘We had to feed the dogs and take the trash down to the burning barrel and put the glass in the glass barrels. So I would throw the bottles in the barrels like a psycho. There was a lot of work to do. So there wasn’t a lot of “you’re cute” going around. There was a lot of “get your s**t done or get your ass kicked” going around.’ She did know that she was smart, finishing her schooling early, then enrolling in college at 15. When she was in her teens, some people entered her name as a contestant in a beauty pageant, which she assumed was a cruel joke. ‘We got this phone call from the beauty pageant that my name had been put in enough times to qualify me. I was horrified. I wouldn’t come out of my room.’ But her worldly uncle, who had served in the navy and had the word ‘sweet’ tattooed over one nipple and ‘sour’ over the other, sensed she needed some confidence, and offered her $100 if she won. Stone figured that she was smart enough to game the system with interview answers, bathing-suit choices and talent (acting, of course) to win his $100. She was crowned Miss Crawford County and then competed for Miss Pennsylvania, which led to a contract with the Ford modelling agency in New York City. She did a lot of acting (five movies in 1991 alone) but didn’t break out as a star until she was 34 and played the lead in Basic Instinct. In 1996, she won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for best actress in Casino, then won an Emmy in 2004 for a guest appearance on The Practice. This summer, she played a hyperviolent mob boss in Nobody 2. Next year, she’ll be a regular on the US TV series Euphoria. At 67, she’s in amazing shape, as I can’t help but tell. In the 1980s, she worked out with Jake Steinfeld, a personal trainer whose Body By Jake videos would become huge. ‘All the guys, like Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg, had Jake. I was the only girl. The thing that Jake and I had was that I had to do more push-ups and sit-ups so that the guys would freak out and have to compete with me.’ She would later challenge her sons to see who could plank longest. ‘I have boys [three adopted sons: Roan, now 25, Laird, 20, and Quinn, 19] and it was a way to get them to settle down. It’s a fantastic thing to do with adolescents.’ It was hard for them to beat her. In 2001, following treatment for the removal of benign breast tumours, Stone’s plastic surgeon inserted breast implants larger than they had agreed upon. ‘So many women have talked to me about this. So many women are f**king furious at the husband and the doctor who are often in cahoots,’ she says. But she’s not angry. ‘Am I happy about it? No. Do I understand the mentality of the knuckleheads involved? I raised three boys. When my first son saw my boobs when he was little, he said, “I like your buttons.”’ Boys, she says, are fragile and fear girls. ‘We need to start dealing with the fact that little boys need to be cared for. And we need to start giving little girls some understanding of their own behaviour, too. The way that little girls were mean to me was just incredibly scarring.’ She remembers being teased at school when the class was asked to memorise a poem. Every other kid went with Joyce Kilmer’s Trees. She delivered all six stanzas of Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic classic Annabel Lee. For show and tell, she used a broom to trap a bat in a jar and brought it to class. The teacher freaked out, so she set it free outside. ‘I unscrew the Mason jar with all the holes in it that I’ve made with the screwdriver. Little do I know that this nocturnal creature does not know how to be in a playground full of screaming children in the daylight and that the bat is now going to dive-bomb them. Now I’m the freak who brought this dive-bombing bat to school. I really am Beetlejuice.’ Heading to her garden, Stone lights incense to discourage mosquitoes. She’s still in her pyjamas, blue with yellow stars, an ensemble that was hand-delivered a few days earlier by designer Max Alexander – a nine-year-old who gained a Guinness World Record last year for being the youngest ever catwalk fashion designer. She became Alexander’s muse after he reached out to her on Instagram, and he came to her house to shoot part of a documentary about him. ‘There are things about ourselves we know from when we’re really little. That’s what I talk to Max about. To be so young and know who you are and to own that, it’s so brave and it’s so beautiful. You have to be willing to understand that you are one of one. And sometimes that’s fantastic and sometimes it’s the s**ts,’ she says. Stone has made a one-of-one home for herself in LA. She has lived there for a while, having left San Francisco after divorcing her second husband, former San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein, more than 20 years ago. She’s been on some dating apps, but it hasn’t gone well. She was thrown off Bumble. ‘Too many people complained and said it couldn’t possibly be me. People never think that once you have success, you might also like to have a life,’ she says. ‘I think what they really meant was, “Get her the f**k off here.”’ Another app was worse. She went on three dates. One wanted her to read his television pilot. Another wanted her to be on a show he was writing. The third took her to a birthday party. She ran into a woman she knew there, who asked her who she’d arrived with. When Stone told her, she was aghast. ‘She goes, “Well, that’s his boyfriend,” pointing to the birthday boy.’ Stone let her gay date drive her home. ‘Then I said to him, “Honey, you can do a lot of things with me, but the one thing you should never do with me is lie,”’ she says. ‘I’m the biggest gay advocate on the planet. Why wouldn’t you just say on the app, “Oh, it’s so fun that you’re on here. I’d like to invite you to my boyfriend’s party?”’ Before she got out of his car, she kissed him on the mouth. For real. ‘I thought, “You want to be surprised? How about this? How about you want to feel uncomfortable now? How about you want to know what I felt like all night?”’ Then she got him kicked off the dating site. Stone has raised millions for Aids research, for which she was presented with the Peace Summit Award by her friend the Dalai Lama. She also travelled to Israel to work with former prime minister, the late Shimon Peres, at his Center For Peace – though she spent a lot of her time in rug stores. She’d sit with the owners, drinking sweet tea and playing backgammon. ‘You can really talk about whatever’s up. It’s a vibe I like,’ she says. It’s getting too dark in her garden and her salad should arrive soon, so we end our Zoom call. She emails me later to thank me for the interview. Her email signature is a quote often misattributed to Voltaire: ‘The most important decision you will ever make is to be in a good mood.’ It sounds smart, but I didn’t need to decide to be in a good mood. I just got to speak to Sharon Stone. Inner Light: The Portraiture of Chris Levine by Helen Chislett is published by Prestel, £40. To order a copy for £34 with free UK delivery until 9 November, see mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Hair: Gui Schoedler at EA Management. Make-up: Amy Oresman at A-frame agency. Artist production: Andy Atkinson and Zooperbloom. Additional copy: Maddy Fletcher. A word on the artist and the muse Chris Levine and Sharon Stone (above) met in starry circumstances. They were at a charity auction as part of an Oscars Gala hosted by Elton John. Levine had donated an original artwork and Stone bid on it. ‘Sharon thought she’d won,’ says Levine, ‘but someone pipped her right at the last second and she didn’t know. So, she came up to me and said, “I’m so happy to have your piece!”’ He had to inform the actress that she did not, actually, have his piece, but she could buy one anyway. Now, Stone owns two Levine prints: of Queen Elizabeth II and the Dalai Lama. Levine, 65, is known for photographing his subjects with closed eyes. It’s because ‘it takes the person inwards’. He applied the technique when he photographed the Queen in 2004 – apparently, she was ‘tickled’ by the idea – to great effect. In 2018, an outtake from Levine’s regal shoot sold at Sotheby’s for £150,000. He shot Stone at the Regent Santa Monica hotel in California and played high-frequency noise in the background (it’s meditative). Afterwards, they went to the actress’s house to keep chatting. Stone hasn’t seen the final portraits yet, but Levine is giving her a print as a present. Maybe she will hang it between the Queen and the Dalai Lama. Inside Sharon Stone’s bathroom cabinet When I ask Stone what beauty products she uses, she tilts her head and says, ‘Let’s look.’ She takes her phone and heads upstairs to her bathroom. When I ask what the most expensive item is, she holds up some Augustinus Bader products. She’s more excited about Bright White toothpaste, bought from Amazon, which looks like clear hair gel. ‘You’re, like, “Is this a mistake? Am I really supposed to brush my teeth with this?”’ But she insists that it delivers on whitening. She wants me to try an oil-pulling rinse on my teeth, for my gut health. And brush with charcoal once a month. To convince me, she dips her toothbrush in charcoal and goes at it until her teeth are comically blackened. When I ask what the cheapest product is, she grabs a can of Vaseline Intensive Care body lotion spray, yanks up her pyjamas way past her knees – unnecessarily apologises for how they look, considering I feel like I won some very weird celebrity auction – and oils up. ‘It’s all the things you’re probably not supposed to do. A spray can, which is bad for the environment. Vaseline, which is probably awful for you. But I love this stuff.’ She’s still apologising for her toned legs. ‘They still look disgusting, but better.’
