Sharon Stone says she “lost my film family” after suffering a stroke
Hollywood actor Sharon Stone has said she was shunned by the film industry after suffering from a stroke in 2001.
Stone, who starred in Blockbuster hits including Basic Instinct and Total Recall, claimed Hollywood replaced her following the health scare, saying she was at “the back of the line”. After taking a hiatus from acting to recover from the incident, Stone returned to acting in 2003 but found her opportunities had diminished.
“I had a massive stroke. In 2001, I had a nine day brain haemorrhage, and a massive, very debilitating stroke,” she said during a recent appearance on Who’s Talking To Chris Wallace. “And I didn’t recover quickly, I it took years for me to recover,” she added.
“But when I couldn’t come back, because I couldn’t remember my lines, and I couldn’t function for quite some time, I was pretty much shoved to the back of the line,” Stone continued.
She concluded: “Once you’re in the back of the line, getting back to the front of the line isn’t about whether you made a lot of blockbusters and billions of dollars for your industry. It’s you don’t really matter anymore. I don’t know if I really abandoned is really the correct word. But I felt that I lost my film family.”
Earlier this year, during the New York Women In Film & Television’s 43rd annual Muse Awards lunch, Stone revealed she earned $13million less than Michael Douglas for Basic Instinct. “Michael Douglas made $14million. Now, I was new. I was new, and he was a very big star. We should think a lot more about what women can do,” she revealed.
Watch a clip from Wallace’s interview with Stone below.